More And More Kids Say The Foulest Thing Language Analysis

Language is the way humanity communicates with each other; it is the backbone of society and without it, modern society would be changed, from relationships with friends and family to technology that took extensive collaboration to create. Unfortunately, speech is becoming ugly to the extent of it being indiscernible. Valerie Strauss, the author of “More and More, Kids Say the Foulest Things,” claimed that ugly language is “evidence of a decline in language skills.” This decline is caused by using complex words that only obscure meaning, rather than clarify it. In Angela’s Ashes, Mrs. Finucane hires Frank to write threatening letters to customers who owe her money. To make the letters sound more malicious, Frank “begin[s] to throw in words

As a child, Tan watched her mother be ignored by society for her poor language skills, so when writing her first novel, she wrote sentences like, “That was my mental quandary in its nascent state,” which uses unnecessarily complex language that is hard to understand even for a native English speaker (Tan 456). Rather, she writes the novel in the way her mother thinks and it is deemed “So easy to read” when she uses the simpler language (Tan 456). Because her mother was viewed poorly for her poor language skills, Tan initially used convoluted language when simpler speech worked more

People would rather use foreign and Latin or Greek words because they believe they “are grander than Saxon [words]” (Orwell 574). These complicated words make people think they sound educated, but the words are an excess to the English language and contribute to it being obscured. People also use words that have so many denotations, that they have become pointless. For “a word like democracy, … there no agreed [upon] definition, [and] the attempt to make one is resisted” (575). Many times, people would rather use meaningless words rather than considering what they are trying to say. This has permitted the English language to become vague which can make communication lose