"We Are All in This Together": analysing coalition cobblers

Today's Guardian features a great bit of polemic from George Monbiot that would make a nice bit of textual analysis for ENGA2. He starts with a reference to something David Cameron said about a tax cuts being off the agenda for the time being before looking at how a change in tax law means that some of the richest companies (the ones who got us in this mess) will now get exactly that. The whole piece is good (and pretty shocking) but it's the last two paragraphs that strike me as particularly effective:

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor's show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

The use of pronouns, positioning of author, reader and government, the mixture of sentence lengths and syntactical patterns within them, all strike me as pretty effective and worth a closer look.

It's clear what Monbiot's agenda is here, so it's hardly what you'd call biased: he makes no attempt to hide his political colours, so it's not as if he's trying to trick us. Anyway, I think it's a neat example of how a writer deploys a whole range of linguistic techniques to make a convincing and passionate argument.

Below, I've put together a fairly simple list of bullet points for the kinds of language techniques you might want to look for in a text like this. If you're interested in finding out more about developing these approaches then have a look at emagazine 42 from December 2008 in which David Hyatt outlines a framework for critical literacy. Or go straight to the daddy of it all, Norman Fairclough, and his excellent book Language and Power.

A suggested framework for representation and language analysis

Pronoun use – which pronouns are used and how is the reader addressed? Are pronouns used to include and/or exclude? Is synthetic personalisation used to create a “faked” relationship with an imagined “ideal” reader?

Active/passive constructions – which voice is used within the text and how is agency handled? Can we see who is doing what to whom?

Modification – are adjectives used to evoke evaluation? How are adverbs used to present ideas? Are we being pushed in a particular direction by the ways in which nouns are modified?

Metaphor – are metaphors used in the text to present one idea in another’s terms?

Nominalisation – are processes and actions turned into nouns? Does this obscure agency (i.e. who carried out a process, or even that a process happened)?

Register and lexical choice – does technical, specialist or academic language create an impression of an educated and knowledgeable writer? Does a colloquial register seem to “bridge the gap” between reader and writer, creating a more believable tone?

Graphology – does the text present information in a graphical or pictorial form which might anchor particular meanings? Does the use of bullet points or headings “close down” other possibilities for discussion?

Rhetorical devices – does the author structure an argument and use language in such a way as to create a persuasive and convincing effect?

Sentence and clause linking – does the use of particular grammatical structures signal dependent relationships between elements in a sentence?

Sentence and clause structure – does the use or variation of particular sentence lengths and structures help create emphasis?

Tense and aspect – how does the use of past, present or future tense affect the meanings of the text? Does the use of aspect – progressive or perfective – affect meanings?

Subject positioning – from which perspective are events or issues perceived and recounted? Is one position given particular prominence and credibility?

Keeping it old school

Most of the links I put up here are to fairly recent news stories about language, but this one is nearly 16 years old. That means it's possibly older than some of you who use this blog for your AS levels. Wow.

Anyway, I stumbled across this Miles Kington article from The Independent of December 1993 while doing some research on attitudes to grammatical errors (which more often than not, aren't really "errors" at all) and it's a good read.

It's about people's language peeves and how they are often not really very well rooted in linguistic reality. My favourite bit concerns the guidance that we're often given about the adjective unique. In Strictly English, Simon Heffer pompously tells us that phrases like almost unique or nearly unique are "vacuous" because "something is either unique or it is not". Kington sees it differently:

Now, this to me is the kind of pedantic rule-of-iron that a third- rate schoolteacher falls back on. Not only that, but it is demonstrably untrue. For example, if there were two unicorns left in the world, and one was very ill, then the other one would be nearly unique . . .

A timely reminder about the Emagazine English Language conference

Apologies if you've already booked a place, or if you've had enough of the self-promotion, but our conference for A level students and teachers is still recruiting and we're heading towards capacity. Well over 600 students have signed up to attend - which is brilliant - and more are booking each day, so if you want to be sure of a place, get onto the English and Media Centre's site here and get your places booked!

We are also very keen to collect language data from those attending for use in Jonnie Robinson's session, so please add your data to the Survey Monkey questionnaire. You don't even have to attend to add your data: the more the merrier.

Hopefully, see you there.

Get a room

The language of lovers is often pretty sickening. It's even worse when you hear it murmured into a hands free mobile by the lovestruck man sitting next to you on a train, like I had to put up with this morning. But it's not just the babytalk-style phonology, or the wrinkling of the nose, or even the giggles of love, it's the vocabulary as well: snugglebunny, lickle lovebucket, poo poo poppet and agreeable bitch, being some examples. Actually the last two aren't his (and neither are the first two, to be fair) but Jonathan Swift's.

Now, some research  from psychologists in the USA suggests that people are attracted to those who have similar speech patterns. That may not be particularly surprising (unless you're Paula Abdul) but what's quite interesting about this is that the patterns seems to apply to online style as well as as spoken.

Research by the same team at the University of Texas has also indicated that language style matching (LSM) is apparent between couples when they're at their happiest in a relationship.

This is related to accommodation theory in sociolinguistics, where people change their speech style to either converge towards or diverge from other speakers around them. The extremes of divergence are noticeable in teenagers when they sometimes make deliberate efforts to avoid the speech styles of their parents, or in students with strong regional dialects who make a conscious effort not to blend in when they live in a different area, but it's not really much of a surprise to find that the closer we are emotionally, the closer we get linguistically.

This could make an interesting Language Investigation at A2: recording conversations between people who have been together for different lengths of time and identifying specific linguistic features that match or don't match.

"Crappy patois"

Yesterday's Evening Standard carried an op-ed by Henry Hitchings on the nature of changing London English. It's partly a response to Charles Moore's attack on changing English in the Telegraph and partly an advertisement for Hitchings' new book, which we mentioned on here yesterday.

Interestingly, Hitchings makes much of what linguists have called Multicultural London English, Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect, or what some journalists have called "Jafaican", which, as Hitchings points out, tends to cast it as an affectation or a fake dialect, rather than " an authentic, organic variety of English and it looks likely to become more prevalent". We've featured MEYD and MLE here on many occasions and if you click on the tabs at the bottom of this post you'll get some links to the research done by Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire (and others) into this fascinating area of sociolinguistics.

Sadly, anything about language change tends to aggravate those who see all change as a foul corruption of our beautiful tongue, or even (in the case of the Evening Standard article), deranged anti-Jamaican troglodytes who argue (or sneer, perhaps more accurately) that it's a "crappy patois" "derived from some of the most pointless countries in the world", and speaking it is likely to limit young people's life chances. Well, yes, but only if they speak it as their only variety, which is generally not the case, as Hitchings is at pains to point out. But why let a bit of reasoned argument get in the way of a good dose of prejudice?

