Dehumanising language

There's a brief story in The Guardian this week about NHS staff being told off for using "dehumanising and trivialising" language about their pateients. Expressions like "frequent flyer" and "dement" have come in for criticism. The full article can be found here.

And if you want to see some more medical slang and jargon, try here. It's not for the easily shocked, especially not "bobbing for apples".

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Island apes, white ghosts and poms...

...all words used to describe British people, apparently. The focus of a couple of recent articles in The Guardian and The Mirror has been on the use of the word "pom" by Australians to describe British people, and whether or not it's a racist term. There are various theories about the word "pom" - some arguing that it's from Prisoner Of Her Majesty and others that it's short for the fruit pomegranate and describes the bright red colour pasty white Brits turn when they get sunburnt - but most agree that if it's an insult it's hardly as bad as "p*ki" or "wog". So what makes a word offensive? An anti-racist saying from some twenty years ago was "power + prejudice = racism". If you have no power in society, you might be prejudiced in your attitudes, but it's only when you've got the power to apply that prejudice that it truly becomes racism. It's a partially persuasive argument and one that might explain why terms like "honky", "cracker" and "gora" don't really carry the same power as terms like "p*ki", the n-word and "jewboy". But is it the whole story? Perhaps the most offensive words have a history that develops like a snowball effect, which means that they pick up more and more negative associations over time and just keep getting worse. Maybe some of these words are linked to such barbaric times in history that their meanings are forever unpleasant. While you're pondering that, take a look at the range of imaginative and descriptive terms applied to white British people by their friends around the world. Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation

Shoot the Puppy

In a great article from The Daily Telegraph over the summer, William Leith takes a detailed look at the language of IT workers and office staff, or what he calls New Office. To help him he uses Tony Thorne's new guide, Shoot the Puppy which gives definitions for the weird and bizarre language of the office (e.g. "having a salmon day" means to have worked hard, swimming upstream all day, only to be shafted at the end if it all).

So shooting the puppy is all about ultra-macho decision-making, several steps beyond 'grasping the nettle’ or ‘biting the bullet’. In a corporate climate,where downsizing has become capsizing (‘capping’ staff numbers until there’s no one left to steer the ship) and rightsizing has given way to downclosing, the idea is often invoked negatively: ‘I’m not going to be the one to shoot the puppy; we’d better hire in a consultant to recommend the restructuring.’

As funny and interesting as some of the slang or jargon is in its own right, two things about the article are particularly helpful for English Language students . Firstly it looks at specific linguistic processes that create the words (blending , affixation, metaphor etc.) and secondly it links the new words to the context that created them and how the new words reflect the attitudes and culture of a given time. So, Leith and Thorne pick out a whole range of new expressions that seem to suggest many people involved in these types of jobs are deeply fed up with their bosses, dismissive of their clients' intelligence and working in an industry that they feel doesn't value them. In other words, the jargon and the metaphors behind the new words reflect an attitude.

In one class last week we tried to update a slang dictionary from Live magazine (linked to this article) which many people felt was now a little out of date. Words and phrases such as "bullet bullet bullet" (uttered when a boy dances in a way that might be perceived as "gay"), "written off" (used to refer to someone who's been knocked out or beaten up) and "boomy" (used as an adjective to express approval of a girl's appearance) came up as new versions of slightly older expressions such as "merked" (injured/beaten up) and "tick" or "choong" (attractive). Maybe "bullet bullet bullet" is an updated version of the old homophobic "boom bye bye" refrain from an old dancehall track.

Again, while it's interesting to see the speed at which language changes and how quickly slang terms are discarded and new ones adopted, it's the pattern of meanings that point to deeper links between language and society. Many slang terms relate to the physical appearance of women, attitudes towards different lifestyles and violence - sometimes a mixture of the three.

So, if business slang and jargon is all to do with feeling miserable in a world that doesn't value you, is life for urban youths all about chirpsing chicks, abusing gay people and beating up rivals from different endz (or something like that, anyway)? I suspect that's not the whole picture, so please discuss...


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

War of Words

It's all kicking off between David Crystal (language guru) and Lynne Truss (lover of apostrophes) in today's Observer. Attacking Truss's "zero tolerance approach to punctuation" made famous in her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Crystal accuses Truss of "linguistic fundamentalism".

For those of you unfamiliar with Truss and her work, Eats, Shoots and Leaves laments the sorry understanding English users have of their own system of grammar and punctuation. Truss explains the "rules" as she sees them and tries to educate her readers about things like the "grocer's apostrophe" (often seen on signs in markets advertising banana's and apple's) and the possessive apostrophe (the man's hat). It has become a best-seller which either tells you lots about how eager we are to learn more about grammar, or how sad we are for not knowing what else to buy Aunty Mildred for Christmas...

