A living language can change, sometime startlingly rapidly. In fiction it's employed to suggest cultural change, or a character's status as Fish Out of Temporal Water. Compare Eternal English. Examples of Language Drift include: * In Gulliver's Travels, it is stated that most Struldbrugs are incapable of speaking more than a few words to those around them due to that trope. It is unclear how much that trope affects the written language, since there they suffer another problem - they can't remember what they just read. * A major theme in Riddley Walker. It's post-apocalyptic fiction, and the book is just barely understandable, if you read it carefully and sound it out phonetically. Their conflation of various words of today's English (notably "Adam" and "atom") lead to much of the b