Put me down for a language fundamentalist, strict constructionist, snob, fogy, whatever. I can’t help but deplore what I perceive to be the drifting and dilution of the English language, not so much because I can’t accept its dynamic nature as because I believe that many people in responsible public positions – news writers and editors, television anchors, and their ilk – either don’t know how to or don’t care enough to get it right.

I come to this position honestly. Raised to believe that the world was created in 4004 BC, I adhered earnestly to that notion until at the age of fifteen I was sent away to school and began to hear some very disturbing alternatives that seemed credible. Briefly adrift and looking for another authority – rather like the larva of an oyster seeking a permanent mooring – I fetched up in TD Donovan’s English class, where there were at least as few uncertainties as in fundamentalist religion. “Convince,” I learned, was not the same as “persuade,” and any student who confused them (after being shown the difference) would suffer a life-threatening wound to his essay grade.

Thus it is with some irritation that I hear the young news anchors on our local television stations pronounce the word “diocese” (much in the news these days) as “DIE-o-seez.” Supposed to be “DIE-uh-siss,” and the plural a very ungainly “DIE-uh-sisses.” I sometimes even e-mail the stations to complain, which makes about as big a splash as dropping a rock down a dry well. Mother often tells me to stop shouting at the screen; it’s pretentious and does absolutely no good. I respond that if sports fans can cheer and swear in front of a TV screen, then I should be allowed to shout, too. It’s honorable to fight to defend the rear guard of a general retreat.

A couple of weeks ago I used the word “farther” in a newspaper column. To my consternation an editor changed it to “further.” I complained politely, certain I’d been right (and still think so), and got shot down with the style book equivalent of the Bible for Modern Readers.

Woolley, Scott, and Tressler’s Handbook of Writing and Speaking was my first guide, in 1950, followed in 1959 by the first edition of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. They both described the difference quite simply: “Farther” was for distance, as in, “He ran a lot farther than he should have.” “Further” was for time or quantity, as in, “We’ll discuss this further tomorrow.” “Further” also could be a verb, as when you choose to further your education. Nowadays it appears their differences have become nuanced (my interpretation: Nobody knows the difference). “Further” has crept over into what was once “farther’s” exclusive domain, and according to the style book the editor quoted, further has become the default mode. Horrors! I feel the earth shifting beneath my feet.

TD compared the English language to music. “First you play the notes the way they’re written, until you develop facility with the instrument. Then you can begin to improve and improvise if you want to. Master it before you try to manipulate it.” So in recent years, as I’ve noticed the steady erosion of “farther,” I’ve gone off on my own and asked myself how a sentence would sound if I changed the adverb by taking off the “-ther.” We’d never say, “I don’t want to go too fur.” We’d naturally say “far.” Hence it’s my opinion we should say, “I don’t want to go farther.” So much for modern, ever-changing default modes.

The word, “default,” reminds me: There’s a new language that’s especially inscrutable to folks of a certain age. It’s called computerese. When most of us fogies sit down at a computer, we’re able to do most of what we need to do. It’s not too difficult to compose text and send it by e-mail, or to download music from a CD, or to look things up in Google (which has got to be the best invention since sliced bread and painless dentistry). But while you’re doing any of these things, you’re aware there are dozens – maybe even hundreds – of others that your computer can do of which you haven’t any inkling. If you happen to punch one of those other commands inadvertently (LOG OUT or COLLAPSE, for example), the result may be incomprehensible, mystifying, and maybe even irreversible. It’s very hard to fix something when you don’t know what you did to screw it up. So I try to avoid clicking on commands I don’t understand, lest I be bombed back into the Typewriter Age. Unlike Alice, who followed the directions on the bottle that said, “Drink me,” I refuse to try anything cybernetic if the outcome isn’t foreknown to me. LOG OUT sounds particularly ominous; I’ve never tried it.

Then there are pixels, bauds, Bluetooth, wi-fi, Garage Band, USB flash drives – an apparent infinity of jargon invented and named by people who think differently. I once took a beginners’ Apple class. The teacher was an German/Argentinean whom I found almost completely incomprehensible. When I said so one day, she responded that I must learn to think logically. If I’d been able to do that, I wouldn’t have been in the class. So I asked if she could think of a metaphor for what she was trying to explain. She had no idea what a metaphor was.

The next generation is literally bilingual, just as surely as if they were raised in France. They casually use words that I have to look up on Google to interpret. The latest, sent to me by an alumni magazine editor, is “userid.” Gee! I wouldn’t speak to old folks with language like that!