Coming to the issue of language and adding more noise on the topic, this review titled "'Doing Our Own Thing': Talk Is Cheap" from the NYT should prove to be interesting to other CAers who have pet peeves about the state of language/slang-uage:

www.nytimes.com

Some choice cuttings that should trigger debate here:

[I]

"At some point in the 1960's, Americans lost faith in their written language, and settled for reproducing a less demanding (but more ''real'') oral variant on the page and in public. The result, McWhorter asserts, has been a steep and steady decline in the quality of political oratory, poetry, musical theater, preaching and -- ultimately -- thinking."

[II]

"...charts certain dire cultural consequences of a mounting distrust of written English. With its repertory of constructions and its bonanza of vocabulary, formal English is the natural idiom for conveying nuance, respect and logical argument. When it goes, they go."

[III]

"Those Americans who still write poetry defer to spoken language, rather than stretching the limits of the written one. McWhorter admires the descriptive powers of the former poet laureate Billy Collins, but finds that his poems ultimately ''read a lot like someone running their mouth.''"

[IV]

"Similarly, the ''spoken word'' poetry that one hears at poetry slams strikes McWhorter as superior to ''the doggedly flat rainy-day poems one sees in venues like The Atlantic.'' But spoken word offers only a narrow poetic universe of ''alienation and scolding.'' Its subject matter is limited to the few angry obsessions that can move an audience viscerally. '' The vast weight of human artistic achievement was not created in indignation,'' McWhorter writes, ''and few of us would wish that it had been.''"

(to this point I find myself in large agreement. Since I had claimed interest in poetry, I had been asked a couple of times what I think of spoken word. The best thing I like about it is its underlying democratic principle: if you can't move the "mob", the "mob" will boo you out. The question however remains: how "good" is the aesthetic sense of the "mob". When I say "mob", I think of the Roman dictum of providing "bread and circuses" to keep the mob happy.)

Also if anyone here has read Percival Everett's "Erasure" ( books.guardian.co.uk ) write about what you think here.