Exams, exams, exams

The exams are approaching, but I’m not going to do loads of revision posts as in years before: not because I can’t be bothered, but because you can just click on the links to the other posts here and the advice remains the same.

Here are some little extra bits that might help you though, along with my top tips with what I think could appear (last year I was completely wrong about these, so whatever…):

ENA1

Remember that question 1 is all about a mix of engaging with what the text is all about and how it represents its subject (be that a person being described like the Shaun Wallace text last year, a person being interviewed like the Peter Fox text of 2005, or a job/idea/product) and labelling word classes. We’ve done nearly all we can on this in class, so what you can now do yourselves is practise past papers (available as hard copies in the LRC, or via the AQA website linked off the side bar) and make a point of reading a few broadsheet style articles. You can revise word classes by using the Internet Grammar of English site here. But remember, you mustn’t go too far with grammar on this unit: you don’t need to cover clauses or sentence types (simple, compound, complex), but you must look for sentence functions, tense & aspect, active/passive voice and those lovely word classes.

My top tip for the type of text this time is a piece of instructional or advice writing. If I’m right I will award myself a packet of Haribos.

The essay questions should be very familiar to you by now, but remember to use the feedback sheets I’ve done for you and which are available on the w drive in college or from Teachit as pdfs here and here. Also, there is loads of stuff about CLA available from the ENA1 revision tips post last year, while for Language & Representation, I like this site. I also like this site, but that’s another story…

ENA3

All the advice I can give on this comes from Beth Kemp’s rather splendid A Level site here so just go here and visit it.

All I’d add is that we’ve covered Deborah Cameron’s recent material on social constructionist theories of male female conversation for a reason, so make sure you use it, if you can find room for it in the gender essay question.

My top tip for the type of transcript this time is an extract of someone telling a story and the listeners’ interaction with the storyteller. If I’m right I will award myself another packet of Haribos. And a bottle of wine.

ENA5

Once again, we’ve done loads on this in class and you have a mini-text analysis along with a copy of the mark scheme to help you revise. You’ve done 5-6 textual analysis past papers since November (more if you’re Angelica, Sherelle or Romaine!) but there are a couple more in the LRC that you might not have done. My tips for revising this are to use the brilliant British Library Texts in Context site here to take a tour of writing 1600 – 1945 and sample various genres such as recipes and travel writing, before looking at this bit of the site for a wider view on language change and the BBC Voices site for more on varieties and change.

For the essay questions, Raj has given you powerpoints on how to write essays on Varieties and I’ve done the same for Change. Check the w drive next week and we’ll make sure we’ve saved them all there for you.

My top tip for the type of text in the texts from different times is an example of a recipe. If I’m right I will award myself another packet of Haribos. And another bottle of wine. Hic!

ENA6

The daddy of all exam papers and one that should suit the creative writers of you out there (hello Kwame) as well as the analysis heads too (bonjour Evelyn, Delphine and Joss).

We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the individual questions but maybe not quite as much time as I would have liked on actually writing the 2a answers, so there’s your top tip – do some writing for different audiences. My advice to some of you has been to use the blog and particularly the links to broadsheet articles about language issues such as attitudes to change, punctuation and accents, and to get hold of e magazine from the LRC (or the e mag website – see me to get the password). Look at the ways in which sometimes rather dry language topics can be injected with a bit of humour and accessibility.

My top tip for the topic on this paper this year is a hedged bet: either it’ll be language change and attitudes to it (prescriptivist/descriptivist debates) or recent accents and dialects (MEYD/MLE etc.). If I’m right I will award myself yet another packet of Haribos. And another bottle of wine. And a spell in rehab.

Good luck, anyway. Please post comments to the blog if you want help. I’m happy to take emails but it might be more useful to all students if you post any ideas, worries or questions here so everyone can chip in.

Stop the cusswords in classrooms

Channel 4 on Monday night is featuring an episode of its Cutting Edge programme all about young people and swearing. Cunningly titled Mind Your F-ing Language, the programme will (according to the Channel 4 blurb) "reveal the rich and hidden world of the language that kids actually use, and look at one school's attempts to deal with swearing".

The programme is trailed by this article in today's Telegraph, which looks at the impact the swearing ban has had on the featured school.

A good idea or a load of bo****s - you decide.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA5 - Language Change

N-words with attitude

Following on from yesterday's post about Russell Simmons of Def Jam calling for an end to the use of the n-word in rap lyrics, and last year's article about New York City Council banning the word, comes a story taken from The Language Log blog about a school in Omaha, Nebraska. The publication of a student newsletter (link to the pdf file here) featuring an article about the n-word and the attitudes of young people towards it has caused a stir in the local community and led to the suspension of the college's principal (since reinstated). I think this is interesting on two fronts: firstly, the language issues - as ever - are pertinent to what we discuss in ENA1, ENA5 and ENA6 about racist language, changing words and debates about language; secondly, as a piece of writing aimed at young people, the newsletter feature is worth a read, particularly if you're looking for approaches to introducing a controversial topic to younger readers. And with ENA6, question 2a being all about doing just that, it would be a good idea to have a look to see what works and what doesn't. More of this in class next week... Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change ENA6 - Language Debates

Stop the cusswords in hip hop. Y-O.

It's been an interesting week for all lovers – whoops, I mean students – of offensive language. CBS broadcaster Don Imus – who is white - was suspended earlier this month for referring to a mostly black women’s basketball team as “hardcore hos…nappy headed hos”. The BBC news website helpfully points out:

"Ho" is slang for prostitute and "nappy-headed" is a derogatory term for the hair of many black people.

Watch the clip here.

Meanwhile, Russell Simmons, the boss of the Def Jam record label, famous for its pioneering of early hip hop acts such as Public Enemy, Run DMC and The Beastie Boys (ask your dad…or me), has called on rappers to tone down the cusswords in their lyrics and stop using such terms as “bitch”, “ho” and “nigga”.

An article in The Independent reports:

"The words 'bitch' and 'ho' are utterly derogatory and disrespectful of the painful, hurtful, misogyny that, in particular, African American women have experienced in the United States," Simmons' organisation, the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, said in a statement.

"The n-word is a racially derogatory term that disrespects the pain, suffering, history of racial oppression and multiple forms of racism against African Americans and other people of colour," it added.

The article continues by talking about the origins of hip hop and how the money-driven genre of gangsta rap has fetishized some criminal aspects of the African American underclass, celebrating their anti-social lifestyles in their lyrics.

