A Sea Change

The past week has brought demonstrations of the speed of linguistic change. These anecdotes came from two different teachers.

One asked her class -- mainly baby boomers, "Would you know what I meant by a sea change?" Most of us nodded vigorously. "I said to someone, 'I'm going through a sea change,'" she said, and he looked at her strangely. He had no idea what she was talking about.

"And he's an actor," she said. laughing. The reference, of course, is to Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. To go through a sea change means to undergo an mysterious and radical transformation, a profound shift, as the original lines from Ariel's song suggest:

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

This anecdote made me face the possibility that the metaphorical language used so easily and effortlessly by our passing generation to express elusive ideas might soon be lost. Not exactly lost, but replaced by new linguistic innovations.

The second anecdote was related in passing, after -- as a self-correction -- an editor with forty years of publishing experience elided the pronunciation of a common three-syllable adverb.

"My fourteen-year-old granddaughter taught me to pronounce that as a two-syllable word," she said.