Analysing language change discourses for Questions 3 & 4: changing punctuation

While I'm on a roll, here's another pair of Section B questions based on some different texts. This time, the focus is on the changing meanings of punctuation and attitudes towards change. Like a few Section B questions, this straddles both diversity and change, so I think it's an interesting one. The use of online comments in response to the article as a Text B isn't a feature of any previous 7702/2 papers but was used once on an old ENGA3 paper on the previous AQA A spec, so I've considered it a suitable text for these purposes. 

There aren't any student responses to this question but if I get time I'll suggest a few angles that might be useful.

Text A is an article by Susie Dent from The Daily Telegraph in November 2020

Text B is a selection of online replies to the article posted on the same day.

Q3

Analyse how language is used in Text A (The Twitter row over full stops...) and Text B (online comments in response to Text A...) to present views about language change and punctuation. 

In your answer you should: 

• examine any similarities and differences you find between the two texts 

• explore how effectively the texts present their views.

Q4

Write an opinion article on views about language change. In your article you should assess the ideas and issues raised in Text A and Text B. 

You should refer to ideas from language study and argue your own views.

Apostrophe errors lead to feline feast?

Apostrophes are back in the news again. No, stay with me; it's actually quite interesting... don't go...please.

With the news that a council in Devon was set to formally ban apostrophes from its street signs, many custodians of the language were up in arms. According to The Daily Telegraph, the move "sparked fury". One person felt more than fury; Mary de Vere Taylor felt a mixture of confusion, patriotism and self-doubt all in the space of a few lines:

"It's almost as though somebody with a giant eraser is literally trying to erase punctuation from our consciousness," she said.
"To me there's something terribly British and terribly reassuring about well-written and well-punctuated writing.
"Some may say I should get a life and get out more but if I got out more and saw place names with no apostrophes where there should be I shudder to think how I'd react." 

The image of an actual, literal, giant eraser, replacing the gun barrel of a Chieftain tank, going around the highways and byways (but mostly byways) of Devon rubbing out apostrophes,  paid for by the council tax of honest residents, is one that will stay with me to the grave. Largely because I've just made it up in my own head and am now a bit scared. But that's beside the point. These things matter to lots of people and not all of them are mad.

A year ago, Lindsay Johns of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard (and writer of a few pieces I've had a go at before) bemoaned the disappearance of the apostrophe from the name of the bookshop  Waterstone's. In his article for the Mail he sounds like a man who's washed down his Weetabix with a few too many dictionaries, arguing "My stance here is not one of supercilious grammatical pedantry. For me, this is about something bigger. This is about the debt we owe both to the English language (as custodians of an ineffably rich, august and venerable tongue) and also to future generations".

This all sounds great and even quite touching, until you start to look at what he's so passionate about: a little squiggle. The apostrophe is actually - as David Crystal, the bearded lord of language, explains on Newsnight here and on his own blog here - a bit of a late arrival in the punctuation pantheon, only becoming standardised in the 19th Century.

Crystal goes on to explain the problem in a bit more detail on his blog:

It's impossible to say how long the apostrophe will last. For almost a thousand years of its history, English writing did very well without it. During the 19th century it came to be seen as obligatory, and the rules governing its use were formed. But during the 20th, its role became questioned. Was it really needed? It was sometimes useful in distinguishing meanings, but it seems it could be left out without causing ambiguity most of the time.

So, when Lindsay Johns and other punctuation police get so excited about the apostrophe as a symbol of our great language's mighty and rich history, they are probably overdoing it a little bit. Just as poor Mary de Vere Taylor said to the Telegraph, there's "something terribly British" about clinging on to outward symbols of a fading past.

So, can we do without the apostrophe? Yes and no. In this age of flashy-looking fonts and online search engines, the apostrophe tends to get in the way, either looking a bit incongruous or messing up an otherwise seamless stream of code. We can also, generally speaking, get by without it in most contexts, because it offers clarification about ownership on pretty rare occasions.