As language students, we know these words matter, but what is their impact on us and society? If we get rid of the words Simmons suggests do we tone down the most extreme and violent ideas within the lyrics? In other words, if we do away with some of the words will we also do away with some of the extreme feelings provoked by them? Is the use of such words in lyrics actually normalising them? Is it making people outside the group who originally used the terms start to adopt them: wiggas from Norfolk farming villages, 10 year old boys from Peckham, 60 year old radio DJs?

And there are wider issues too. Why has it become acceptable to refer to women as hos and bitches? Who let this happen?

For more on this debate, you could look at this blog and this article on Radio 1 Extra’s website.

And there’s a Haribo-related prize to the first person who can post the name of the rapper whose lyrics are misquoted in the title of this post.

Useful for: ENA1 – Language & Representation

Scrobbling Avril Lavigne

April 10: heard this on my car radio the other day. I'm so in touch with youth culture! My admin assistant Lindsay found the lyrics to Avril Lavigne’s catchy new number 'Girlfriend' for me, courtesy of Yahoo. Here's a typical specimen of the teenspeak the sk8r girl uses so compellingly (is this Valley Girl speak, or grunge-meets-pop?):

Hey! Hey! You! You! I don't like your girlfriend! No way! No way! I think you need a new one Hey! Hey! You! You! I could be your girlfriend …[etc]
I think about ya all the time You're so addictive ...(parental advisory bits censored)[Bridge] She's like SO WHATEVER You could do so much better I think we should get together now And that's what everyone's talking about! …She's so stupid What the hell were you thinking?! [repeat]
Inspired stuff. I posted this on my college VLE forum, when I researched Ms Lavigne’s ‘whatever’ usage:
Further to my posting yesterday : one site I tried is Last.fm, which introduced me to my new word of the day: 'scrobble'...Here's how UrbanDictionary defines it:
1. When Last.fm automatically sends the name of each song played by audio player, they call this “scrobbling.”
The application will scrobble your playlist.
2. Can replace most verbs to indicate that an action has been performed, and that it has been logged or recorded by a 'scrobbler', which is a system that records whatever you're scrobbling, although the scrobbler may not necessarily exist.
If you played 64 games of Fifa 98: Road To World Cup, you could say "I scrobbled Fifa 64 times today." Or if you were on the phone, you could say "I was updating my PhoneScrobbler".

There are more usages and an etymology, but like parts of ‘Girlfriend’, these are parental advisory. Here’s some of my students’ responses…
'My brother has an account with last.fm, which is so annoying cos it makes my computer at home so damn slow, seeming he downloaded the software to go with it, but still! He always uses the word scrobble now, like he uses it for everything! [Note the teen-usage of ‘like’ there!]
It's a very good site mind, there is absolutely everything on there music-wise! You can even have your own top ten, depending on what you have listened to the most.
As has already been said, when you listen to music using a comouter (sic) music player such as iTunes, the music will be recorded as listened onto your account, thus being scrobbled, then put into the chart.
But me being me, listened to some songs [which I am not even going to explain as they are bad] and was accidentally logged into his account. He then had random music which is so not cool to have showing on his profile and got told off by him! Well if he was clever enough he would have logged out! Sorry, having a rant.'
And this from another: 'I personally hate this song and wish Avril Lavigne would hurry up and decide if she's a goth, a sk8r or a Paris Hilton wannabe! Oh yeah, and addictive doesn't rhyme with delicious!' (If she can rhyme ‘whatever’ with ‘better’, why not? Look at Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ if you really want to see some deliberately off-beat rhymes!!)
Sorry if all this sounds too trivial as we approach exams, but I do think this could be useful for language and representation (the grungy girl subverts gender stereotypes…or does she?); language change (following on from Dan’s recent fascinating post about the history of ‘whatever’; then there's all that usage of 'like', number homophones, shared cultural references, etc.). So academic rigour is sustained, and teacher’s cool credentials … probably shot. Ms Lavigne, sk8r or Paris Hilton, does seem to be going down the ‘Hey Mickey’ pop stream (or is that ‘drain’??)

Top tips for AS and A2

It's about that time of year when students ask for revision help, so here's a list of all the top tips we've put together for both AS and A2 exams. Some of these we've put together ourselves, while others are links to other people's sites and blogs, but the toppest tip of all though, is do some revision now and keep doing it consistently up until the exam: don't leave it all 'til the last minute.

ENA1
Top tips for textual analysis
Child Language advice and revision tips
Child Language other sites to help you revise
Language & Representation advice and revision tips

ENA3
Top tips for the whole paper

ENA5
Top tips for textual analysis and managing your time on the paper
Top tips for language change and varieties

ENA6
Top tips for whole paper

A good tip for revision of basic (and not so basic) grammar is this brilliant, teach & test yourself site at UCL. It takes you from the basics of word classes like nouns and verbs into more complicated areas such as clauses, tense and aspect, and the passive voice. It's great.

And remember, for lots of other wider reading and different angles on the main topics, try typing in phrases like "powerless language", "racist language", "male female conversation" & "CLA" to get links to other articles and posts. Referring to some of the ideas and researchers in these posts, or building their approaches into your own angle on the topic could mean all the difference between an A and a B. Or a B and a C, or a ... you get get the general idea.

Please post any revision questions here as comments.

The changing face of "whatever"

We all know what it means now; even our parents use it and a man older than me (!) used it – apparently unironically - to his young son in the Ikea queue this morning. It's whatever and it's making teachers angry. At least, it’s making teachers in the ATL union angry at their Easter conference.

A survey of 400 teachers found that the "Wha'ever" and "Am I bovvered?" phrases, from the Catherine Tate Show, were the most used in the classroom - ahead of catchphrases from the Simpsons and Little Britain. The sulky adolescent retort of "Am I bovvered?" was recently demonstrated by the Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a comedy sketch recorded for Comic Relief. Teachers were concerned that copying the language and attitude of television characters could have a damaging impact on classroom behaviour.

Like so many slang expressions - greazy, moist, shank or even that old classic brap brap - whatever has morphed its meanings during its 30 (ish) year existence. This article on the BBC website's magazine traces its meanings from 1960 counter culture slang, through the valley girls of 70s and 80s America, Jerry Springer's working class audiences and into British streets and the mouth of the delightful Vicky Pollard.

1973: Meaning "that's what I meant", US Secretary of Defense briefing paper for returning POWs

1982: Meaning "you decide", San Francisco Examiner

1980s: Used regularly by California "valley girls"

1986: "Whatever man, whatever", in film Platoon

1990s: Used by the Jerry Springer crowd

Late 1990s: Reaches UK's rich female teenagers

Early 2000s: UK street language

2003: Little Britain's first TV series

Sources: OED, linguist Tony Thorne

But like lots of other expressions that move from the streets to mainstream usage, whatever is probably doomed to go the same way as bling, losing its cutting edge in the mouths of old folks, Trinny and Susannah yuppie clones, and wannabe trendy English teachers. But then again, cool has always been cool, and some other slang terms remain in circulation for a long time. It all depends on what it sounds like, how it's used and who uses it. And so long as it winds teachers up, it's probably still got currency for a while.

