How the corporados have changed our language

Truth Dig - Researchers at the University of Los Angeles put 1.5 million English-language books into a tool that catalogues phrase usage and found that “over the last 200 years there has been an ever-increasing use of particularly acquisitive words: ‘get’, ‘unique’, ‘individual’, ‘self’, ‘choose’; while over the same period ‘give’ and ‘obliged’ decreased,” writes Owen Hatherley at The Guardian.

The pattern only changed briefly during the relatively egalitarian Western period between the 1940s and the 1970s.

“What has happened over those 200 years was the rise to dominance of capitalism, which obviously changed, and changes, our language and thinking,” Hatherley continues. The results suggest that the English language has long been in the process of becoming a class language, where words that are sympathetic with capitalist values and perspective are accepted as “standard.”