Language Wars

Henry Hitchings' new book, Language Wars is definitely worth a look for any AQA A spec students planning ahead for the ENGA3 exam in June. The whole book is about what constitutes "proper English", so should be ripe territory for the Language Discourses part of the paper.

It's been reviewed and commented upon here, and you can see Henry Hitchings debate the subject with Simon Heffer (author of the dreadful Strictly English) at the British Library next Monday (7th Feb 2011).

Like being flogged with a warm lettuce

some budgie smugglers in action

Australian English is often held up as an example of a variety of English that is full of invention and wit, and I'm not going to argue with that because Australians are also very good at insults. We'll get to the insults in a minute, but for invention and wit, how about taking a look at these Macmillan Dictionary blog posts - one, two and three - and this Oxford Dictionaries article. There are some fantastic turns of phrase here, like tight swimming trunks being referred to as budgie smugglers. The image is an enduring one and reminds me of family holidays in Holland back in the late 1970s where hairy-chested German tourists would strut around the poolside in unfortunately tight Speedos.

Keeping up the theme of tight-fitting garments, the Australian English thong is a particularly dangerous term that gets lost in translation. If I were to get all Sisqo and ask to see you wear that thong-tha-thong-thong-thong, I'd be presented with a flip flop. And rightly so, because in Australian English thong refers to an item of footwear not a cheesewire between the buttocks.

The articles and blog posts above will give you many more excellent examples, including some fantastically rude ones, as well as some fairly obvious abbreviations (beaut, arvo and convo).

Moving on to insults, my colleague Jill (of Australian background herself) has passed on this link to an archive of abuse from the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, whose way with words puts the tame banter in our own Houses of Parliament to shame.

World Englishes are part of the AQA A English Language course (unit ENGA3) and not just a bit of fun, so you can actually use some of this in your exam.

n00bs and netizens

Technology has given us masses of new words, blends and compounds of old ones, as well as complete semantic shifts (cookie, menu, desktop, virus and spam all being good examples of semantic change) and this fun quiz on the Oxford Dictionaries site gives you the chance to test your knowledge of some of the more recent expressions.

It's always handy to have a range of good, recent examples to use in exams when you're talking about language change, so have a look here and make a note.

Word clouds and sputnik moments

The US President's State of the Union address always attracts a fair bit of media analysis, but in recent years the analysis has taken on an apparently more linguistic angle. Thanks to cool tools like Wordle and Concordle which allow you to paste in text and then create word clouds based on lexical frequency (see the graphic above, for a word cloud of this blog post), many commentators have started to argue that key themes can be discerned, and from these patterns judgements can be made about the president's concerns.

This link from the BBC news site gives us a chance to examine the relative frequency of 10 words over the last 220 years. Meanwhile, this piece from the BBC last year takes a look at the frequency of particular words in British political parties' election manifestos from 1945 to 2010.

On the surface this sort of analysis makes sense, but as linguists point out, just because you use a word many times doesn't necessarily mean that that specific word reveals a great deal about you. For example, I really dislike Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. The reasons are numerous and varied, ranging from a knee-jerk dislike of Gove's posh Tory background, through to Gove's dogmatic belief that all schools should become "free" schools or academies, Gove's scrapping of the EMA and his bizarre insistence that state schools' problems can be solved by frisking teenagers for porn and putting ex-soldiers in classrooms. But it doesn't stop there: I also have (an admittedly childish) dislike of his resemblance to Dobbie from Harry Potter. Now, if you were to create a word cloud of this post, I'm sure the words Michael and Gove would crop up quite frequently, leading some to suggest that this post is all about Michael Gove. It's not. It's about language, not about Gove at all. But presumably, you can see my point by now...

 This blog entry by the Lousy Linguist puts it more analytically (and more sensibly), so is well worth a read.

Arguably, one of the most telling moments in President Obama's speech this week was his use of the phrase Sputnik moment to draw a parallel between the US's economic and technological status in the world now  - and the need for a reinvention of the USA's research and development programmes - compared to the moment in the last century when the Soviet Union gave the USA a nasty shock by successfully launching the world's first satellite. However, he used the word sputnik only twice in his address, so such an interesting image is unlikely to be identified in a basic crunching of the data.
So, in short, word clouds and simple crunching tools such as those mentioned above can be really helpful for carrying out what corpus linguists like to call "quick and dirty" breakdowns of word frequencies in texts, but we always need to be aware of context and meaning if we're to avoid drawing unhelpful conclusions from the data. In many ways, a quick corpus analysis using something like Wordle can be a brilliant way of opening up new ways into a text, be it a speech, a poem or an extract from a novel, but it's not a substitute for detailed analysis.

Dear blog, cheers xxx

Hey...
          ...Hi...
                     ...Yo...
                                 ...Wassup...
                                                   ...Wagwan...
                                                                     ...Hello...
                                                                                   ...Dear ...

Which is the right one to use in an email? This BBC News magazine piece about the correct way to address the recipient of an email is a really good read.

I've always been stuck somewhere between Hi for people I know and Dear for people I don't, but it feels really weird to me to type "Dear such and such" in an email. And while I like hey as a greeting, I feel too old to use it myself.

It's all part of a shift away from purely written forms of communication into the less regulated territories of blended modes, where the "rules", as much as there are ever rules, become less clearly defined.

And as for signing off an email, I've nearly always used cheers in private emails, thanks in more formal ones, but then cheers is described in less than glowing terms by Jean Broke-Smith who says "What is 'cheers'? Clinking a glass? It's an irrelevant word."

Cheers for that.

txtng: some more db8

Today's Daily Telegraph upsets its readers with a report on new research from Coventry University about the effects of texting and mobile phone use on young people's literacy, namely the beneficial effects texting can have.

The research comes from Clare Wood and her team at Coventry (members of which came to SFX two years ago to talk about their work) and is part of a series of projects they have been involved in. Click on the texting label underneath this post to find all the other SFX blog posts about their work (and related articles).

To give you a taste of the reaction to this research from the Daily Telegraph readership, or at least the part of it that feels compelled to contribute to a message board, have a look at these extracts:

Really? These academics need to get out more and see the result of the texting game, many young people are not only unable to spell and write but sometimes incapable of expressing themselves. Wossit', innit' wha'ever, shu'up!!! 

I can only assume the researchers are from the same genetic pool that fill in recruitment forms for my company!?

This is just an attempt to cover up the failure of the teaching community to teach correct spelling and grammar.

The bankers get (rightly) criticised for wasting our money, it's about time these pseudo-scientific research studies get stamped-out. 

How on EARTH can "U alrite m8" boost spelling SKILLS?
What a load of stupid HOGWASH. 

Luckily, there are also some sane readers (OK, ones that I agree with) who have made a few interesting points about prescriptive attitudes to language change and the influence of technology, or about phonetic spelling actually being any use to English:

There have been numerous historical examples of shorthand writing that are reminiscent of texting, without civilisation coming to an end. It's just nothing new.