"It's used as a punctuating term, the answer to everything," says Ralph Surman, a deputy head teacher at a primary school in Nottingham and a member of a government task force on school behaviour. "It's like a toddler saying 'no'. They don't mean 'no' but say it to everything because it feels nice. The syntax feels nice on the teeth and the tongue."

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Accent change revisited

More coverage of accent change in the UK linked to the excellent British Library website - worth looking here and here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Accent change? You're having a laff.

Today’s Telegraph has a front page feature on research into accent change in the UK, which focuses on the spread of vowel sounds and trends in dialect (or rather, accent) levelling. The article takes a historical overview of trends in accent and looks at how the words bath and laugh are pronounced these days and how they were spoken 200 years ago. As with many pieces of research into this , there seems to be a trend away from distinct local accents towards regional ones, so as Jonnie Robinson, curator of English Dialects and Accents at the British Library explains:

Huddersfield, for instance, is becoming more like Leeds, while towns nearer Hull that once had their own sound were becoming absorbed into the Humberside accent. "Really large towns stand firm, but the rest can lose their distinctiveness. And in the South, accents in places such as Reading and Oxford have become more like London." There are power accent bastions, with Liverpool being the most obvious. A combination of Irish and Welsh immigrants in the second half of the 19th century gave the city its distinctive voice, but association with what was then not a very healthy or law-abiding urban centre did not appeal to folk within easy reach.

Perhaps of more interest than the article itself – which is fairly good but doesn’t really offer much more insight than you’ll have from your lessons anyway – is a set of sound files you can listen to, of accents recorded around the country in 1950, and a link to what looks like an amazing British Library project which is creating a voicemap of the whole country.

And if the spread of Estuary/London tones isn't enough to cause palpitations for our northern brothers and sisters, have a look at this article (recommended by blog contributor, Simon Lavery) which suggests that children brought up by parents with different regional accents may end up falling behind at school. Or so they say...

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change & Varieties

We’re not loving it

It’s a job that is “poorly paid and menial” according to the Collins Dictionary and by the Oxford English Dictionary as an "unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector", so no wonder McDonalds wants to change the definition of the word McJob. But how do you go about changing a dictionary definition if you don’t like it? Well, not by pressurising the lexicographers, if this quote from The Language Log is anything to go by:

Sydney Landau, in his book, Dictionaries: the Art and Craft of Lexicography (Cambridge U Press, 2001) says that the lexicographer "cannot allow any special-interest group to determine what gets in his dictionary or how it is represented" (page 407). That would seem to discourage McDonald's from being too pushy with lexicographers, who have their own methods of determining meaning and who don't much cater to external pressures from industry.

So, how are dictionaries compiled and what do lexicographers do? The latest update to the OED has just come out, and some of their experts talk about the new words and how they collect them here:
http://www.oed.com/news/newwords.html
http://www.oed.com/news/revisions.html

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

Haribo crisis

Due to a recent fire at the Haribo factory in Luxemburg, supplies of this delicious confectionery have been scarce. So winners of last week’s quiz – Evelyn and Whitney – and winners of the language change bingo lessons – err, lots of you – will have to wait until next week for supplies.

Either that, or email the college principal with a demand for me to receive a well-earned pay rise, and I'll be down Walthamstow Asda/Poundland like a shot.

English accent = bad teeth and booze problem

On first hearing an English accent 50 years ago, Americans might have thought: stately home, private school, good manners. Nowadays, they think: low income, poor diet, alcohol problem.

So says Toby Young in this article from The Guardian. Accents and different ways of pronouncing particular words and sounds, have long stirred up animosity and disquiet. Some people only have to hear a Scouse accent before they’re clutching their handbag and hubcaps to their chest and muttering “smackheads”, while others hear a Jamaican accent and run for cover. Many harbour prejudices about Caribbean or American accents (as this post from last year shows) and some just hate it when we drop our t’s (as in the glottalised bottle and water).

Stephen Fry commented earlier in the week – some say rather bitterly – that an English accent, rather than acting talent, will open doors for you in Hollywood (that story is featured here and developed in the BBC website's magazine) and Toby Young’s article is a response to this. Meanwhile, David McKie looks at the ways in which the letter “h” is pronounced and the extreme reactions such an ‘umble little word can produce.

All this can tie in to work on ENA5 and attitudes towards different accents and dialects, and links to previous posts on the blog about Howard Giles’ matched guise experiment and the Aziz corporation’s survey of attitudes to accents back in 2005. And like so many of these articles, it’s not just what the columnist says that’s interesting but the responses from readers at the end of the article. Just quoting a few examples of extreme prescriptivism from these articles would be a useful way of injecting some contemporary discussion into essays about attitudes to accent and dialect.

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Varieties

Nasty names

Black bastards... gingers... monkeys... it must be another post about offensive language and race.

There’s been another flurry of media interest in racist language over the last week with a senior Conservative Party MP resigning over his use of the term “black bastard” while talking about racism in the army, the current Miss Scotland receiving criticism for calling Samantha Mumba (remember her?) a monkey, and lots of ginger people complaining to Metro about the abuse they receive (no link – check the tube train floor).

There’s not much more to say about this sort of thing, apart from how it’s always useful to see what media commentators have to add to the debate, and in this instance Nirpal Dhaliwal talks about how his own dad served in the British Army and was subjected to racist abuse, but how he coped, dealt with it and eventually thrived. Worth a read, and the comments posted afterwards have sparked heated debates too.

My dad came to Britain, from India, as a nine-year-old. Aged 17, he joined the Gloucestershire Regiment in 1967. Having left school at 15 with no qualifications, the army was his only way to escape the factory work that everyone else he grew up with was destined for. Only 5ft 6ins tall, he was a slightly built Asian lad who wanted to see something of the world. He'd been the only Asian child at his school and had suffered racial abuse and beatings. He now entered the hyper-macho arena of the army in which his colour made him stick out like a sore thumb. Coming from London made him even more of an oddity. When he first joined the West Country regiment, other soldiers would appear at his billet to gawp at the brown-skinned boy who spoke with a cockney accent. But people's responses weren't always so benign. The word 'P*ki' wasn't then a common part of racist parlance, so the bullies used the words 'wog', the n-word and 'coon' to his face instead. He shared a room with one who habitually called him a 'black enamelled bastard'. He was also attacked. One long-serving soldier, a heavyweight boxer several years older than him, picked a fight with him in a pub, spuriously accusing my dad of badmouthing him behind his back. He took my father outside, shouted the routine insult of 'You black bastard!' and butted him.

Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

New acronyms: FIDS and FUDS

Last year we had HEIDIS (Highly Educated Independent, Degree-carrying Individuals) and now we have FIDS (Fully Involved Dads) and FUDS (Fully Uninvolved Dads). The trend to label different or changing groups in society with increasingly strange acronyms seems to be on the increase, as advertisers, and now government, try to put us all into categories and box us up.

A BBC4 programme called Are We Having Fun Yet is running at the moment and according to this link on the BBC website (posted by blog contributor Simon Lavery to the English Language List), part of the series considers new words used to label the changing demographics of the 60s through to noughties.

So this week's Haribo competition for A2 students is, what do the acronyms MOS and PAW mean? Post your answers as comments below and the first 2 answers will get a prize each.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Today's cliché is tomorrow's proverb

A hundred years from now, period dramas set in 2007 will feature pretty girls with antique rings through their noses informing their parents that they are going upstairs for a, like, chill-out, y'know, and Telegraph readers will coo and purr at this comforting reminder of a more civilised era.

In an excellent response to last week’s Daily Telegraph article (and subsequent 8 million replies) about words and phrases that annoy us, Craig Brown traces the origins of certain “newfangled” expressions and finds that they’re older than they appear. While prescriptivists moan about new words and phrases entering the language, Brown points out that words and phrases like “undies” (as short for underwear), “trouble shooter” and “beat it” (like in Michael Jackson’s classic, pre-scandal, tune) have been around for about 100 years already.

And he makes the point – like all good descriptivists – that attitudes to language change are more to do with attitudes to the users of these new expressions than the words themselves.

Anyhoo, check it out, like. Innit. And other expressions that annoy...

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

Language change - a mehness to society?

With new words and the reasons for their existence high on the agenda for A2 students (and presentations taking place tomorrow and Wednesday – hint hint), this article in The Guardian and this post on The Language Log blog look at the word “meh” and its spread across the internet and into print.

I’m not sure I’d even registered that the word really existed, although it sounds familiar, but apparently it’s an expression of indifference or vague disapproval that’s made its first notable appearance (although this is hotly debated) in The Simpsons and then spread through the power of the constantly hilarious little yellow 4-fingerered fellows to wider society. Nowadays, it seems to occupy the same semantic space as the much more British (and therefore better) “whatever”.

As with so many words that seem to have come about in the last decade or so, it’s not so much the etymology of the word that’s interesting but its rapid spread and the reasons for this. Technology is part of it: the internet, and its massive influence on the speed of change, has to be a significant factor in the spread of new words and new meanings. When you consider that the telephone has only been around for about 130 years and personal computers for 20, you realise that in centuries past, language change could only be as quick as the quickest mode of transport: an airplane, a train, a donkey delivering the mail from one person to another.

So now, with virtually instant communication across continents, new words and new meanings spread like bird flu in a Bernard Matthews slaughterhouse. And words morph into new forms as they are transmitted: “meh” has now moved from its original function as an interjection ( a bit like “ha” or “heh”) and into an adjective (“that’s just so meh”) and now into a noun (“the very meh-ness of it”).

And a special, Haribo-based prize goes to any student who mentions this meh post in their presentation tomorrow or Wednesday.

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

NYPD Black?

A brief article on the BBC website today and a longer one in The Guardian tell how the City Council in New York has banned the use of the n-word although the ban is more symbolic than legal as you can’t be punished for using the word. Apparently the move is a response to a growing use of the word, beyond the young African Americans who have supposedly “reclaimed” it from its negative connotations, into other ethnic groups. It is, according to The Guardian article, “the latest move in an argument raging across the US over the common use of the word, especially in the black community, where it has morphed into a slang word similar to "mate". This “semantic reclamation” has been a topic for discussion in many English Language lessons, and if the comments from SFX students are anything to go by, there seems to be a growing trend on this side of the Atlantic towards the word being used in a similar way, maybe due to the influence of American rap music on British youth culture. But it’s not universally accepted by any means, and lots of older people from Caribbean backgrounds strongly object to its use in this way, maybe because they were the ones who were subjected to its worst sting when they arrived in this predominantly white country back in the 1950s and 1960s. As the American lawyer Roy Miller, a campaigner against the n-word, puts it "At its worst, the N-word is the ultimate form of disrespect against black people. It is a dangerous snake which is liable to bite". In terms of its etymology (the word’s origins and development) The Guardian describes it as coming from “the Latin "niger", Spanish "negro", and middle French "negre" meaning black. One of the earliest uses of the written word was in 1786 by slave masters to label their Africans. It is through its application in slavery that it has come to be seen by many as the most offensive racial slur in English”. The website Ban the N-word, says on its home page “If it’s not acceptable, ok or cool to use kike, hooknose, wetback, spic, honky, cracker, paleface, peckerwood, blue-eyed devil, dago, wop, greaseball, guinea, chink, slant-eyes, gook, then, remember, it is not acceptable, ok or cool to use the N-word”. So, a pointless campaign, doomed to failure, or a reasonable attempt to get people to address their potentially offensive language use - you decide. The debate about the n-word has been taken up here on the BBC website, with journalist Kari Browne offering her perspective on the word's history and current usage:

Words are multidimensional. And they mean different things to different people. But how can a word used to categorically dehumanise an entire race of people ever be flipped around to be used as a term of endearment? Some African-Americans argue that by reclaiming the word, by owning it for themselves, the word can take on whatever meaning they ascribe to it.

In other words, they argue it is possible to re-invent the n-word and change its connotation. Words can be painful and incredibly emotional. The n-word was born in the context of American slavery. The first written documentation of it in print form was in 1786. It was used by white slave masters to label their black slaves.

Centuries later, it has enjoyed a rebirth among mostly young folks who have never known the context in which it was once spoken. And this is the problem. We do not hear our elders saying: "Hello my n..., how are you today?" My grandfather, raised in part by his grandmother - a freed slave - doesn't greet his friends with the word.

In fact I have never heard him, or anyone else in my family use it. So why did I?

Meanwhile, Gary Younge in The Guardian today talks about the issues around other labels for black people in the USA - African-American and Black - arguing that the rise of US Democrat and presidential hopeful, Barack Obama has led people to question what the difference is and what "blackness" actually means:

"African-American" and "black" have been used interchangeably in the US to such an extent that they are regarded as synonymous. They are not. African-American, a term which entered regular usage in the late 80s, refers to a particular ethnic experience of black Americans of African descent. Black refers simply to Americans of African descent, which includes black immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa and Latin and South America. All African-Americans are black; but not all black Americans are African-American.

