At the same time it reveals our aversion to disorder. We fear not being able to make ourselves understood, and fear also that the essentials of our world-view are not shared by others. When we practise what the linguist Deborah Cameron has designated ‘verbal hygiene’, we expose our anxieties about otherness and difference.9 It can seem as though we positively want to feel that our language is coming unstuck. Even if other aspects of our existence appear beyond our control, language feels as if it can be rescued from the chaos of modernity. If we can arrest language change, the thinking goes,
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