Changing English

English has been changing throughout its lifetime and it's still changing today. For most of us, these changes are fine as long as they're well and truly in the past. Paradoxically, we can be curious about word origins and the stories behind the structures we find in our language, but we experience a queasy distaste for any change that might be happening right under our noses. There are even language critics who are convinced that English is dying, or if not dying at least being progressively damaged through long years of mistreatment.