The political relationship between the two has always been close. Two of the greatest icons of black nationalism in the US - Stokely Carmichael and Marcus Garvey - were from Trinidad and Jamaica respectively. Malcolm X's mother was from Grenada; Louis Farrakhan's mother was from St Kitts and Nevis and his father from Jamaica.

These connections make sense. In their daily lives, all black Americans face racism. But there is more to the black American experience than racism and more to African-American identity than race.

Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

A gripefest about language use

People have always complained about others’ use of the English language, and have looked back to previous generations as golden ages of English while bemoaning the language of the youth of today. Julie Blake covered the history and background to such complaints about language change in her Bilious Pigeon lecture at the last SFX Language Conference, and it’s now an article in the February emag (in the LRC).

A recent discussion in class about the conversion of the noun text to the verb to text and younger people’s use of the past tense form “I text you yesterday” rather than what I thought was the “right” past tense form “I texted you yesterday”, is maybe a case in point. To me, as a 30-something English teacher, it seems normal to say “text” in the present tense and then add the –ed inflection in the past tense. But for (I think) everyone in the two A2 classes that was strange, abnormal, weird, just…extra. Even Gbemi’s dad thinks it’s weird and he’s probably older than me. So, who’s right? Well, we all are to some extent, but if the usage of text as a past tense continues to spread, then you’ll be standard in your use and I’ll be just a bit old-fashioned and non-standard in mine. Then I'll start to moan about the youth of today having no respect.

Likewise, the trend towards missing out prepositions like “to” in utterances like “I’m going Peckham”, or “You going library” seems to growing beyond casual, colloquial use into more formal settings. Maybe that too will spread to become the standard form among a whole generation. There’s probably someone researching it now.

But in wider society (i.e. away from SFX and Sarf LDN) many, many people have their own linguistic bugbears, and two websites have called for their readers to add their own.The response has been huge. According to The Language Log blog, “at the New York Times, Dick Cavett's inaugural blog post "It's only language" now has 761 comments. And across the Atlantic, on the Telegraph's web site, readers have devoted more than 1,270 comments”

Old favourites like like being “over-used” in speech (“And I was like “yeah?” and she was like “whatever”) and doubling-up of prepositions (“He’s Damon out of Blur” or “She’s inside of the house”) all appear, but there are many others too, like complaints about the verb to rob being used to describe thefts from houses as well as people. “The house was robbed” is seen as wrong by some of the contributors; they argue it should be “The house was burgled” as only people can be robbed. Have a look for yourselves.

But, as The Language Log points out, lots of these so-called wrong usages have actually been around for hundreds of years and the more recent ones are just matters of personal taste. Like so many prescriptive attitudes to language change, there are deeper social factors at work, and these are not just complaints about language but about a changing society.

Underneath it all, lies something a bit more psychological too: the need for people to get together into communities – either real or virtual – and hold gripefests about language. As this article discusses, the unease that the gripers feel about abuses of their language, is probably more to do with social and psychological issues than it is to do with language itself. And the article goes on to ask where this will lead us.

The recent Lynne Truss and John Humphrys phenomenon - and David Crystal’s excellent response to both of them here and in his book The Fight For English - show us that many people feel insecure about “correct” usage and how they will be judged by others if they speak incorrectly, while others are quick to correct us on our errors. But, equally, there are many people who go around blissfully unaware that they are being judged, looked down upon and condescended towards, by “correct” speakers. What the study of language at GCSE, A Level and beyond should be able to do is make all speakers of language aware that one person’s “incorrect” usage is another’s code-switching, and that so long as we all have some grasp of Standard English, we shouldn’t write off others’ language as inferior.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Attitudes to Language Change

The lexical patterns of liars

If you’re emailing a teacher with excuses for not being at a lesson, not giving in coursework or being late, and you’re telling porkies, beware; new software has been developed which can – according to this article in The Sunday Times - spot lies through your lexis.

The software has been designed by a team at Cornell University led by Jeff Hancock, and scans messages to discover a number of lexical patterns and trends, which might indicate that the writer is lying, with a 70% success rate so far.

One of the main giveaways is the length of a message. E-mails that mask a lie have, on average, 28% more words than truthful messages. “When you’re lying, you are trying to give a credible story so you provide more detail, you are in persuasive mode,” said Hancock.

Liars are also more likely to use third-person pronouns, such as “they” and “he”, in a bid to distance themselves from a lie because of the guilt associated with it.

“People also tend to use negative emotional terms because they feel uncomfortable when they are lying,” said Hancock. “So they tend to use terms like ‘sad’, ‘angry’, ‘unhappy’ and ‘stressed out’.”

Another telltale sign of a fib is the overuse of “sense terms”, such as “see”, “feel” and “touch”, which Hancock believes are employed to build up an elaborate and evocative account of a scenario that may never have happened.

Finally, liars tend to use fewer “causal phrases” to minimise the chances of being caught out. So, for example, a person conducting an illicit affair is less likely to say they were unable to get home early last night because they were with someone else. “They will just say, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t meet you’ and be deliberately vague,” said Hancock.

Email is often described as a blunt tool, which doesn’t convey the nuances and tones of real face to face conversation, and it’s often blamed for misunderstandings between people. So, can a computer programme really reveal lies in people’s email style? There are skeptics, including psychologist, Peter Collett who says “The thing about lying is that a lot of it can be picked up from body language when you talk, it’s got something to do with the timing, the pacing and the actual utterances,” he said. “How can you get software to spot all this? With e-mails you are just left with lexical patterns”.

But with so much communication now carried out by email, maybe we’ve all developed our own styles – our own email idiolects - and the technology can work to reveal our little white lies. Or the big fat ones, like when my children try to get sweets and biscuits out of me by saying that I’m not bald. So, don’t try that one at college…

Dying dialects

"It's been dying for some time and it will just die a natural death. I was brought up in the fishing industry, which has died out, and the dialect has gone as the place changes." So says Bobby Hogg, 87 years old and one of possibly two or three surviving speakers of a particular fisherman's dialect from Cromarty in the Highlands of Scotland.

In an article in The Scotsman newspaper this week, linguists and cultural historians had a look at the looming disappearance of another local dialect - not just a regional dialect but an occupational one too - and the significance of it to the rest of us.

And it's not only in sleepy fishing villages that local dialects appear to be dying out, but in the urban heart of Scotland too. In a linked article, Miriam Meyerhoff, a professor of sociolinguistics at Edinburgh University looks at the ways in which the influence of southern English, American and Australian has changed the lexis and phonology of Scottish English.