But, again pointed out by Crystal, it's currently part of what we consider to be standard English punctuation, so it has a status and value which can't be ignored:

The old order still rules, and has to be respected. Omitting an apostrophe may not cause a problem in a text message, but it can cause a huge problem in essays, job applications, and other kinds of formal writing. Not because it makes meaning unclear, but simply because it goes against what society considers to be acceptable English. Students have to be taught how to manage this situation, so that they know what's expected of them.  

I'm all in favour of ditching apostrophes altogether, but while they're part of the current system of punctuation, you can expect your work handed back with red rings around errant or missing apostrophes. Otherwise you could end up like this poor family, worrying about whether their teenage sons are really eating their pet cats...

The lack of an apostrophe has the potential to cause even more alarming misunderstandings (Letters, 21 March). While away on holiday I received a message from my teenage boys at home, declaring: "We have completely run out of food and are so desperate we are going to have to eat the cats."
Adrian Brodkin, London

from The Guardian letters page 22.03.13

Apostrophe disappears: world ends

Apostrophe-lovers are up in arms over Waterstones' ...Waterstone's's...the decision of Waterstone's bookshop to remove the apostrophe from its name. In a move that some punctuation purists have likened to the end of the world, Waterstone's (named so because it used to be the firm of one Tim Waterstone, therefore - like Sainsbury's and McDonald's - a possessive apostrophe) have decided to ditch the dinky little punctaution mark.

This article in the Daily Mail gives you more information and offers some hilariously unintentional punctuation errors in its readers' comments after the piece. One interesting angle is that the apostrophe is a useful shibboleth, allowing the (ahem) better-educated to look down upon their inferiors with wry disdain. But what use is the apostrophe? It's a relatively new invention, punctuation-wise, and doesn't conform to its own rules (it's ...its...see I'm confused now), but perhaps still serves a helpful disambiguating role in contractions like I'm and she'll, where the pronunciation of a word might be affected if there were no apostrophe.

We've looked at apostrophes before on this blog (here and here, for a start) and I'm increasingly of the view that they're dying and we should probably just get rid of them once and for all to save confusion. It's a good topic for ENGA3 Language Discourses questions (probably as part of Language Change) and would make a suitable topic for a Language Intervention on ENGA4 too.

# hashtags - this year's LOL?

Following on from the post about changing punctuation, here's a guest post from Emma Bertouche who is an Online Marketing Executive for a language translations company and writes for several websites and blogs regarding language and social media.



Advances in technology have always added to and changed the way we use the English language. The rise of social media and the regular social network user is the latest example of the internet driving many new or distorted words and phrases into common language, infiltrating themselves into daily use in written and spoken communication.

Many blogs and articles are written every day on how this is perceived to be diluting and misusing the English language – and many other languages for that matter. One phenomenon that needs closer examination is the growing use of the lowly hashtag - ‘#’ – to emphasise an argument, feeling,  or solidarity with a group.

For those people unfamiliar with Twitter and the hashtag phenomenon, words or phrases are prefixed with a hash symbol (#), with multiple words concatenated, such as:
#RealAle is my favourite kind of #beer

Then, a person can search for the string #RealAle and this tagged word will appear in the search engine results. Hashtags are used by people to try and get a topic trending. A trending topic is a word, phrase or topic that is posted (tweeted) multiple times, these trending topics are then shown on websites, including Twitter's own front page. The aim is that  users can then search for any Tweets containing that specific term or phrase and read what other Twitter users across the globe are saying about it.

On the surface this seems to be another internet trend, spreading from person to person within the online culture, which originated on the Twitter social networking site. So when someone in the office recently described themselves (in the spoken word) as “hashtag smug” it was an example of how quickly the language of social media is making an appearance not only in other online communities, but also creeping into everyday spoken conversation.