Anyway, back to the battle between Crystal and Truss. In the article, Crystal is quoted as saying "Zero tolerance does not allow for flexibility. It is prescriptivism taken to extremes. It suggests that language is in a state where all the rules are established with 100 per cent certainty. The suggestion is false. We do not know what all the rules of punctuation are. And no rule of punctuation is followed by all of the people all of the time".

Interestingly, one of Crystal's other targets, John Humphrys of Radio 4, responds by saying "'I think David Crystal is making a fundamental mistake when he says rules don't matter that much. I say they matter enormously. Take the example we always use on both sides of the debate: the apostrophe. It is either right or wrong. We wouldn't accept something being wrong in any other walk of life, would we?".

What Humphrys seems to miss is the fact that many of these rules are little more than the prejudices of language "experts" in the Eighteenth Century whose ideas gained credibility once they were written down and widely circulated. They're not rules that are set in stone for any logical reason; although some would argue that a few of these rules are there to avoid confusion in communication.

For more on this debate, have a read of the article and search for Aitchison as a key word in the tool bar at the top of this page. You might also want to have a look at the Michael McCarthy articles linked here or here. Or have a look at the previous debates sparked by Lynne Truss's book here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

Goodbye Everard Willy, Farewell Cock and Cheerio Hugh G. Rection

Firstly, may I apologise for the title of this post. It's very immature and it won't happen again...

According to The Daily Mirror, "joke" surnames are fast disappearing as people change their embarrassing soubriquets through either marriage or deed poll. So, surnames like Smellie (popular in Glasgow), Pigg (popular in Newcastle) and Daft (big in Nottingham) are on the way out.

The article itself has many more terrible puns about men's anatomies than I can manage, so it's worth a read. And it's not too long (as it were).

But more seriously, names make the basis for some very interesting language investigations. There are obvious links between surnames and ethnic/geographical origins, as well as many that link to human characteristics. The significance of naming traditions in different societies is well worth a look at, with the whole issue of women taking their husbands' surnames central to many groups of people.

Then you have first names and the influence of a growing influence from foreign cultures and celebrities: Mohammed is in the top 20 for boys' names now, while Whitney is often a popular choice among girls. Jordan, Chantelle, Preston and Romeo could all be on the up too. A quick search of this blog (use the search bar at the top of the page) should take you to previous posts on this topic and links to top 20 lists of boys' and girls' names that might help you with some research.

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigations

Wrinkly coffin-dodgers need not apply

New legislation coming into force in October means that job adverts may need to be radically overhauled to avoid discrimination against older workers, according to the BBC News website. Terms such as "energetic" and "youthful" face the chop, and presumably "Must have own teeth" is set to go as well.

Age-related language is often overlooked when we focus on Language & Representation in ENA1, so this could prove a valuable area of research. Is there a tendency to label older people with demeaning terms such as "crumblies", "senile old gits" and "has beens"? And if so, are these labels out of proportion to those applied to younger people "hoodies", "yobs" etc. ?

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Muffin tops, salad dodgers and munters

With the new Chambers Dictionary released in a couple of weeks, there's an article in today's Guardian about some of the new (and not so new) words set to be included. What makes this article a bit more interesting than the usual spate of new words articles every time a dictionary comes out, is that it has a sociolinguistic spin at the end.

According to Dr Pia Pichler from Goldsmiths College, many of the new words betray a derogatory representation of women, far outnumbering the derogatory words for men. For those of you who have looked at Language and Representation in ENA1, the name Julia Stanley might ring bells. Her research in the 1970s suggested that the number of pejorative terms for women outweighed those for men by a factor of about 10 to 1. So for every "nobhead" there were ten "sluts", "hoes" and "mooses"...or something like that.

What this article seems to suggest is that this lexical over-representation is still evident: perhaps it's even increasing because of the huge amount of new words and phrases used to describe female bodies. So, the obsession with trying to look like an orange-skinned celebrity nonentity (like Jordan, Chantelle or those strange looking girls from Atomic Kitten) has led to all sorts of new words and phrases to describe processes of hair removal ("Brazilian"), breast enhancement ("tit tape") and skin colour ("permatan") but has also led to new terms for those women who don't make the grade or whose bodies don't fit the skinny, plastic template: "bingo wings" for wobbly bits on the underarm; "muffin tops" for those outpourings of flesh over the top of too-tight belts; "salad dodgers" for people who don't follow diets.

So years on from Julia Stanley's research, do we still have the same level of over-representation for terms used to describe women and their bodies? How do we find out? Well, don't rely on other people's research. Do what Julie Blake has always suggested on her Language Legend blog and DIY! With all sorts of new ways of researching language - using google to find out the popularity of certain new words, or using online corpora to analyse language use in written or spoken texts - you can find out if particular patterns exist. And then you can work out if it means women are still the target of the arsenal of nasty words, or if men are finding themselves the victims of new pejorative terms as well.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
EA4C - Language Investigation
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

Congratulations

Well done to everyone who got their A Level results. I think this was the best set of results we've had so far, so thanks for all your hard work and good luck in the future! Many of you are going on to do English Language/ Linguistics at Uni so make sure you stay in touch and feed us your knowledge via the blog.

