The Milkman Journal

One might look upon the title of this and think it to be clickbait. I will grant, the English language itself is not in any danger of dying out soon, in the sense that many still speak it. The Anglosphere (That compromising of the United States, Canada, UK, etc) is the business center of the world in many ways. Outside of it, the English language is considered to be the business language of the world in large part, being learned in many countries alongside their native languages. So what then is meant by the title of this article?

English may be commonly spoken, but the version of it that has become commonplace has become dysfunctional and somewhat nonsensical.

I think that there are a variety of causes for this. The most recent manifestation (of our language degrading, as well as of our general cultural decay) would be ‘brainrot’, primarily as it pertains to the usage of slang. Slang like “gyatt”, “rizz”, “ohio”, “gooning”, etc are examples of this, but they’re not the only ones. Before we had brainrot, there was hip hop slang and hood speak, before that we had some people (though less than now) whose entire dialect was made up of whatever slang was popular at the time, and of course, there have always been people using “f**k” and “s**t” every other word.

I think what is fair to observe is that in the modern age, it seems to be so commonplace for these practices to be the standard. If you compare the articulation and intelligence of average people around 50 years ago against their modern day counterparts, there is no question about which one is of superior quality. When watching interviews with people in the past, even as recently as the 2000s (crazy that it seems so long ago now) people speak in a much more clear, concise, articulate manner than they do now.

This problem especially becomes more apparent when you go online. Looking at the way people talk on social media, or in emails and messages in chat rooms (like on Discord or in Group chats). Compare to their counterparts in the 1990s or the 2000s, they are of a much more inferior quality grammatically speaking. No punctuation, periods, correct use of commas or capitalization, etc.

What especially bothers me about this is that if you decide to go against the mainstream by speaking in a more sophisticated and intellectual manner, it causes you to be more difficult to understand. You might be using words that are actually not insanely obscure to describe your thoughts, and yet you might have a hard time getting those ideas across to people because there vocabulary is much smaller than that of people in previous generations and decades. In fact, (I had actually completely forgotten about this until I started thinking about writing this article), this was why I made a conscious decision a few years back to actually try and make the vocabulary I use less varied, so that most people in my life, at work and at school would have an easier time understanding me.

This is partially why I decided to start “The Milkman Journal” in the first place. I had profound realization recently, I was scrolling the X feed for Nicki Minaj, and I realized, in reading some of the tweets that she had posted to her account, that a number of them were actually more articulate than many of the thoughts in my own head that I have on a regular basis. This was something I found to be remarkably disturbing (no offense to Mrs. Minaj) and so I decided to make the conscious effort to reform the quality of my own thoughts, and the way I transmit them.

I don’t think slang (even modern slang) is bad, I’m not even fully convinced that curse words are universally bad, however the danger with both certainly lies in their ability to overcome the way people talk, to the point where most of the things people say sounds almost nonsensical because of how much of it consists of slang and curse words. As a result, all I would do is encourage people to be careful so as not to let that happen to them. To expand your vocabulary is to exercise your brain like a muscle, and it certainly can do you no harm!

I’m curious to see what you guys have to say about all this, so please let me know down in the comment section what you think, and remember to always keep living the dream my friends!