Linda Hall: Coolspeak:

“I find righteous denunciations of the present state of language no less dismaying than the present state of language,” Lionel Trilling once wrote. But then Trilling, I am certain, did not live to see Columbia students address their women instructors (the ones they get along with) as “Dude.” On the same campus where I am Dude, I hear a professor tell a student that she has chosen a cool topic.

…The measure of the decline in reading is to be found not in S.A.T. scores—those may be artificially high owing to coaching and cramming (cranking!)—but in our decreasing ability to speak. “A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression,” Mario Vargas Llosa observed not long ago. “We learn how to speak correctly—and deeply, rigorously, and subtly—from good literature, and only from good literature.” The Hudson Review