Weekday Musings – But where is the ‘on’?

During the Navaratri festival, I had visited a family friend’s house for Devi puja. In conversation, the elderly gentleman, a self-confessed purist of the English language, was grumbling about the declining standards of writing and rattled off names of editors and journalists of the bygone age - Inder Malhotra, Tavleen Singh, Kuldeep Nayar, Vinod Mehta, Shekhar Gupta - whose editorials, he said, were models of perfection. He also complained about how people speak and write these days. His complaint was simple but sharp: “The meeting is Wednesday,” they say. But where is the 'on'?

I saw the point and it stayed with me. He once told me, "You have all the makings of a journalist - you convey sensitively the core of any subject matter". With the background of his erudition, I took his point seriously and pondered about it. 

That missing little word suddenly opened my eyes to how much English has changed around us. Prepositions are vanishing, commas are going on holiday, and semi-colons, those elegant little bridges between ideas, are almost extinct. Dashes, ellipses take their place, or sometimes nothing at all, just short, clipped sentences. Even the once-feared “dangling preposition” has found a safe home in everyday speech. We now ask, “Who are you talking to?” instead of the stiff old “To whom are you speaking?”

And it’s not just prepositions. The language around us is quietly loosening its collar. Where we once wrote, “Each student must bring his notebook,” we now say, “Each student must bring their notebook.”

Other examples keep popping up:

Once upon a time, a sentence might run, “He was tired; nevertheless, he continued working.” Now it’s more likely, “He was tired. Still, he kept working.”

The old verbs we grew up with are quietly changing clothes. Where we said, “She dreamt of faraway places,” most people now say, “She dreamed of faraway places.”

The once-feared whom is quietly retiring and hardly anyone seems to miss it. What was “Whom did you invite to the dinner?” is now “Who did you invite to dinner?”

Long, rolling sentences have been trimmed down. Instead of, “After the storm had passed, and once the sun broke through the clouds, the weary travellers continued their journey along the muddy road,” today it’s just, “The storm passed. The sun came out. They kept going.”

Even the tone has shifted. Compare: “I cannot attend the event because I have another engagement” with today’s breezy, “Can’t make it, I’ve got something else on.”

Spoken English, too, has crept into writing. I notice it in emails, in WhatsApp chats, even in newspaper columns. We no longer write the way we once did. Compare this:

Old style: “The train was delayed, and as a result, we had to wait at the station for nearly an hour.”

Modern style: “The train was late, so yeah, we just hung around for an hour.”

The second feels like someone talking to you across the table, casual, unbuttoned, with little fillers like so yeah and you know slipping into the text. Our writing today often sounds like our speaking.

Why is this happening? The reasons are many, and they go back a long way. Once, writing was meant to be formal, a step above ordinary speech. But then radio, films, and television gave spoken English a far wider reach. Later came email, texting, and social media, which turned writing into quick conversation. Add to this the fact that millions of non-native speakers across the world bring their own rhythms into English, and you see why the language bends and reshapes itself so quickly.

This isn’t about right or wrong, good English or bad English. It’s simply about change. Language has always followed the needs of people, and people today want quick, clear, conversational communication. English is alive, sometimes formal, sometimes casual, sometimes polished, sometimes playful. And maybe that’s its greatest strength: it keeps moving, just like us.

So next time someone says, “The meeting is Wednesday,” and you wonder where the on has gone, smile. It hasn’t vanished. It has just quietly made way for a faster, lighter English that belongs to our time.

Tavleen Singh