The phenomenon has also been picked up by The New York Times, which wrote this interesting article about the hashtag making this way into our lives.  We increasingly see instances of the hashtag being implemented on other social networks, where characters are no longer capped(the internet equivalent of shouting)  yet people use it to stress a word or point that they are trying to make. Furthermore, unlike ‘text speak’ and the lingo of teenagers, this trend is not exclusive to a specific demographic of people, and can have universal appeal.

Twitter is, in essence, the 21st Century equivalent of William Tyndale, facilitating the mass distribution of the written word across an era-defining medium; in Tyndale's case, Caxton's printing press, and in the case of Twitter, social media. The messages they communicate may have been different (Tyndale translated the Bible, rather than screamed #WELOVEJUSTINBIEBER) but their aim is the same; for as many people to see their message as possible. Similar to Tyndale, however, there are many clamouring to cry heresy at the implementation of a new language variant, and opposition to the hashtag is growing to levels previously experienced as a result of the rise of texting and email. It is to be hoped those opposed don't follow Pope Clement VII's example, and seek to eradicate the problem as they see it. Thankfully, I don't think nouns are flammable. 

Of course as with any form of publicity, be it self promoting or for business there can often be a downside or even a backlash at attempts to use the hashtag for marketing purposes. People often see the opportunity to use trending topics to spam Twitter with unrelated topics but then include a popular hashtag to ensure their tweet gets seen be a decent number of Twitter users. One of the more documented mistakes was that of Habitat who used hashtags including #IranElection and #Mousavi to promote discounts on their products, making for some heroically non-sensical tweets. The idea behind the madness is not a particularly clever one at the best of times but linking a range of home furniture to  sensitive humanitarian crises is only ever going to anger people. .

Social media trends do not provide the first examples of  ‘moral panic’ regarding language change, either. In fact, there is a long history of alarm at evolving language trends. The rise of the postcard brought with it concerns that, due to the limited amount of space people had to write their messages, the use of the English language would be compromised. Comparisons between the post card and Twitter have already been made by The Daily Mail, back in 2009.

It will be interesting to learn what future language scholars make of the introduction of social media and its effects on the spoken word – there is already debate raging on what to call this new phenomenon.
While researching the hashtag I found a web forum where linguists were asking “Is there a linguistics term for glued-together Twitter hashtags, such as #vacationwishlist, #isawesome, and #wordsthatdescribeme?” The closest answer I could find was portmanteau but a hashtag doesn’t create new words; it just lumps existing words together.

 There doesn’t seem to be an agreed linguistic term for this yet, but people are still able to easily associate meaning to it. Unlike the controversy of ‘text speak’ entering the English Language, which seemed to scythe down language to its most basic construct,  would the inclusion of hashtag English (as indeed with other languages that communicate via Twitter) be as contentious?

In the same way that people now question whether it is acceptable to include ‘smilies’ in emails to colleagues, the fact that the use of #hashtag  is up for discussion means that some people already find it acceptable and do use them - whether others like it or not.

Although I have only heard one example of ‘hashtag’ in spoken communication, it will be interesting to see if this catches on. Social media is presenting a whole new set of questions on the future of language for the students and tutors to solve, and who knows - maybe if I was ‘down with the kids’ I wouldn’t feel so #confused .

Language change: big pictures and little details

Two pieces on language change that have appeared in the press recently offer us a really neat contrast between the big picture of change - David Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words - and the very small details of it - Henry Hitchings' Wall Street Journal piece on the history and future of punctuation.

Crystal picks one hundred English words and uses them to trace a history of the language, taking in foreign loan words like potato and trek, a homegrown Celtic term like brock or a Scots one like wee, as well as many more recent ones from internet culture, abbreviations and cultural shifts.

Hitchings takes a look at punctuation: where it comes from and where it's going. He considers archaic forms like the pilcrow and hedera, ones that he thinks are on their way out like the apostrophe and semi-colon and ones that are coming back in or just appearing, the snark and the interrobang.

Both articles are a good read and offer some excellent examples of how to take a particular element of language - lexis in Crystal's case, orthography in Hitchings' - and trace its changes over time.

OMG!!!! I hate exclamation marks!!!!!