So are we seeing the death of regional varieties of English, smothered under a blanket of mass media-driven metropolitan mumbling? Well, yes and no; as lots of recent research by linguists like Dave Britain at Essex University, Sue Fox at Queen Mary's University and Paul Kerswill at Lancaster University (among others) has shown, while dialect levelling is clearly taking place - local differences gradually blurring as wider and regional ones take hold - new dialects are also being created.

Have a search under multi ethnic youth dialect or multi cultural london english in the search bar at the top of this page, to find a host of articles about new varieties of English, or better still, post your own examples here as comments.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Faggots swimming in gravy

"It's all about having a laugh," says Peter Towler of Mad O’Rourke’s Pie Factory in Tipton, West Midlands. So why aren't gay rights activists laughing? Well, it might have something to do with the so-called Michael Barrymore pie on offer at the shop, which according to the menu contains "faggots swimming in gravy", a reference to the dead man floating in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool presumably. The story appeared earlier this week in The Sun.

For those of you under 25 and from the south of England, the original food-based definition of faggots might need explaining - meatballs, basically - and that's because the pejorative use of the term to refer to gay men has pretty much taken over in younger generations' usage. But what is a faggot and how did the word come to be?

According to Michael Quinion's World Wide Words site, the term used to mean "a bundle of sticks" (strangely, the same origin of the word "fascist", I think) and then came to be applied to women, in much the same way as the word "baggage" was applied to women: in other words they were property, owned by men and probably - like baggage - a bit of a burden. So, having made the journey from sticks to women, like so many other words it started to be applied as a term of abuse for men who exhibited overly feminine characteristics, including gay men.

According to Quinion the use of it as a term to describe women remained until relatively recently, the influence of American English and the widespread use of it as a term for men gradually pushing it aside until it crept into relatively general usage.

So general in fact, that Rio Ferdinand let the word slip out on Radio 1 last year before apologising and claiming he wasn't homophobic. Yeah, right...

As a derogatory term, it's up there with some of the extreme racist words that featured in The Sun article last month, but it seems like there's more of a fuss when racist language is used maybe because there's wider antipathy towards gay people than there is towards ethnic minorities. So, while Rio Ferdinand is happy to sign his name to any anti-racist campaign, he might be less likely to support an anti-homophobia in football campaign.

But it's not all bad news; the word appears in one of the greatest Christmas songs of all time, The Pogues' and Kirsty Maccoll's "Fairytale of New York" - "You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, Merry Christmas your arse, I pray God it's our last". Quality...

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

The Importance of Context (and Prepositional phrases!)

This post is quite a technical but interesting one. It talks about clause structure and hopes to show how prepositional phrases help us identify ambiguity and in doing so show us the importance of context.
(Yes I did get it from a supervisor but where's the harm in sharing the fun?)

Let's analyse the following sentence on a phrasal level:

I saw a man with a telescope in the park

Most noticeably, there are four noun phrases
(noun phrases tell us what exactly we are talking about in terms of entities/things):
-'I' (remember phrases can in fact be one word when dealing with clause structure),
-'a man',
-'a telescope', and
-'the park'.

There are also two prepositional phrases
(I have recently been enlightened that these tell us not only about spatial relationships- 'on', 'above', 'underneath', etc- but also relationships regarding general awareness of things i.e. 'with', and 'between'):
-'with a telescope', and
-'in the park.'

(I tried to argue that 'saw a man' was a verb phrase but I was told that was pushing it, so we'll disregard those but post if you agree with me that it so could be identified as one! Moving on Charissa..)

Prepositional phrases (pps) are meant to tell us something about how these nouns and entities are related to each other right? Like what they are doing and who has them and stuff.
Now, bearing this is mind-
where is the man? I looked at my supervisor like duh- the man is in the park stupid.
Where are you if you are referring to yourself as 'I'? 'I'm watching the man in the park with me.'
Where is the park? 'Around me'
Where's the telescope? My response: 'it belongs to the man, so it's in the park also?' (by this time I'm not even sure myself now- there is a term for this which I really need to revise. Anyhow..) The argument goes thus:

Is it not possible, that the pps have decieved you? You cannot possibly know where the man is and the park is etc simply by looking at the sentence- that is if we assume this is a complete sentence, as we have been given no punctuation to signal this is so.
-What if the park was one of those parks with telescopes fitted in? you could be watching the man with the park's telescope but the man may not be in the park himself.
-What if the telescope was by your bedroom window? You could be looking into the park through the telescope at the man, the man doesn't necessarily have to have the telescope.

Didn't really enjoy the insinuations that I'd be the one watching men through telescopes (I don't for the record), nevertheless the point is clear. With literature, and indeed the texts we get in textual analysis papers, this ambiguity is removed and we wouldn't even be considering what the circumstances of these entities were. Literature builds up characters and tells us more about what we need to know, so that language becomes revealing of situations and places and events. Literature, in a way, makes pps safe and reassuring to us because it serves an adverbial or adjectival function. But, if we get one of those texts that begin with clauses such as the one given above, then these prepositional phrases become important for us to analyse as it'd be a major part as to how we're recieving the text and why we're making the technical judgements we are about the text at work.

Of course this is just one example of how language complicates literature in an interesting way.
Honestly, I'm not sure can't tell you how to directly apply this complication to a question, but perhaps if we consider what doesn't add up about the text given, pps would be a way in. What do you think?

Farewell for now..

Ex-Sfxian

Racial abuse

It may be a bit rich coming from The Sun, a newspaper which has been at the forefront of anti-asylum seeker campaigns, but it certainly makes for a striking front page. Yesterday's Sun featured a group of children, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, holding up signs showing terms of racist abuse that might be applied to them. Asking what they have in common, The Sun then reveals another picture a few pages on, which shows the same children holding up signs saying "British".

The editorial can be found here, and the children featured go on to tell how they've been called various racist terms in their lives. There's some brief background to each term of abuse and an editorial that bangs the drum for a shared sense of British identity among all of this country's ethnic groups. I'll leave you to decide what you make of the political message, but the article gives some good material for discussion of language and representation, not just in its coverage of racist terminology but in the wider debate about a label like "British" and its use in political discourse.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

When's it OK to call someone a "c*nt"?

...when you're not calling them a "p*ki", apparently. Racist language is all over the front pages of the papers today as the Celebrity Big Brother row over Shilpa Shetty’s treatment by other housemates goes supernova.

Having bleeped out Jade Goody’s unfortunate boyfriend, Jack Tweed calling Shilpa a nasty four letter word, newspapers in India (Shilpa’s home country) started claiming that the bleeped out word was “p*ki”; Big Brother producers claimed it was actually only “c*nt”. So that’s alright then…

But the racism allegedly exhibited by the three main culprits (I say “alleged” as I don’t watch it) seems to be more than just a question of words. No one seems to be claiming that the three women at the centre of this – Goody, Lloyd and O’Meara – have actually used the p-word themselves, but that their ignorant and racist attitudes towards Shetty have been reflected in some of their unpleasant comments. Snide remarks about her touching their food, not cooking her food properly and having a strange accent, all seem to suggest that they view her as weird and alien, and probably a bit foreign and dirty. So what’s worse, using an offensive four letter word, or treating someone like scum?

If Judge Paul Darlow had anything to do with it, we’d all just get over racist language and see it as a bit of banter, or something like that. In a separate story about the dreaded p-word, The Guardian reports how Judge Paul Darlow, sitting at Exeter crown court, said he had found it "rather odd" a racism charge was brought against a man who called a police surgeon a "f*cking Paki" and had said Imraan Jhetam should have "let the matter roll off his back". He also had advised the defendant, Matthew Stiddard, to moderate his language. Next time, said the judge, "call him a fat bastard, and do not say anything about his colour".

According to the paper, the judge has since apologised, saying "My comments were not intended to make light of racist remarks. I fully accept that, in a circumstance and time, they can be both offensive and distressing to those to whom they are addressed."

But all of this raises some interesting issues about language and representation and the harmful effects of words. Are the words themselves “bad” and so poisoned with racist attitudes that they can’t be used without causing distress? I have problems with this notion, because in the process of discussing this topic we have to use words like “p*ki” and by doing that we’re not being racist but attempting to be analytical.

Then you have the notion of reclamation: many contentious and previously problematic words such as bitch, the n-word and queer have been reclaimed by some of the previous targets of the words themselves, but by no means all. Even the word “p*ki” has - it has been argued – been reclaimed by some Asian people, its racist power removed in their mouths. I’m not convinced. And does a debate over racist language actually divert us from the “real” racism which is exhibited not through language necessarily, but through our actions and behaviour around other people of different ethnicities?

The latest developments appear to be a comment made by Shetty that she is experiencing racism at the hands of the three white women (see here) and the issue leading to demonstrations and effigy burnings in India on Gordon Brown's first trip there.

Useful for: ENA1 Language & Representation

p.s. I'm bleeping out swear words and not racist words, not because I think they're worse (I don't) but because most filters block these words first and I'd like you to be able to read this.

New words of 2006

Apart from the words to be found in Susie Dent's 'The Like Language Report for Real' published in autumn 2006 (Amazon link http://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Report-Susie-Dent/dp/0199207666/sr=1-1/qid=1167842614/ref=sr_1_1/202-9246196-7675051?ie=UTF8&s=books), some of which were discussed on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning (and alternatives with Michael Rosen on the Word of Mouth programme repeated yesterday at 4pm; you can listen again to both on the BBC R4 website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ is the homepage address, then use the A-Z listing to reach the programmes wanted, and follow the prompts to listen again), here are some not particularly serious/legitimate coinages of the year, reported in the Observer just before Christmas, taken from Newsweek magazine in the first section:


Brokeback Marriage n. Thanks to Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal and their celebrated screen tragedy, this describes a union between a gay man and a straight woman or a gay married man having an affair.
Celebutard n. A celebrity widely perceived as unintelligent. We're not naming any names, Paris Hilton.
Civil War n. Not a new term, but Iraq's 'sectarian violence' - to use George W Bush's preferred phrase - had people asking, is it or isn't it?
Fed-Ex n. So long, K-Fed. The tabloids found a new name for Kevin Federline after his break-up with Britney Spears.
Liquid Terror n. Coined after terrorists plotted to board planes in London with liquid explosives.
Season Creep n. Spring came early and summer lasted longer. What's to blame? Most say global warming.
Wikiality n. based on consensus rather than fact. The popularity of the online encyclopedia, which the public writes and edits, gave rise to the term.
Taken from the Observer, 24.12.06; here’s the link: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329670651-102280,00.html

Another piece from the same edition's magazine; you’ll notice some overlap:
Five other new words for 2006
Truthiness: Supposed truth felt 'in the gut'; the quality of preferring 'facts' wished to be true rather than those supported by reality. Truthiness was recently chosen as word of the year by the American Dialect Society (and, as noted on Word of Mouth, by the American Merrill-Webster dictionary)
Jagshemash!: A welcoming enquiry made by Sacha Baron-Cohen in the guise of Borat Sagdiyev. It appears to derive from how-are-yous said in several East European countries. One might say 'Jagshemash! I like you. Do you like me? We make a sexy time?'
Celebutard: A celebrity who is, or is thought to be, unintelligent. Thought to have derived from the NY Times in an article about Paris Hilton, 'celebutard' coupled celebrity (or the later celebutante) and retard, and has since come to be used in reference to any person finding fame without having a high IQ. One might say 'Dunst, of course, portrayed Marie Antoinette as an 18th-century celebutard'. (Oh dear, they don't like Paris H. at the Observer, do they?!)
No noising: 'Quiet please!' Considered the top Chinglish (Chinese-English) words of 2006, 'No noising' originally appeared on signs in Chinese libraries
Polska zywnosc: 'Polish food'. A simple message, often misspelt, which is attached to shop windows to note that there are Polish products on sale inside
John Hind contributed this second section. Happy new year from Cornwall!

Raising an index finger to PC?

"Borat raises an index finger to political correctness and all its exponents," claims Mail on Sunday reader Colin Veitch online, who obviously feels that were Borat to raise his middle finger, the finger traditionally used for giving offence, he may have been overstating his case.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the various rants that have appeared here over the last couple of years about attacks on PC (Political Correctness) and the motives behind such ludicrous non-stories as “Christmas” being banned, Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep replacing Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the splenetic outrage of various tabloid newpspers at the word “housewife” being reassessed by the Women’s Institute. So, it’s with great joy that I can link to a piece by my favourite comedian, Stewart Lee, who looks at what PC has given us and how it’s absurd to claim that comedy shows & films like Borat, Little Britain and The Office are anti-PC.

In the rush to attack PC, most commentators seem to have forgotten that its original raison d’etre was to prevent language causing offence to, and discrimination against, different groups in society: a noble aim in many respects. And they also forget how poisonous public discourse was in the 1970s about issues like race, mixed marriages and homosexuality. As Lee explains:

I'm 38, and old enough to remember comedy, and life in general, before political correctness. At secondary school in the Midlands in the early 80s, our maths teacher, who was a genuinely nice man, would routinely refer to the one Asian boy in our class as "the Black Spot", fondly imagining that this was in some way inclusive, like some pocket calculator-wielding version of David Brent™. And the idea of a comic performer like Little Britain's Matt Lucas being openly gay - let alone having photographs of his civil ceremony splashed across the tabloids - would have been unimaginable, however camp his on-stage persona.