...you can always be sure with any technology that some will view it as the end of all things, and future generations will laugh at them. 

If English was a vaguely phonetic language, the article might make some sense. However, since we have 40 sounds in English but more than 200 ways of spelling them, I very much doubt that texting helps. 

David Crystal's Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 is a good introduction to some of the arguments about technology and language change, and he is of course one of the speakers at the Emagazine A  level English Language conference in March. Have a look here for more details about the conference and here for more links to articles and arguments about texting.

And, of course, all of this glosses over the true dangers of texting that can be seen here.

Blood libel: language change in a heartbeat

Following on from the post about violent rhetoric and metaphors of conflict, Sarah Palin has now come out with a bizarre phrase - "blood libel" - to describe "slurs" upon her and her Tea Party movement by those who've linked their inflammatory language to the Arizona shootings.

"Blood libel", had until fairly recently, only ever been used as a term to describe the unpleasant myth that Jewish people killed Christian children as part of some bizarre ritual. It's one of many racist slurs that Jewish people have had to put up with during an extended period of persecution. So why did Palin choose to use such an esoteric expression to respond to her accusers?

This article offers some suggestions and makes some fascinating points about how language changes as a result of social networking technologies and the web.

The first use of the phrase I uncovered came on January 9, one day after the shooting, on the website Renew America. As conservative activist Adam Graham put it: “When someone on the left says that the Tea Party movement is responsible for the shooting in Tucson, they are leveling the political equivalent of a blood libel that blames an entire political movement for the actions of a person who in all likelihood had no connection to the movement.” Note that Graham links to the Wikipedia page on “blood libel,” demonstrating knowledge of the traditional meaning of the term.

They also link to this article which makes the intriguing suggestion that internet "memes" spread more like a heartbeat than a virus, a model for language change that might start to rival the traditional wave and S-curve models.

Tired AF so just a short post

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have been analysing Twitter messages in the USA and found some interesting regional variations, which linguists have started to pick apart.

This report (which I found via this site) tells us more. It's no surprise that tweets reflect the regional, social, ethnic and age variations of the tweeter, but it's intriguing that such variations can be mapped so closely. For example, to find that intensifiers like hella, meaning really/very (as in hella tired) or dead ass (as in dead ass tired), or even a comparative version like AF (as in tired as f**k) can be traced to specific cities or states is quite a neat idea.

So, as we pointed out back here, Twitter is actually working to preserve some regional variation rather than lead to the dialect levelling that so many people predicted.

edited on 13.01.11 to add:

There's another blog post about Twitter that fits in with this recent research here.

edited later on 13.01.11 to add:

For an LA blog's take on their Twitter slang/dialect try here.

Murder and metaphor

The gun rampage in Arizona that has left six dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords critically injured has initiated a great deal of discussion in the media in the USA and elsewhere. Many commentators have focused on Arizona's gun laws, while others have chosen to focus on the language of political debate and whether or not the febrile atmosphere stoked up by the right wing Tea Party might have contributed to a climate in which such an attack was inevitable.

Today's Guardian features an article by Jonathan Freedland in which he explores the language of conflict and warfare that has been used in recent political discourse in the USA. He picks up on Sarah Palin's visual imagery of crosshairs targeting Giffords' congressional seat as well as the combative streak that runs through her rhetoric, including her exhortation for her supporters not to retreat but to "reload": a bit ironic really, given that for all her love of guns, Palin is reputed to be a hopeless shot (as well as an imbecile, obviously).

Freedland makes a number of interesting points about the language of politics, one of which being that politics is saturated with violent metaphors:

...Palin is hardly the first politician to use the language of combat. She could argue that anyone who has ever referred to "battleground" constituencies, talked of candidates "wounded" by "fatal blows" or arguments "shot down" is just as guilty as she is. In this, she could cite the unlikeliest examples. It was the sainted Obama who revved up a crowd in 2008 by declaring of his Republican opponents: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Elsewhere, the linguist John McWhorter  takes a look at the ways he thinks the internet is partly responsible for glib soundbites, rather than reasoned and nuanced rhetorical debate, taking hold of politics.

Emagazine conference site now up and running

The site to support the forthcoming Emagazine A level Language conference is now up and running. You can find it here.

At the moment, you can see the programme, the speakers' details and how to get there, and you can also book tickets for your school or college (if you are a teacher).

There is also a blog running alongside the site to help collect data from you for Jonnie Robinson's session and to submit your questions about language to David Crystal for his Q and A session. We'll be updating the blog regularly with information about each speaker, links to interesting research and some follow-up activities after the conference. You can find the blog here.

We're very excited about the conference, so get your tickets now!!!

Media texts and Language interventions

As loads of A level Language students (and teachers) are currently looking for style models to use for the A and B spec A2 coursework, I thought I'd try to make the search a bit easier by pulling together links to articles and stories that might be good to use.

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.

All that junk inside your trunk

Happy New Year and all that. Just a couple of quick links here about new words for 2010 (junk being a potential word of the year) and reasons for English's continuing lexical growth. And here's one from today's Independent about political and professional language.

Normal service will be resumed once I've recovered from back to work depression and the experience of a Barbie Princess Castle alarm clock going off at 2am, causing my daughter to scream and think that the world had ended.

English, Englishes, Elves and Latin

There's a good introduction by Michael Rosen to the role of English as a world language in the BBC News magazine this week. He looks at the role of Latin as one of the first "world" languages (sort of...) before moving on to think about the ways in which English and its various Englishes have spread around the globe.

Some of the most recent debates around this issue have centred around the existence of a standard form of the language (Global English) or different versions of it (Global Englishes), or more recently around a phenomenon called ELF (English as a Lingua Franca). Anyway, Michael Rosen's article is a good start if you want to find out more about the background to the debate, and you can find some more discussion on this blog post.

Hit Me Up with some culturomics: new words for 2010

Moustache + November = Movember

As we get closer to New Year and the alcopocalypse that is the Christmas party season, many language enthusiasts like to have a look at the new words that have emerged or gained new prominence in the year so far.

It's been a good year for new words, with one of my favourites being a renaming of a whole month as Movember ( a blend of the clipped mo for moustache and November). Having spent a rare night out in Hoxton a few weeks ago, it was hard to distinguish the brave Movemberists from the usual hipsters who normally sport a pathetic caterpillar atop their upper lips.