"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes," according to the late, great F.Scott Fitzgerald. Well, as someone who is sometimes lucky just to have an audience of one (myself) laughing at my "jokes", I know where he's coming from. He's so right!!!

Apparently, these days we're seeing more exclamation marks than ever before in written and - especially - blended mode communications. In this article from The Guardian, earlier in the week, Stuart Jeffries looks at the exclamation mark and what it means, and how it's changing. Interestingly, he makes the point that 30 years ago, some manual typewriters (those things that existed before word processors and PCs) didn't even have exclamation mark keys:

It is important to realise that advances in technology (if that's what they are) affect how we write. And how we write includes how often we deploy the beloved gasper. Before the 1970s, few manual typewriters were equipped with an exclamation mark key. Instead, if you wanted to express your unbridled joy at - ooh, I don't know - the budding loveliness of an early spring morning and gild the lily of your purple prose with an upbeat startler, you would have to type a full stop, then back space, push the shift key and type an apostrophe.

He goes on to look at how women and men use the exclamation mark in computer-mediated communication and refers to research that suggests women use them more than men:

But technological change is not the only reason for variations in the use of exclamations. Carol Waseleski's unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this? Are women more excitable? Some theorists (notably D Rubin and K Greene in their paper Gender-Typical Style in Written Language) had argued that the exclamation mark was often a sign of excitability, and that "a high frequency of exclamation points can be regarded as sort of an orthographic intensifier signalling 'I really mean this!'" They also argued that this might convey the writer's lack of stature; that, in fact, a confident person (read: man) could "affirm their views by simply asserting them". Perhaps then the use of multiple exclamation marks is not simply a sign that someone is wearing underpants on their head, but of deeply unmasculine insecurity about expressing one's thoughts. Or maybe that's just my theory!

Waseleski found otherwise. She concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists - which isn't quite how she put it. Instead, she wrote: "The results point to the need to reconsider the negative labels that have often been associated with female communication styles, and to investigate [their use] as they relate to email and other forms of computer-mediated communication."

The rest of the article is a good read for anyone interested in language change - especially orthographic change - over the centuries. So read it!!!!

Apostrophe's must go!

Today's Telegraph and last night's Newsnight have features on that old friend of ours (why not our's?): the apostrophe.

Why does this punctuation mark exist? How come about 50% of the population can't use it properly? Should we just say "pah" and get rid of it? The Newsnight link is very good as it's got a 4 minute of Jeremy Paxman and David Crystal discussing its (why not it's?) history and use. And, it has to be said, it's a slightly more enlightening interview than Paxman's one with Dizzee Rascal last week.

There's more about this debate here on The Register and here on the linguist, John Wells' excellent blog (scroll down to Friday 3rd for this). It's John Wells, of course, who kicked off this particular round of apostrophe uproar with his call to get rid of the apostrophe as part of a more straightforward system of spelling and punctuation (covered here and here).

It's all part of the prescriptivist versus descriptivist debate which features in ENA5 Language Change.

Say bye to the hyphen

Bye...hi...hyphen? Geddit? Oh, well.

The new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is out and instead of the usual media articles about all the funny new words included in it (WAGs, yummy mummies and size zero all make an appearance BTW, and there is at least one story about the new words here), the focus has this time been on a tiny little piece of punctuation: the hyphen ("-"). According to an analysis of the new dictionary, hyphens are dropping out of usage. So words that used to be hyphenated such as bumble-bee are now compounded into one single word, while others such as ice-cream and pot-belly are now written as noun phrases e.g. ice cream and pot belly.

As this interesting article on the BBC News Magazine site tells us, the blame is again being laid at the door of email and electronic communication. Others are arguing that the hyphen is not dying our but being re-purposed (or should that be repurposed) as part of emoticons like the smiley :-)

It's not the first time the decline of the hyphen has been noted, as this story in 2003 demonstrates in almost exactly the same terms. And for more detail on the whole story, have a look at The Language Log blog here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates