"Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth." (Genesis)

.....Lately I've been thinking about my collegiate studies in structural, historical, and comparative linguistics, and after a review of those studies I have arrived at a startling hypothesis--the English language is changing right under our nose! Of course, when you hypothesize you must then prove your theory by citing facts through deductive reasoning, as all of you know. At present, I cannot understand some of the English spoken by some of our children nor can I understand all of the English of all of our grandchildren. I can't even understand most of the English of the English. If there is general agreement about this among other American parents and grandparents of my generation; that is, they too find understanding the English of these young people difficult, then my conclusion about the language changing may actually be valid. (The conclusions of this type of reasoning are never true nor false; they are either valid or invalid.) So far, so good.

.....The reason that I cannot understand the aforementioned English is that it is spoken much too rapidly to follow; one word speedily elides into another, and consonants are avoided like the plague. My ears cannot process their speech so quickly. I am geared to a slight pause between words and sentences. .....Eventually--but very gradually--21st Century English will hardly be understood by English speakers in the 22nd or the 23rd Centuries A.D.!

.....Let's look at some other facts about language change and English; Old English, the language of Beowulf, which you all have read, of course, (in translation, of course), was spoken from about the middle of the 5th to the middle of the 12th Century. Then Geoffrey Chaucer came along in 15th C. and wrote "The Canterbury Tales" in what was then "Middle English"--much easier understood than Old English (except by Bill Berger). From 1500 to roughly 1650 we had "Early Modern English", the language of Shakespeare which you all read in high school and loved it. And finally, here we are speaking Modern English from the late 17th C. until now.

....Another reason that I believe the language is changing is the process of "texting"--the choppedupintopieces language that kids and many adults speak and write on their tiny machines. Thus, LOL (Laughing out loud) will become "Lots of love" or "Lots of luck" or "I love you a lot." That's not so strange since many of our words have more than one meaning. I'm not very good at texting; I wouldn't know how to use an I-pod or an E-pod or a Pea Pod if someone bought me one for Fathers' Day--which I hope no one does. Way down the line, I'm certain that much texting like LOL will become part of the spoken language; people will say "Lol" to mean "I love you" and the latter phrase will have disappeared from the English language, and those poor students of the 23rd Century will not be able to understand our books or plays. And, believe me, that's for certain.