Wiki- has grown in popularity as a prefix too, with Wikileaks being all across the news over the last month. We looked at the wiki- prefix a while ago on the SFX Moodle ENGA3 unit (and if you're an SFX student, it's still there and you can contribute to the new words wiki), but for those who aren't SFX students the etymology is here. At the other end of a word, you'll find a suffix, and the -gate suffix which first appeared, not as a separate morpheme but as part of the proper name Watergate, has been applied ever since as a suffix to any type of scandal. So earlier this year when the General Election was taking place (You must remember: it was when and Nick Clegg was telling students that he would scrap tuition fees and David Cameron promised that EMA was safe.) Gordon Brown got himself involved in Bigotgate. And connected to Wikileaks, we have cablegate, where the cables that were intercepted have had -gate tacked on the end.

Connected to Wikileaks again is hacktivism, which is a blend of hack (as in its computer hacker meaning rather than its other ones) and activism. The Visual Thesaurus article on new words has more on this and loads of other words, and, like most things on VT, is a really good read.

 The role of  social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter in spreading language and creating new trends (trending as a verb being revived thanks to Twitter) has continued to have power over many people, with the initialism HMU (Hit Me Up i.e. call me/contact me/ping me/BBM me/message me/give us a bell) coming top in the Facebook status updates top 10 list. Until the day I saw that report, I had never heard of or used HMU, but now I will. Every day.

Pamela Stephenson - a true GILF?

Another new word, which may well have existed for a little while, but came up at a recent teachers' reunion in a Soho pub (which probably tells you a lot about the ages and mental states of those involved) was GILF. If you already know what a MILF is then you should have a fairly good idea of what a GILF might be. And if you were to then think Pamela Stephenson on Strictly Come Dancing, you'd be close to the real meaning. What can I say? There are some sick people out there. I prefer the X Factor.

On a much bigger and more educationally respected scale, this report in today's Guardian reveals how a project at Harvard University is creating a database of billions of words by digitising more than 5 million books. They call  it culturomics: presumably a blend of culture and economics, with a bit of linguistics thrown in? a blend of culture and genomics (as pointed out by Ben Zimmer in his comment below).

What's particularly revealing from a lexical point of view is that the vocabulary of English is seen to be expanding rapidly. The figures quoted in the study show that in 1900 there were an estimated 544,000 words and then in 2000, 1,022,000 words, with an estimated growth of approximately 8500 words a year.  The report's abstract can be found here and there's a lot of good reading in there, including how grammar is changing over time. One of the most striking points about grammar is in the section on the regularization of past tense endings:

...each year, a population the size of Cambridge adopts “burned” in lieu of “burnt”...1% of the English speaking population switches from “sneaked” to “snuck” every year: someone will have snuck off while you read this sentence.

On that bombshell, I'll sign off. This will probably be the last blog post this year, so have a good Christmas break and New Year.

Pim-holes and Jeremy Hunts

Swearing is all over the media, literally in the case of Radio 4 last week which delighted/shocked (delete as appropriate) its listeners with two unintended utterances of one of the rudest words in the English language. It's a word so rude that if I typed it here, you would never again be able to read this blog at a school or a college, so I won't*.

Anyway, the use of this dreaded word appeared to be a genuine mistake on the part of the Today programme's James Naughtie, as he tried to trail the appearance of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary (as you can hear from this clip of his slip). Later that morning, on the same station, Andrew Marr repeated the word while talking about the error Naughtie had made. Naughtie later made an apology, claiming that the mistake was a Spoonerism, a substitution of initial sounds between two words (try swapping the initial consonants of "shining wit" or the name of circus accessories store, "Cunning stunts" and you'll see what I mean).

So, why the outrage? Well, swearing still upsets lots of people even though lots of us do it and have done for centuries. This article by Jonathan Margolis from back in 2002 looks at how attitudes to swearing have changed over the years and provides a bit of background, but if you want a really detailed look at bad language, you could do no worse than put Peter Silverton's Filthy English on your Christmas list.

Sometimes though, our willingness to be shocked can be rather odd. This report on the UK Polling Report site tells us that 61% of respondents in a recent survey thought that the word pim-hole should either never be broadcast on TV or only ever broadcast after the watershed. That's pim-hole. It doesn't actually exist as a real word, outside this 1990 Fry and Laurie sketch about swearing. The full report is available from YouGov here and contains strong language. Obviously.

We've looked at swearing before and you can find some interesting stuff here and here. Also, Steven Pinker's most recent book, The Stuff of Thought, features some really interesting stuff on the links between swearing and language evolution, which these short lectures throw a bit of light upon:

and:

*But what I can tell you is that it's a word most sensible people say whenever George Osborne appears on TV.

Variety is the spice of language acquisition

Some new research into children's acquisition of language, reported here, suggests that children who are presented with more diverse objects of a similar type are quicker at developing their grasp of nouns than those who are shown a smaller range. The report explains further:

Two toddlers are learning the word "cup." One sees three nearly identical cups; the other sees a tea cup, a sippy cup and a Styrofoam cup. Chances are, the second child will have a better sense of what a cup is and -- according to a new University of Iowa study -- may even have an advantage as he learns new words.

This might not strike you as such a great surprise, but it's a study that sheds a bit of light on the processes children go through as they develop a sense of what a word means and the limits to which they can stretch that word's range of meanings. The linguist and child language expert, Jean Aitchison, talks about children acquiring words and their meanings as going through a process of labelling, packaging and network building. As you can probably see from this research, showing children a range of different objects, all with similar characteristics, seems to help them with the packaging and network building elements of their language acquisition.

The research goes on to suggest that a knock-on effect of this early boost to lexico-semantic acquisition is an enhanced ability to generalise. So, when children were later asked to identify objects that they hadn't seen before (or types of objects that they had seen in slightly different forms) they were better able to label them:

When tested on unfamiliar objects that fit into the categories they'd been taught -- such as a bucket they'd never seen before -- kids in the variable group performed better. This showed an ability to generalize the knowledge. "We believe the variable training gave them a better idea of what a bucket was. They discovered that the buckets were all alike in general shape, but that having a handle or being a particular texture didn't matter," Perry said. "In contrast, the children exposed to a tightly organized group of objects developed such strict criteria for what constitutes a bucket that they were reluctant to call it a bucket if it was different from what they'd learned."

emagazine A Level Language Student Conference

Sorry for not posting much recently, but I've been busy with various things including some A level workshops, the day job (doing neeky grammar things) and organising (or organising how to avoid) trips to Mr Tumble in pantomine. The other thing I've been doing is helping the English and Media Centre organise what we hope will be a brilliant conference for A level English Language students.

All the details are here and if you want to attend as an A level student then badger your teacher to get a booking made. If you are a teacher, email Barbara Bleiman (barbara@englishandmedia.co.uk) at the EMC to express your interest and provisionally book some places. If you are a university student, there will probably be individual tickets available and more details will be made available soon after Christmas.

The details:
Wednesday March 16th 2011 – with David Crystal, Deborah Cameron and others...
At the Logan Hall, Institute of Education, London WC1 (10 min walk from Euston)
Following the success of the Literature and Media Studies student conferences in the Autumn Term, emagazine is planning a conference for A Level Language students in the Spring Term, for AS and A2. We are working with Dan Clayton to plan the day.