Tabloids such as The Sun were quite happy to use a headline “Pooftas on Parade” in the 1980s when gay men were permitted to join the army, while popular culture was full of references to darkies, sooties and p*kis – all words that PC helped clean up, well, maybe outside of certain pubs in Chingford anyway…

Lee goes on to discuss the language of PC, linking it to linguistic determinism & relativism adding:

There's a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break. Linguistic theorists who define the terminology of political correctness suggest that grammatical choices made in language influence both the speaker's and the listener's ideas and actions. This would seem to be common sense, so it would be churlish to argue against the idea of attempting to ensure basic levels of politeness and consideration in official, public discourse.

So, a reasoned and impassioned defence of PC, instead of my usual frothy-mouthed rantings about the cursed Daily Mail. For more info on the mighty Stewart Lee and his work, have a look at his website here.

Useful for:

ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 – Language Change

Democratising the dictionary

The return of BBC2's Balderdash & Piffle later this year is featured in many newspapers today, with much of the focus being on the ways in which the programme is seeking the public's information on the first appearance of particular words and phrases such as “dogging”, “kinky”, “the dog’s bollocks” and “tosser”.

While, most of us are fully aware of what these words mean – and use the last one on an almost daily basis when faced with missed homework deadlines from English Language classes – the OED is keen to find out if the public can supply earlier citations of the words in print than those they already have. So, according to the OED, the earliest appearance in print of the word “hoodie” was in Roddie Doyle’s The Snapper in 1990, but if you know that you saw it in an edition of the NME, Smash Hits or The Source two years before that, you can help them out.

And it’s important that such work is opened up to the public in this way, I think, as it democratises our language use and gets us away from any ideas that language change is a bad thing or a trickle-down from those experts and authorities above us on the social ladder. As John Simpson of the OED points out in todays’ Independent, this approach has been used since the 1800s: “"It's great that the long-established democratic traditions of the dictionary are continuing. Our first public appeal went out in 1859 and we've been busy collecting information every since. We've selected 40 words that are puzzling the OED's editors for the new wordhunt and we're hoping for some more great results."

The story is also covered in The Times and Daily Mirror, with the Balderdash & Piffle site here, and the OED’s Wordhunt site here.

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

OMG it's the new OED

The Oxford English Dictionary is having a major overhaul and the full story is covered here in a Guardian article from last week which features an interview with one of its top bods, John Simpson. Dictionaries may not seem the most exciting things in the world, but for English Language students they should be mines of fascinating detail, and barometers of social change.

The whole process of putting new words into the OED is discussed in this article, including the growing range of sources from which they acquire citations for new words - blogs, websites, rap lyrics - and the new ways of searching it online to find histories to individual words, but wider patterns as well. The college has a subscription to the OED online, so make it your New Year's resolution to look up a word a week and refer to it whenever you get set a homework on Language Change.

Useful for:
all units but especially ENA5

Christmas is cancelled...

...except it isn't. The tabloid press (especially The Sun) has been running a campaign against the politically correct nutters who want to ban the term "Christmas" for fear of offending Muslims, Hindus, Pagans and err...turkeys. The Sun even ran a front page "Kick Them in the Baubles!" urging on the Great British public in their attempts to stop this politically correct madness. But it's all a load of rubbish! No one has tried to ban Christmas, just like no one has seriously tried to ban Baa Baa Black Sheep. And, in a more serious incident last year, a judge in Manchester bleated about political correctness gone mad when a white boy was brought to court for calling a class mate a "p*ki". Except it wasn't just the one-off name calling event that led to his prosecution, but what appeared to have been a long campaign of abuse and intimidation. So, it wasn't really political correctness gone mad at all. And what's this got to do with language? Well, lots really: various myths abound about the ways in which the Political Correctness movement has forced ludicrous language changes upon us, but so many of them just aren't true, and reflect a staggeringly conservative - and often reactionary & racist - worldview. So, be careful when you write your language & representation answers. And if you want to go on to do journalism as a career, be prepared to do some research. Unlike the lazy b*stards on The Sun. Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation

Teenage twits

It's the news that all parents of 15 year olds already know: teenagers have poor language skills and need to stop mumbling. According to a report on the BBC website, based on research done for Tesco Mobile Phones by Lancaster University linguist Professor Tony McEnery, "teenagers used half the words of average 25 to 34-year-olds".

His analysis of a database of teenage speech suggested teenagers had a vocabulary of just over 12,600 words compared with the nearly 21,400 words that the average person aged 25 to 34 uses. Prof McEnery said in his report: "Of note when examining the word 'no' is the frequency with which the word is accompanied by the word 'but'. These words occur in the sequence 'but no' or 'no but' almost twice as frequently in teenage speech as it does in young adult or middle aged speech."

Employers often complained that new employees were unable to answer the telephone in the formal way required of them for work and that they were also intimidated by speaking formally in meetings, the professor added. He put this down to a lack of training and the overuse of technologies such as computer games and MP3 players. "This trend, known as technology isolation syndrome, could lead to problems in the classroom and then later in life. Employers are already complaining that first jobbers are lacking basic verbal communication and it seems things could be set to get worse. Kids need to get talking and develop their vocabulary."

Fair points or gross generalisation? Is it fair to lump all teenagers together, in the same way that some peopel generalise about all men and all women and their speech styles? And what about different communities of practice? Maybe Emo teens and goths have a wider and more sophisticated vocabulary (misery, suffering, pain) than hip hoppers and ravers (choong, merked, tune)... or maybe not.

What do you think? Can you even string a sentence together to comment? And can we honestly believe a report sponsored by a mobile phone company whose aim is to make us talk more so they can make money from our chat?

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties and Change
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language

Talk to me, baby

As AS students are well into their study of Child Language Acquisition and A2ers will be revising it in the Spring term for ENA6 preparation, I thought it might be handy to flag up some useful links to child language resources.

First off, Chas Blacker from City of Bristol College has put some new resources up on his website here and you'll find them handy for revision and a few extra ideas.

Also, the National Literacy Trust's Talk To Your Baby project has some nice links to projects on child language, with a good section on theories of CLA here.

Then, Beth Kemp's website here has plenty of revision material for all sorts of English Language topics, including CLA.

Finally, teachit's resource site has plenty of material on CLA, primarily aimed at teachers but containing plenty of child language data for those of you seeking out examples to explore.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition, obviously...