I'd be more paranoid about the loss of natural language all together. Ever see... I think it was the movie Stargate, where the common people are kept under control by forbidding them from reading and writing? Losing a language or causing a language to stagnate is a bigger risk.
Even if words change, new words can be created to express complex phrases and emotions, as can be seen in other languages (there's a word in French that translates to "Going around in circles", for an example). The problem begins when you start enforcing the usage and forbidding language to expand naturally. Fictional examples would be 1984's Newspeak and the plot of Snow Crash, which involves controlling large groups of people by stripping away their higher communication skills. For a real life example, take a peek at Quebec's language laws. This would be true censorship, which is the big scary word that everyone is scared of, but nobody ever agrees on what it is.
I don't know if you were around in the MST3K fic community when the MiSTing bubble burst back in 2002, but the end of the community in fanfiction.net was dealing with a related problem. A lot of bans at FF.N went through at this time, like all MST3K fic, NC-17 fic and Real People fic. There was an end of the MiSTing fandom that screamed out "Censorship!" and stormed off to their own little corner where they created tons of NC-17 fics and MiSTings in protest. It was an extreme case of missing the point completely; censorship was not about preventing a person from writing about gore, sex and the extremes, but rather trying to control everything on a whole. I recall ranting to Amanda Vaughan a lot about that.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-07-19 06:14 pm (UTC)Even if words change, new words can be created to express complex phrases and emotions, as can be seen in other languages (there's a word in French that translates to "Going around in circles", for an example). The problem begins when you start enforcing the usage and forbidding language to expand naturally. Fictional examples would be 1984's Newspeak and the plot of Snow Crash, which involves controlling large groups of people by stripping away their higher communication skills. For a real life example, take a peek at Quebec's language laws. This would be true censorship, which is the big scary word that everyone is scared of, but nobody ever agrees on what it is.
I don't know if you were around in the MST3K fic community when the MiSTing bubble burst back in 2002, but the end of the community in fanfiction.net was dealing with a related problem. A lot of bans at FF.N went through at this time, like all MST3K fic, NC-17 fic and Real People fic. There was an end of the MiSTing fandom that screamed out "Censorship!" and stormed off to their own little corner where they created tons of NC-17 fics and MiSTings in protest. It was an extreme case of missing the point completely; censorship was not about preventing a person from writing about gore, sex and the extremes, but rather trying to control everything on a whole. I recall ranting to Amanda Vaughan a lot about that.