The programme will include lectures, a session on approaches to investigation, with an interactive element, and a short session modelling how to respond to data in an exam. At lunchtime, we are hoping to organise a ‘Language Fair’, with stalls from one or two university departments, a surgery held by the emag editors for anyone wanting to write for the magazine and a ‘resident linguist’ who will answer students’ questions and chat to them. We’re also hoping to set up a Conference blog, in advance of the Conference, to get students involved before the day.

Speakers confirmed so far:

• Deborah Cameron
• David Crystal (including a Q&A session, with David Crystal, based on students’ questions, sent in advance, and submitted on the day)

Programme: 10.30 – 3.15 to allow for ease of travel
Cost: £20 per school/college student. 1 teacher per 10 students goes free. £50 for teachers wanting to attend without students, as CPD.
A conference website will be set up at the beginning of next term, (accessible from the EMC and emagazine websites) with full details and the facility to make provisional and confirmed bookings. In the meantime, put it in your diaries and if you would like us to keep you informed, please email barbara@englishandmedia.co.ukwith ‘Emagazine Language A Level Conference’ in the subject line.

Hash, octothorpe or pound?

Several articles have picked up on the rebirth of the # symbol thanks to its use as a hashtag on Twitter. This article looks at its history and return to fame, while this brief piece in today's Guardian does something similar. It's also called a number sign on Wikipedia.

Other punctuation marks have had similar histories and undergone revivals thanks to multimodal forms of communication. Previously on this blog we've looked at the exclamation mark !!!, the l'il apostrophe , the hyphen and you can also read more about the @ here)

Right-sizing the workforce

I used to try to add regular blog posts about the evils of corporate and management jargon, but in many ways this kind of language has become so mainstream that it's often no longer jargon. Sadly, the jargon has won. This article from today's Guardian takes a look at the jargon used in corporate law and it's a depressing read. If you thought Melissa from The Apprentice had swallowed a dictionary of drivel and was talking utter nonsense, then some of the expressions mentioned in the article will probably make you think she was actually normal.

One example is particularly egregious: right-sizing. When used as a noun - "We have to implement some right-sizing to meet our profit forecast" (or some such cobblers) it both hides and confuses meaning. What it really means, of course, is cutting staff - making them redundant - and cutting them to the level that is "right" for the business, or more accurately, the business's profits.

Grammatically, it seems to be a form of nominalisation: a term used to describe a process, that usually involves a verb, becoming a noun. So instead of it being an action or ongoing process, the noun becomes the label for the entire end result.

An simple example might be something like describing a person as a "stabbing victim" - a noun phrase which basically carries the information that the person being talked about is the victim of the process of the verb "to stab". By using nominalisation, the focus is taken away from the process or the action itself, and switched to the person affected by the action. By doing so, in a way, the process itself becomes wrapped up with the person who has experienced it: they become bound together.

Why does this matter? Well, a bit like with the passive voice, if agency (i.e. who did what to who) is hidden, we don't get a full picture of events. We see an end result, but not the process that led us there. It could even be argued that by doing this we are less likely to be able to challenge or prevent the process - we may not even see it - and that hides responsibility and the bigger picture of cause and effect. Still with me? No... Oh well.

In the case of right-sizing, the process of cutting jobs is condensed into the idea of "sizing" - which almost inevitably means making something smaller - but even more devious is the use of "right" which carries with it connotations of correctness and even virtue. But of course, it's only "right" for the person who makes money out of cutting a job. For the person who has been a victim of right-sizing, it's probably very wrong!

Rage, riots and representation

The student demonstrations in London the other week, and all over Britain yesterday are not only (in my personal view) a positive sign of resistance to massive cuts in education, which students should be proud of themselves for taking part in, but a great chance for language students to look at how the media represents protests, protesters and police.

Today's Daily Mail for example, has decided that the most notable thing about yesterday's demonstration was not the fact that it involved university, sixth form and school students in many different cities and towns across the UK, but that girls were involved in violence and vandalism. Under the headline Rage of the Girl Rioters, they describe female protesters as "the disturbing new face of the riots". So, they seem to be suggesting that if you're a male protester who gets a bit angry and launches a flying kick at a police van it's par for the course, but if you're a girl, that's simply unladylike. Unless of course, Facebook is involved, in which case the females were not "the disturbing new face of the riots" but frivolous young floozies, there only to take a few pictures and pose fashionably amid scenes of urban vandalism. Girls, know your place!

What's interesting from a language point of view is how grammatical and lexical choices can be used to offer very different representations of events.

Take these two lines from the Mail's coverage and have a look at the use of active and passive voice:

(Rioting girls) threatened to overturn a police riot squad van as they smashed windows, looted riot shields, uniforms and helmets and daubed the sides with graffiti.

Here, the girls are the subject and agent of the sentence, responsible for four verbs (threaten to overturn, smash, loot and daub), which themselves are chosen to represent wild and unrestrained behaviour.

As tensions ran high, police were forced to ‘kettle’ 5,000 protesters for hours just a short distance from the Houses of Parliament.

But in this example, the subject of the sentence - the noun phrase police - is receiving the action of the verb ("to force"), suggesting that they were not responsible for the kettling taking place (itself an interesting noun- verb conversion). So, who was? We don't know because there isn't an agent in this sentence: the sentence seems to be suggesting that a mighty force beyond the police's control (God...Doctor Evil...Jay-Z) might have forced them to comply. But no, it was probably the senior police officer who was responsible.

Of course, it doesn't take a genius to know that the media would generally rather focus on a dramatic image of violence - a masked protester smashing a window, a fire extinguisher dangerously close to police lines, a student urinating on a police van - so it's also a good idea to look at how the largely peaceful and orderly protests in places like Leeds, Sheffield, Colchester and Winchester were reported upon in local papers, where a more balanced and thoughtful representation might be offered.

Gang slang: a response

The article by Lindsay Johns in the Evening Standard the other week has already kicked up a fair bit of discussion here and elsewhere, but The Voice has a brief response to it here. As well as being an interesting debate about language, there's plenty of material in the original article, the comments after it and this piece to help any English Language A level student who's putting together a Language Intervention for ENGA4 or a Media Text for ENGB4.

A prescriptivist pot-pourri

Conservative governments - even ones that barely scraped into power and find themselves propped up by Lib Dem MPs - tend to like their pronouncements about "tradition", especially when it comes to cultural touchstones like the English language itself and the traditions of the language. So, it's not much of a surprise to find that Michael Gove, the Tory Education Minister, has started to talk tough about spelling and grammar in school students' work. According to Friday's Daily Telegraph, students will lose up to 5% of their marks at GCSE (in any subject) if their spelling, punctuation and grammar aren't up to scratch.

Now, you'd be hard-pressed to find an English teacher who doesn't think that clear communication is vital to the education of a student, and I think most students would probably agree too. But dig a little deeper into what Gove and his supporters say and you get a much more muddled picture of what "clear communication" means. Take the comments on this page of the Daily Telegraph's site, where posters bring up many of their own pet hates about language usage - "sloppy speech", innit, we was, slang of all colours (but mostly black and/or American), anyone who doesn't speak RP -  and you can see that to the Conservative Party's natural support base, the perception is that the English language has been wrested away from them and placed in the hands of the infidels and chavvy proletarians, but now they can claim it back as their own.

The horrible prescriptivist pot-pourri that appears on pages like this shows us what confusion there is about grammar and how we should be studying it in more detail: not studying it to be prescriptive and claim that one should never dangle a participle or split an infinitive, but to learn more about the language in all its fantastic variety. The approach I'd support is the one outlined here on the UCL project blog and here in an article for the TES that Professor Dick Hudson and I wrote the other week.

More grammar - yes please, but not the kind of "grammar" that should remain in the Victorian schoolbook or in the snug of some Surrey village pub where the bar is propped up by retired wing-commanders and investment bankers whose grammar is basically prejudice dressed up to look like knowledge.

An adapting language

Today's Independent celebrates the forthcoming World Languages Day by running a fascinating article about world languages and the "discovery" of a previously unknown language from the Himalayas. The article is well worth a read for its overview of the decline of world languages - it is estimated that about half of the world's 7,000 languages will be extinct by 2100 - but also because of the light it sheds on new theories of language acquisition.

One of the most striking bits of the article (for me, at least) is the suggestion from evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel that language is not a product of an inbuilt language acquisition device or language instinct, but should be viewed as similar to an organism in its own right, adapting to the human brain in order to survive:

All humans have the same brain, which is why successful languages tend to resemble one another, giving the illusion of a universal grammar. But, Pagel says, they may have arrived at that similarity via different routes, and solved the problem of being easy to learn in different ways. 

I'm not much an evolutionary linguist (or much of any sort of linguist, if truth be told) but this is a weird and rather wonderful idea that really appeals. There's some more about Pagel's research here and here, if you want to look further.

edited to add:
A colleague at UCL (thanks, Jill) tells me that Simon Kirby at Edinburgh is also interested in this language evolution approach. For those of you who have seen the excellent Why Do We Talk? Horizon documentary on language acquisition from last year (and available here last time I looked), Simon Kirby appears towards the end to talk about the experiment in which students are asked to name different coloured fruits. One of his papers is available here.

Hard-wired or softly spoken

The debate about gender and language use is one that has been a hot topic in linguistics for the best part of 40 years. From Robin Lakoff's "Women's Language Hypothesis", through to the staunchly feminist dominance model, into the difference model of Maltz & Borker popularised by Deborah Tannen and then John Gray, before recently heading into a discourse and diversity approach championed by Deborah Cameron, the debate has developed apace.

Today's Guardian features a strong comment piece by Madeleine Bunting that focuses on the recent clashes between followers of a "hard-wired" approach to gender differences, and those who suggest that context and individual differences are more important. Deborah Cameron is a key reference point in the article and it's exactly the kind of debate about language (and other things) that underpins the ENGA3 unit on the AQA A spec, and the ENGA4 Language Intervention. It's also an interesting read for anyone who wants to mug up on some of the latest arguments about biological determinism and the influence of culture and upbringing.

Quick links

I'll be adding  a few more links to the sidebar soon, but until then, these websites and blogs are definitely worth a look.

BBC2's Culture Show featured a good segment on the British Library's Evolving English exhibition which you can find on YouTube here.

Ben Zimmer's On Language column in the New York Times is always a good read and he has recently looked at youth slang and the growth of the word relatable (which even as a self-proclaimed anything-goes-trendy-leftist-linguist bugs me more than I know it should).

Dennis Baron's The Web of Language site is new to me so I haven't got much to say about it yet, although I'm reading his A Better Pencil at the moment, a book about technology and writing, which is interesting for anyone looking at multimodal forms.

Stan Carey's Sentence First is already listed in our sidebar links, and it's a very informative blog.

Also, here's a link to the Daily Telegraph's review of the British Library Evolving English exhibition.

The decline and fall of English?

This morning's Radio 4 Today programme had a good segment on the future of the English language featuring expert opinion from top applied linguist, David Graddol (whose excellent Open University books on language change and diversity, I'd thoroughly recommend). Is English going to remain the world's favourite language, or will it decline as other world powers, like India and China, start to dominate the globe?

You can listen to the clip here.

The tweeting of birds (and blokes)

The MacMillan Dictionary blog has always got good stuff for English Language students and this post is particularly interesting if you're looking at Language and Gender on ENGB1 or Language Variation for ENGA3.

They link to a fascinating project at the University of Trento in Italy which analyses the lexis of Twitter tweets and breaks them down into gendered usage. So, you can search for Robin Lakoff's famous "women's language" features - words like adorable, gorgeous, lovely, divine - and even two word "compounds" - really gorgeous, so cute - to see which gender uses them more in their sample. They've also got a collocate tool that allows you to look for the most common words associated with other search items. So you could look for "pie" and find that on of its male users' most favoured collocates is the Homer Simpson-esque "pizza pie" (mmm... pizza) while one of the favourite female collocates is "sweetie pie".

Of course, all the usual caveats apply to this kind of broadbrush approach. We don't get much context, we don't get much sense of what types of men and women are tweeting and we don't get to see raw data to explore it further, but all in all it's an interesting approach and worth having a look at.

Woop woop - it's the sound of the gavvers/boy dem/po po/filth/coppers/babylon

Here's the real sound of the police, but for those of you who don't want to travel back in time to the prehistoric days when hip hop meant something, just go straight to yesterday's Guardian which ran a short item on the slang used by some British police: you can find it here.

The whole area of occupational language is a good one to study. Doctors, teachers, soldiers, call centre workers and firefighters are all likely to have their own occupational varieties, which themselves might be affected by the speech styles of the individuals in the job, or the geographical area that people work in. The police are no exception to this and their occupational variety is probably one of the more widely scrutinised forms because it often appears in transcript form in court, or (perhaps more glamorously) on TV dramas and even reality police shows.

So is this sort of occupational variety a slang or a form of jargon? To what extent might we call the police a "community of practice"? According to the definition given by Graeme Trousdale in his excellent new book, An Introduction to English Sociolinguistics, a community of practice is defined by three characteristics: mutual engagement, a jointly negotiated enterprise, and a shared repertoire. He uses the example of a school rock band to illustrate these characteristics.

Here, a number of individuals come together in face-to-face contact (mutual engagement) for a particular purpose, that is, to play music (jointly negotiated enterprise), often conversing using jargon common in discourse on popular music, such as riff, bridge, amp, bass guitar and so on (shared repertoire).

Is the same true for the police? I think so. And like other communities of practice, there is pressure from within to use language in the accepted way, meaning that members of the community of practice become institutionalised in the language of the organisation.

Quite where this leaves the firearms police involved in this case, I don't know. they seem to have developed their own discourse, which apparently consists of slotting in as many song titles as possible into their witness testimony...

If you're interested in the language of the police, this link to a forum about police slang/jargon might be of interest.

Also, the many different words used to describe the police can be found here.

edited to add: 
While on the subject of communities of practice, this short article about the language used on message boards by divorced women discussing their relationships is quite a good one. There's the usual mix of acronyms and initialisms that we tend to see online (although I'm not sure LOL has been correctly defined here) along with a  smattering of new ones like STBXH (Soon to be ex-husband) and OW (other woman).

Evolving English - lots of languagey stuff

The British Library's Evolving English exhibition starts next week and looks really amazing. Here's a link to the evening talks and events. There's slang, swearing, the language of the Bible, Multicultural London English, gender and language. It's all there and blooming exciting.

Gang slang is not nang but don't be prang...

...and other desperate attempts to use slang in a headline in a(nother) post about slang.

There's now quite a number of comments that have been added to the article in Yesterday's Evening Standard, and they make for an interesting read, especially if you are an AQA A spec student looking at Language Discourses on ENGA3.

We've got some fairly rabid anti-immigrant postings, where the link between young black people, slang and crime seems to have got a few EDL/BNP types all upset. We've got some "crumbling castle" views, suggesting that our once beautiful language has been reduced to a vile slang code understood only by debased urban raggamuffins. We've got some descriptivists arguing that slang has always been around and is just one code that people use in certain contexts. We've also got a few others arguing the toss over the meanings of certain slang terms that have appeared in the glossary in the article. It's quite a range. Why not contribute yourself and add to the debate?

The writer of the article, Lindsay Johns, has a track record of  attacking slang and defending what he calls "proper English", as you can see from this article from 2009.

Finally (until I get worked up again and start ranting about slang) I've added a poll to the right of the blog homepage where you can add your view to what "peak" actually means to you. If you feel particularly passionately about this latest bit of London slang you can add a comment too.

Gang slang: not peak, just moist

Today's Evening Standard features an article by Lindsay Johns which sports the terrible headline "The secret world of gang slang". It's a terrible headline for two reasons. Firstly, the article isn't really about "gang slang"  (whatever that is supposed to mean): it's more to do with youth slang in general. Secondly, the headline gives the impression that slang is linked to gangs and violence: it can be - as anyone who has studied slang should know, some forms of it have their origins in the secret language of criminals - but more often than not has nothing to do with criminal behaviour.

The article itself is a bit of a let-down. Instead of talking to linguists (you know, the people who actually spend their lives studying language and looking at its usage), instead of talking to slang lexicographers (the people who put together and research dictionaries about slang, people like Jonathon Green and Tony Thorne), the writer talks to people who have opinions about slang but don't really have much to say about it: people like Simon Heffer, a man who knows virtually nothing about slang but has lots of views about how awful teaching is these days and how slang is a bad thing.

What really bugs me about the article is that it casts young people as some kind of alien species, whose language is so different from that of mainstream society that they are unintelligible. That may be the case for one or two unfortunate individuals who can barely pass a bus without saying "Dat's peak, bruv" but for most young people this really isn't the case at all. Code-switching - moving between languages or registers of languages - is something that people do all the time. Young people are especially adept at it.

So, to cast youth slang as simply gang-related and sinister just adds another dimension to the alienation already felt by a lot of teenagers. But I'm 41 years old and a "trendy leftist", that breed of linguist that Simon Heffer blames for the collapse of standards in teaching, so what do I know?

To be fair, there are some interesting bits in the article, but I'm just a bit jaded after reading so many articles about slang that say the same thing. So have a read and see what you make of it yourselves, I suppose.

Attitudes to foreign accents

With the post earlier today focussing on changing English accents and pronunciation, here's something different. A piece of psychological research from the USA and covered on the BPS research digest shows that in a study of "believability" heavier foreign accents came out lower in their score than light accents or "normal" ones.

The researchers suggest that it isn't just down to prejudice, but might have something to do with what they refer to as the "fluency effect" (Wikipedia defines and explains it here). Perhaps if we struggle to process a heavier, less familiar accent, we tend to believe the content of it less. The study referred to by the BPS seems to suggest that the fluency effect really has an impact.

A while ago (1971 to be precise) Howard Giles carried out a famous sociolinguistic study when he looked at attitudes towards different accents in the UK. He used a matched guise structure for his study (read more about this methodology here) and the American study is similar in many respects.

Edited on 26.11.10 to add:

This piece of research into the brain's activity when faced with foreign accents is also quite interesting.

Why we love i and simples

There's lots of good stuff for students of language change in today's papers and online, with the latest additions to the Collins English Dictionary getting some coverage. The Scotsman gets some expert opinion from Edinburgh University's Geoff Pullum on the new entries to the dictionary and you can read more here. Elsewhere, the BBC covers it here and The Guardian here.

For many of these articles, the highlight is the inclusion of a humorous Russian meerkat and his use of "simples". Linked to new words and their formation, the BBC News magazine also has an interesting look at the way i- has entered the language as a kind of trendy prefix. According to the article, now we have the iPod, the i-Player and the i-Phone (well I don't have an i-Phone but I wish I did) but soon we will have i-everything. In the same way that e took off as a briefly funky prefix to add to anything you wanted to pretend was modern (e-commerce, e-marketing, email...) i- has become the new must-have prefix. It's a good read and features the wisdom of Tony Thorne from King's College, London, a man who knows his onions when it comes to language change and new words.

Getting in a pickle with lickle Mr Tickle

The forthcoming British Library Evolving English exhibition is looking like a brilliant event for anyone who is interested in our language, and it's receiving some national coverage today for its focus on our evolving accents.

This morning's Radio 4 Today programme featured Jonnie Robinson from the British Library and John Wells, the UCL phonetician, talking about how our pronunciation of different words changes and how people feel about those changes. You can listen to it on i-Player here and if you're an SFX student try the link through Moodle that will appear later this week.

The BBC News website covers the exhibition's focus on collecting pronunciation here and they explain how the Mr Men story, Mr Tickle, is being used to collect our regional, social and ethnic differences in pronunciation.

So, how do you say little? Is it li??el (with glottal stops), littel (with Ts in your mouth), lickle (if you're Jamaican...or Tim Westwood)? And what about the eighth letter in our alphabet: is it Haitch or Aitch? The British Library wants to know. There's more about it here as well.

So, farewell then, Melissa. Those who dissed you will be retributed.

