Progress At Last

Something you may not know about me , and are probably not gagging to find out ,is that I am quite knowledgeable about the development and structure of the English language . This odd state of affairs came about because when I arrived at “Uni” to do Eng Lit , I was deeply committed to hedonistic nihilism, aka 'wine women and song, plus sex and drugs and rock’n’roll ,(but not rum bum and concertina .) As a “subsid” , ‘English lang.’ struck me as a no brainer, and therefore fitted my skill set perfectly . Little did I guess at the Chomsky-ish horrors that awaited but , as sometimes happens I began to be fascinated. I have retained a curiosity ever since .
It was therefore with the trained nose of a 2.1 ( that’s two up from Carol Vorderman….) that I sniffed a sea change in a Janet Daley article . In it she slyly continue her long whine about David Cameron’s sensible balance by hypothesising a Labour Party attacking successfully from the right, under say a Purnell. All phoned in copy, but her final words set my spider sense tingling . …
“ I believe it would be best for the country if the entire policy debate was conducted in progressive terms “
What was that word ? “Progressive”? Now last I heard this described a dog eared set of baby boomer bourgeois Liberal errors , does “Progressive" now mean something good ?.
Then at lunchtime in was pestering Labour parrot and amusing writer Hopi Sen. He is busy counselling against ditching Brown and this exchange occurred with one of his commenters about the meaning of ‘progressive’ .
““the progressive agenda is strongly represented in the Brown government.”( said Hopi)
"If my decoding is any good, you mean ‘Blairite’ (non -social/permanently pro-’more market’). Progressive never used to mean that…” (said Miller 2 )

Well this is fascinating . My suspicion that the New Speak-ers of New Labour are at the heart of this as their eroded Party threatens to shrink to its Old Labour core ,but the meaning of ‘progressive’ is also organic . When Labour follow Conservatives on Welfare reform , when Irwin Seltzer says the state is too large and tax cuts should be offered , when the forces of Labour are visibly obstructing progress then it can only be that Conservatives are the new “Progressives “. Should you require further proof Conservatives are now the most popular second choice of Liberal voters who , as we know , are vacuous Weathervanes who would cut off their arms to fit into the latest trendy cat suit .As you may gather I am ambivalent about how much I like to be a “Progressive”.
Language facts :
1 Penguin is the only Welsh word imported into English
2 Commuter stems from a ‘commutable’ ticket once issued in the US from the root ‘commutare’ or change /metamorphosise
3 Key Points and the endless use of Key from “men” to issues stems not from a metaphorical transference from ‘Key’ to a door but from an early transference to arch building now the dead metaphor “Key stone”. properly used it carries the weight of the final stone placed which holds up the arch.
3 Jacob Grimm, the elder of the Brothers Grimm, in his book Deutsche Grammatik was a seminal linguists establishing the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered linguistics
Grimm`s law describes Consonantal shifts between Indo European languages as they become Germanic . The one I know is P becomes F.

English: foot, German: Fuß, -Latin: pēs, pedis, Sanskrit: pāda, Russian: под (pod),
4 Noam Chomsky`s genius was the description of “descriptive” Grammar. He started by asking why it was that when I change the order of a sentence “ I am John.” to “ Am I John” a statement becomes a question. What law was being followed ? He looked at more complex sentences and discovered the underlying structure of English. On the back of this he bored the world with half baked political rubbish but at his job he was a genius .
5 One of many structures of change is continued pejoration of words. For example stink was once neutral as was smell.
6Many pronunciations are incorrect if you judge by historical precendent . Forehead for example is correctly pronounced “ Forrid’. Our chaotic orthography drawn from non existent Norman sounds created the misleading spelling “Forehead”. At the end of the 19th century the new mass literate classes determined to be correct followed the spelling ..incorrectly . Similarly Garij has become replaced by Gararj following an irrelevant French model .
7 There are far more linguistic marker differences between English dialects than between English and US English which is virtually uniform by comparison
8 None of this helps me to spell or punctuate any better as you will have noticed