I'll try to group these into broad areas that have been helpful for me in the past, but if you'd like to suggest other categories or argue about how I've grouped or defined these, just say.
(Updated with new links on Monday 17th October 2011)
Op-eds (opinion/comment pieces by named writers)
- Zoe Williams on slang that demeans women
- Zoe Williams attacks the word "chav" and all it stands for
- Paul Flynn on the word "chav"
- Beatrice Bray on words to define mental illnesses
- David Mitchell on language change
- Richard Littlejohn on "gollywog"
- Mad Melanie Phillips on "gollywog"
- Hannah Pool on "gollywog"
- Ziauddin Sardar on the place of political correctness in language
- David Gelernter on the perils of PC
- Anti-ebonics op-ed
- Max Davidson on slang
- Christopher Howse on new words and dictionaries
- SFX blog post which links to several pieces by Simon Heffer about language
- Dr Bernard Lamb of the Queen's English Society bemoans low standards in English
- Henry Hitchings (author of Language Wars) on changing London dialect
- Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph on why change is bad
- I h8 text messages: John Humphrys gets mad in the Daily Fail
- Cn u txt?: John Sutherland savages texting in The Guardian (2002)
- 2b or not 2b: David Crystal argues that texting isn't all bad
- The end of handwriting: Boris Johnson on the rise of technology and the end of writing
News stories
- "Man on the Street" offensive to women
- The Sun on "youth"
- Texting is good for you
- Texting is bad for you
- Texting is edumacational
- Studying texting is dumbing down
- More on texting and literacy (readers' comments range from hysterical to offensive)
- The Sun on slang (image file)
- A strangely popular article about the rise of "regional super-accents". With pictures of Cheryl Cole.
- Twitter and regional dialect in the USA (thanks to Ant's blog)
Feature articles
- "Gang slang" in The Evening Standard (nothing to do with gangs really, but there you go...) and an op-ed response in The Voice
- Lucy Tobin on "student slang" (again, not really about "student" slang per se, but worth a look...)
- Anna Leach on geekspeak and the language l33t (really good article!)
- Seattle Times piece on worries over text language
- General advice from Tim Radford on writing about science for a non-specialist audience: useful tips
OK, that's a start for now, and I'll add more over the coming days. You can also look for the blog posts where these articles were first mentioned by putting various keywords and phrases such as language intervention, media text, style models, texting, slang, new words, political correctness in the search bar on the top left of the screen, or by clicking on the labels below.
You might also find this link helpful as it gives more info about what an op-ed is. I've always told my students it's an opinion editorial, but this link says that's not the case. Ho hum.
This is quite interesting on different types of feature article too.