It's with great sadness that we wave farewell to Melissa from this season's Apprentice. Not only did she have the charisma of a young Amy Winehouse, the self-belief of Gordon Gecko and the haircut of a porcupine, but she also changed our language.

Today's fantastic moments included (following on from the other week's comfortability where adding an "-ity" suffix to a word makes it even more serious than just plain comfort) professionality , manoeuvrement (not manoeuvrability)and (at the end of the show where she claimed to have been ganged up against by her fellow boardroom candidates) the bloodcurdling threat that for their behaviour... "karmically they'll be retributed".WTF?

Goodbye, Melissa. We salute you for making up random new words.

edited the morning after to add:
...but are they random? A colleague says that, while they appear random, Melissa is actually following some rules with her use of -ity and -ment. But what are those rules and why should professional, the adjective, take -ism to make it a noun, or manoeuvre, the verb, take -ability rather than -ment?

Representation of celebrities

There's a good piece in today's Independent about the ways in which celebrities are represented in the media. It looks at the cycles of build-em-up-and-knock-em-down that are so common in the press and focuses particularly on Cheryl Cole and Wayne Rooney.

Definitely some good material here for an ENGA2 Investigating Representations task, I think.

The mode map

While it doesn't quite cover all modes, this map by the cartoonist, Randall Munroe, is a really great way of visualising the different forms of communication available to us in 2010. He's chosen to make the land masses' sizes proportional to their number of users, as this article in The Independent explains.

The full image of the map can be found here. You'll see me bobbing up and down in the Gulf of Lag, just off the south coast of the MMO Isle.

Comfortability?

I nearly choked on my Chilean Merlot last night (drunk to celebrate the rescue of the trapped Chilean miners rather than out of any dependence on the tranquilising effects of alcohol, honest) when Apprentice contestant Melissa used the expression "to find comfortability" while referring to her team's hopeless product the Book-Eze, designed to make reading on the beach less onerous (watch from about 30-31 minutes into this episode if you want to hear it for yourself).Am I getting prescriptive in my old age?

"Comfortability"? Is it a real word? When I type it wrongly, my Blogger spellcheck corrects it, so Blogger thinks it's real. I've checked it on WebCorp and it seems to appear on several US business websites and it gets used  by American footballer, Shawne Merriman here. But what does it mean? And why not just "comfort"?

This guy claims he coined it to refer to an ability to be "fully present/comfortable in an uncomfortable situation". I can't find it in the OED or Merriam-Webster, but it appears as long ago as 1984 as part of a medical test, "A Comfortability Level Scale for Performance of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation". Weird...

So, is this like conversate: a word that might have originally just been a mistake, a slip of the tongue, and which gets picked up and spread into wider usage because of its apparently impressive sound? Is it better than "comfort", and, more importantly, will I be able to read my Girl With The Dragon Tattoo on Bognor beach in comfortability?

Tube tips for women revisited

Back in 2005, Transport For London issues a leaflet called Tube Tips For Women which set out to help women "get the most out of the tube and stay safe". It contained such brilliant and original advice as minding your step on the escalator if you're wearing "party shoes", always carry a cereal bar (fits well in even the tiniest of handbags, apparently) and capped it all with graphology straight from the high street perfume counters, all lippie and pink squiggles. Zoe Williams of The Guardian didn't like it and after a few complaints it was withdrawn.

The original link to the leaflet died after the leaflet was pulled, but I've uploaded it as a clickable image on the original post from 2005, which you can find here. If you're looking at representation of gender for ENGA2, the leaflet, Williams' response and 2 or 3 other short extracts about the same theme would probably make a good set of materials for an investigation.

More on slang and correcting dodgy grammar

Here's a couple of follow-ups to recent stories featured on this blog.

For starters, this is a comment piece by Bob Nicholson in The Guardian which looks at how Victorian English took in American slang, and how the Americanisation of English is hardly a recent phenomenon.

Then there's this piece by Belinda Webb, also from The Guardian, that takes a look at reactions to slang. It's not a particularly brilliant article as the writer appears to confuse dialect and slang, but it's an intervention in the debate about language, so worth a look.

Finally, there's this article about Queen's English Society arch-pedant, Bernard Lamb in last month's Times Higher.

The English Language: it's not doing great

Each day seems to bring another argument about language and how it should be used. It is a great time to be an English Language student, huzzah!

Today's Independent features an opinion piece by Dr. Bernard Lamb, the President of the Queen's English Society (Surely that's a dangerously republican title for a staunchly royalist organisation?) who argues, among other things, for an end to the inverted snobbery and deliberate dumbing down of language that have led to a generation of nitwits not knowing the difference between they're and their. He rails against many other things too: the glottal stop; the lack of capitalisation of proper nouns; using great as an adverb when it's an adjective (Stop press! It's been used as an adverb for a long time. Deal with it!).

And as a professor of genetics, he's obviously eminently qualified to talk about... genetics. So why is he holding forth about language?

Anyway, he does make some sensible points too. There is a really good argument that we all need Standard English as it is a mutually intelligible dialect for all English speakers. If we all have access to Standard English then we all have a chance to communicate with each other, regardless of the region, the social class, the ethnic group or the age group we come from. I wouldn't argue against any of that. But when the definition of Standard English (or the Queen's English as Lamb insists on calling it) spreads like a BP oil slick to cover strong regional accents, glottal stops and the "misuse" of literally, then it's no longer really about a mutually intelligible means of communication and much more to do with personal prejudices.

Slang: now the teachers don't know nuffink neither

Yesterday's Daily Mail featured a brief story about a school in Portsmouth where two teaching assistants have been criticised in an OFSTED report for their "poor grammar". As usual, the Daily Mail's message boards seem to act like a magnet to every droooling, knuckledragging dimwit in the universe (as well as the occasional rational human) so within a day 100 comments about the state of the British education system had been posted, ranging from those that blame Nigerians, Alesha Dixon and Tony Blair to those that are sure it's the fault of scruffy (male) teachers and Alan Sugar.

The story actually turns out to have very little to do with slang (despite the Mail and this blog's headline) and much more to do with dialect. The teaching assistants had apparently used the local construction "I likes football" (which shows a different subject verb agreement from Standard English's "I like football", or more accurately "I hate Millwall"). But again, and like so many other stories about aspects of language, the anger isn't really directed at the feature itself (which is pretty harmless) but at the users of it and those that are perceived as letting it ruin young people's education.

I've done a (slightly) more technical post about this over on the Teaching English Grammar in Schools blog if anyone's interested, but is it really such a bad thing to have a couple of teaching assistants using a local variety of English in the classrroom?

And wouldn't it be good if next time the Daily Mail ran a story like this, a mass language intervention of intelligent comments from A level English Language students drowned out the nutty ramblings of the usual message board trolls?