You don't have to like the changes to our language but it's happening - Ian McMillan

Yes, King Canute, the historical figure I first read about in an old edition of Look and Learn. He was the King of various places including England, Denmark and Norway until his death in 1035 and he’s remembered, if he’s remembered at all, for his attempt to show his sycophantic courtiers that we wasn’t omnipotent and that he couldn’t stop the tide coming in.

Over the centuries the story has bent and buckled a little in the constant retelling until it sometimes seems to say that Canute thought he could actually turn back the tide, but that’s not really the story. Either version fits the story I’m telling here.

I’m a big fan of the excitement and unpredictability of language change; I like the way new words and phrases and new spellings of those words and phrases slip into the way we speak and write and I like the way there’s nothing we can do about it.

If we do try and stop language change we’re like the version of Canute that thinks he can stop the water advancing across the beach, and if we know that there’s no point trying to stop it we’re like that other version of Canute, the one with enough self-knowledge to know that, no matter how hard he tries to hold that salty water back, his sandals are going to get wet.

You’ll have noticed that I used three very specific examples of language change in my opening paragraph. The first is that phrase ‘To be fair’ which seems to be ubiquitous in the mouths of young and not so young people at the moment; it’s often initialised in print as TBF, three letters I’ve seen staring out at me on numerous occasions in texts from my 19-year-old grandson.

‘To be fair’ is a placeholder in a sentence, rather than a heavy lifter, and I like these linguistic placeholders because they can give a sentence rhythm and cadence. Other examples could include ‘like’ and ‘you know’ and that wonderful piece of mouth-music, ‘er......’ where the final consonants hang in the air like hovering insects.

‘Sneak peak’ is everywhere at the moment and I like it because the word ‘peak’ has turned its original meaning upside down. We’re going to take a sneak top of the mountain? Pardon? The evolution of the word is fascinating, too.

We used to peep and then we started to peek and then we had a sneak peak and the engine of language change is in top gear, throbbing and growling.

The third piece of language change in that opening paragraph is what I call the ‘From…to’ moment and you often see it in travel articles or reviews of films and plays. ‘From the charm of the old town to the dazzling urbanism of the city centre streets’, for example.

Here is language that is happy that its changing because it doesn’t have to try too hard. Just stick in a ‘From…to’ and the paragraph will run like clockwork.

You don’t have to like these changes. You don’t have to be thrilled and energised by them like I am and you can be as irritated by them as you like.

But they’re not going away, as King Canute learned about the tide, TBF. They’re here to stay. Until the next change comes…