Erik Routley described the modality of this new "language of worship" as the "facticious intimacy of the microphone." I submit that this technology and the resulting modal shift is the crux of the conflict between "traditional" and "contemporary" worship patterns, although the former exist in pure form in rare acoustical and cultic contexts.

The book mentioned in the article, "The American Language", is on archive.org here.

One of my best finds in the college library's free-giveaways cart was a 4th edition of this, plus two supplements: I always find it fascinating to see laid out in writing such linguistic stuffs that otherwise one doesn't usually bother to try to articulate.

We almost need a British/American dictionary to tell what each other means. I have a friend in Scotland who refers to items under the bonnet of her car and puts luggage in the boot. As an exercise junkie, I follow good advice from a fitness guru in Northern Ireland. He did some excellent videos on expanded use of resistance bands using a brush staff. I realized he meant a broom handle after I watched the videos. Let confusion reign gloriously - LOL.

It isn't just a problem with English. A friend from Madrid informs me that no one in North or South America speaks good Spanish.

I think knocking the speech of others is widespread. I worked with a Cuban engineer who maintained the Mexicans speak horrible Spanish. When I took Spanish in college, the professor had learned the language in Madrid. She said Castilian Spanish is like British English. They are the standards against which the languages are measured, but are not the most widely spoken numerically. Evidently, there is the "King's English" and also the "King's Spanish."

Yeah, lots of folks enjoy annoying the French. They are like your batty old aunt who drives you to desperation, but you still have to love them. LOL.

American English does preserve words/usages that were more common in the British Isles before Independence. ("Loan" as a verb comes to mind, if offhand memory serves.) English pronunciation shifted after Independence (not quite as much as in the early Modern period). And in both countries you have the phenomenon of language becoming more ruddered by written prescriptive practice (cheap dictionaries, the penny press and the spread of grammar schools over a greater portion of the population) than oral tradition, and Independence occurred in the early part of this phase of language development. (Now we are returning to the more usual historical pattern of orality being dominant in the evolution of usage and pronunciation. An excellent example of this is the revival of the singular "they" - the prohibition of which was of relatively recent vintage of the logical lexicographer and schoolmarm sort - and while the prohibition is not archaic, it can no longer claim exclusive right to being standard English in the USA.)

Btw, Spain is not the only Spanish-speaking nation with a national language academy - many of its former colonies have cognates as well. The capital region of Colombia is particularly proud of the purity of its Spanish usage, though it's not identical to Castilian Spanish usage. Knowing some people whose families came from the professional classes there, I can understand their pride in that.

by the end of this century English and American will be two distinct languages.

That seems highly unlikely, since mass communication tends to make languages more similar rather than more different. TV made everyone in the US talk the same way. Social media seems likely to make everyone in the world talk (or, maybe, text) the same way.

the Academie Francais and the Real Academia Espanol, and others which Liam mentions, there are some of us who really do wish that we had a Royal English Academy.

I hate to disagree with MJO on language matters, but I could never desire that our language was ruled over by a bunch of out-of-touch, green-jacketed ninnies with swords. While there are certainly some who abuse the privilege, English's flexibility is its greatest strength. And if any one's abuse of that flexibility offends me, I am not at all obliged to listen to it. (cf. HIP HOP).

(Besides: How much does the average French- or Spanish-speaker know or care about the pronouncements of their Guardians of Oldspeak? Is there an enforcement mechanism? Do urban youth have to do community service when they get caught with antecedent-disagreeable pronouns? Do leftist professors get fined when they kidnap perfectly good words and torture them into serving their godless ideology?)

Now, now, Adam. Your blanket castigation of the august members of the Academie Francais as 'out-of-touch', and as 'ninnies' is highly subjective and indefensible, not to mention disrespectful of scholarship, and, perhaps, even, an ad hominem slurring of the cultural guardianship of a learned society. It is, also, unworthy of you. I do understand that there are those who would so paint these ladies and gentlemen. However, they are self-evidently biased towards a chaos of illiterate usage and utterly irrational, if not comedic, characterisations of those who have the brazen cheek to differ with them. Actually, there is some depth to your proposals. However, if I had to guage my usage according to one of these 'ninnies' or to one of our ever-so-cute-and-chic champions of ungoverned and untutored linguistic mayhem, I should choose, with absolute jocundity, the former. It is the latter, to a man and woman, who are ninnies. Still, this in no way begets any diminution of respect for you on my part; only the observation that your normal sagacity would seem to be on holiday. Perhaps you were distracted by some uncouthity shoveled into the atmosphere by a professor who was illiterate. (Many are, you know!)

I offer a firm "no" to the silly idea of an English Academy. The very idea is . . . French, not English. (As in the old joke about the French academician saying: Zat may werk in practisse, but noht een theeoree.)

The best rule of usage in English is neither purely prescriptive nor purely descriptive. It is: how well will your audience understand you, and how likely are you to leave a number of its members confused by your usage?

It's about *effective* communication. Style - or the lack thereof - can improve or detract from effective communication.

It's not about honoring your former teachers and demonstrating how well you conform to the rules they taught you, and the effort you put into your own education. (There is a part of prescriptivism that is about that, just as there is a part of descriptivism that is about avoiding having to ever say someone is wrong.)

Adam

Of course. And not only as the communicator imagines it will be received....

I would suggest, Liam, that you are inalienably entitled to oppose an English Academy, but that to label the idea as 'silly' is not exactly respectful of what is not an inherently silly idea, nor of your esteemed colleagues who might think it a marvelous proposal. Actually, I cannot imagine that we would ever have such an academy, in Britain or the US, but I do think that our culture is much poorer in being one in which such an academy is not only unthinkable, but scorned.

And Charles -
You are quite right about gender and language. I often wonder what misery feminists must be suffering when their languages retain masculine and feminine nouns and such.
As for women (and churches who 'ordain' them) thinking that they are priests, the obvious problem that they have in honestly calling them priestesses is that they wish to abolish gender as a signifier of character, personhood, or occupation. This is, of course a polite fiction in a society which, compared to the rest of the world, is an existential fairyland. The feminists are ingeniously inconsistent with their assumption of masculine signifers. Priests they wish to be, not priestesses (which are prolific in pagandom but utterly foreign to the Judaeo-Christian witness), cantors they likewise wish to be called - not cantrix, and ministers and choirmasters - not mistresses, and on and on. But, they have a glaring preference for signifers such as gladiatrix, mediatrix, and others which convey a fearsome power that is unique to the feministic mind. Also, they have yet to call duchesses dukes, or countesses counts, or princesses princes, etc. Here, too, because of the unique status involved they feel no need to erase but to emphasise their gender. Where they wish to assume male identities which are perceptibly distinct from female ones, they will always adopt the male signifier and erase gender differences. It is an established 'scientific' fact that male and female differ in many ways other than their respective genitalia, but it is in the feminist interest to pretend that, but for 'gender', we are all alike. It is significant that there are no males who style themselves actresses, or waitresses, or such. But actresses routinely would have us believe that they are actors. It is astonishing that we live in a society so inured to the irrational and unreal that people don't break into laughter at such usages.

Not any more. You are free to stick to that usage, of course. English is flexible that way.

If you enable political correctness, don't complain when you eventually suffer because of it.

No, Liam! Not the NEED, but the desire on the part of feminists. What furthers the feminist's interest is 'gender equality', which doesn't exist, has never existed, nor will ever exist. In our time equality is what females say is equal, and many are the ways in which they are catered to which makes them more than equal. There are many ways in which feminists have no desire to be 'equal'. You will find them wearing brass and gold braid and being saluted to in the Pentagon, but you won't find them in the trenches. And this is mirrored in many other aspects of our incredibly artificial society.

My most detested of linguists, grammarians, and chic English teachers (and their preposterous followers) are those who constantly and aggressively justify any and all linguistic horrors by the assertion that 'language is living and constantly changing' and on and on ad infinitum. Of course it is. We all know that. How could we not. But that doesn't excuse a preference for patent illiterate and ignorant usage

Lucid. Thank you.

"the word "priest" in English is a male term"

The argument for or against a single-sex priesthood should be predicated on theology, which is grounded in unalterable truth, and not grammar, which is a modifiable human invention.

Gender confusion I don't understand. I was quite clear about being a boy very early in my life, and early on realized that girls were different. I don't understand the problem.

While I imagine you and I are of similar opinions about what you term "gender confusion," the fact that you do not, or cannot, understand it is hardly relevant. You probably do not also understand what it is like to grow up a poor, black woman. I do not understand why an improperly voiced organ sounds bad. To make your own experience the metric for truth is to participate in precisely the error being committed by the gender-confused population.

Residents of Tangier Island in Virginia speak a dialect of English which is badically Jacobean, CharlesW.

And which sounds completely insane amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E

Which sounds a lot like...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi-rejaoP7U

MJO

You will find women in the trenches. And probably registering for Selective Service in the not too distant future. (You should probably avoid getting into a fight with a female Israeli soldier.)

There are language changes that feminist language prescriptivists would like to change that have not happened. The ones that happened occurred not so much because of feminists but because word differentiations that arose because of unusualness became marginal when the difference became more typical than unusual. Why remember waiter AND waitress when one word will suffice? Ditto actor and actress. It's not like we have different words for female and male doctors, lawyers, dentists, architects, organists, composers, engineers, teachers, et cet.

When English complexifies in one hand, it tends to simplify in the other. The tidal ebb and flow is constant.

...why remember waiter AND waitress when one word...

It has nothing to do with one word! It has to do with feminism and gender studies, which means that men adapt to what the female gender is comfortable with, and not the other way around. Why not call duchesses dukes, or empresses emperors, or ladies lords, or mediatrixes mediators - why, why not call women men, and males females... after all why have two words when one will do. Your rationale in this matter is disturbing.

As for your observation about the pervasive shift of vocal tone due to the microphone (and other related influences), I agree wholeheartedly with you. Another example of the shattering of civilized manners of speech and relationships by the paraphernalia of this overly touted age in which we live.

Why not call duchesses dukes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Lancaster

no one says either sex is superior to the other

Oh but they do, and have done for millenia. And the ludricous denial of the complementarity of the sexes is a reaction to that. However for us

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

Mr. Osborn, may I humbly suggest that you are hanging out with the wrong feminists?

It is. And I'm Ms. JL. :)

The manipulation of language to obtain political advantage is certainly nothing new. It is practiced by politicians, races, and people in religions who really should know better.

I agree with Jackson that the church is under attack nearly everywhere. The dissenters in the church stay and try to undermine it. Those who can't abide church teachings should leave. At least that would be honest. I have to admire the early Protestants who couldn't agree with the doctrines of the church. They had the intellectual honesty to leave. Not so with current "dissenters," who are anything but honest.

I would also add that, like the Byzantines who prided themselves on their relations with the Turks, today's Christians are headed for similar troubles. Those who chuckle at Christianity and think themselves enlightened Christians are going to be greatly surprised when they one day wake up and find themselves surrounded by Muslims, their laws, and all else undesirable that religion contains. Sleepers wake...

Thinking about Shakespeare, have there been any recordings of Elizabethan choral music in O.P.? It would certainly give a different flavour to the music than the standard choral R.P. of Oxbridge choirs.

the word "priest" in English is a male term

Curiously, we've been told that "for us men and our salvation" employs an inclusive term.

And cantrix isn't even English.