And well done to those of you who got your AS results. These were also very good overall, but not quite as many top grades as we'd have liked, so we'll go through these in detail with you when you get back. So don't worry just yet...

Accents hold the comedy key

In a piece of research carried out by linguists at Aberdeen University and reported here in The Guardian, it's been discovered that a person's regional accent can have a major influence on how funny they are perceived to be.

Rather like Howard Giles' famous matched guise experiment into accents, this research measures how "warm" or "cold" the speakers are perceived to be. As The Guardian reports, "After asking 4,000 people to listen to the same joke in 11 different regional accents, researchers from the University of Aberdeen concluded that the Brummie accent, as typified by the likes of Frank Skinner, Jasper Carrott and Lenny Henry, is Britain's funniest, appealing to more than a fifth of those questioned".

Received Pronunciation (R.P.) comes out at the bottom, below accents from Manchester and Glasgow. So it's not just the way you tell 'em, it's the voice you tell 'em in.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

"PC gone mad" parts 301 & 302

Two stories in yesterday's papers re-hash that tired old phrase "Political Correctness gone mad". In one piece in the Daily Mirror, council workers in Newcastle have been "re-educated" about their use of terms such as "pet", "love" and "hinny" (Read the article for some more on this obscure northern lexeme! "This political correctness is getting ridiculous," claims one rent-a-quote Tory MP in response to the story. My normal reaction to stories like this is to see them as part of a right wing agenda which seeks to discredit any attempt to get people to look at the language they use and how it might offend others. "Common sense" ideas about "PC gone mad" are put forward, but really they're just reactionary ramblings that see any attempt to remove racist or sexist language as part of some weird communist plot. But is that all that's going on in this case? Another element to this story is the issue of dialect and identity. As one council worker puts it, "It's like they are trying to kill the Geordie language. It's totally bloody crackers". This point is developed later in the article:

But Peter Arnold, 62, chairman of the Northumbrian Language Society, said: "I am horrified that these words, which are part of the native language of people living in Northumbria, are to be banned. It is just part of the way ordinary people speak.

"Some think the Geordie dialect is sexist and male oriented. It then follows that people think Geordies are male chauvinist pigs. This is a mistake.

"People who use these words - hinny, which is a term of endearment whose origin is lost in time - are speaking what is to them the first language of many people from this part of the world. It is part of our heritage."

The connections between dialect and identity are riddled with issues of self-esteem, regional insecurities and perceptions of domination by metropolitan elites (in other words, that London's New Labour-supporting middle classes want to control the language we all speak).

So, should regional varieties of English be allowed to keep their old-fashioned and perhaps patronising terms? Is it even a good idea to try to regulate language use in this way? Can it even be done? And who is making these decisions anyway?

In another article, this time in The Guardian, an employee of Orange is being investigated for his remarks on a web discussion site in which he pokes fun at what he calls a "lefty lexicon" or what he sees as the abuse of language by "lefties" and especially the "rights industry", according to the article. Everyone's entitled to an opinion, you might say, but if you're the "community affairs manager" of a huge mobile phones company should you be able to vent your spleen about minority groups (many of whom are your customers)?

And in today's Mirror, there's a really great guide to the different terms of endearment used around the country. Click here for the online version (less impressive to look at than the print version which I'll try to scan and post up on the site in the next week or two).

Your views on this whole issue of patronising terms and language control would be welcome as comments (click below to add your points).

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

Hyperlexia

For those of you interested in Child Language, here's an extract from a piece of research reported in The British Psychological Society digest which gives some info about a boy of 4 with incredibly advanced reading skills yet a mental age of just one and a half.

If you remember the Cognitive theory as proposed by Piaget and his followers, language development occurs as part of a child's wider cognitive development. If that's the case then how does something like this occur?

Researchers at the University of London’s School of Languages have observed a four-year-old boy with autistic spectrum disorder who rarely speaks spontaneously and shows little evidence of verbal comprehension but who can read aloud precociously – a phenomenon that’s known as hyperlexia.

On psychological tests, the boy is found to have a mental age of just one and half years and yet he can correctly pronounce irregular words not normally encountered by children before the age of nine. Irregular words like ‘yacht’ don’t follow the usual letter-to-sound rules and his
correct pronunciation of them betrays a level of linguistic development far beyond that predicted by his mental age.

Even when presented with novel Greek letters, he attempts to read them as English letters and numbers. “This behaviour is possibly indicative of the type of driven, compulsive, and indiscriminate reading behaviour associated with hyperlexia”, the researchers said. Indeed, the boy’s mother recalled that her son looked through newspapers with an unusual intensity before he was even two years old.

Because the boy doesn’t communicate it is difficult to gauge his actual comprehension of the words he can read. Nonetheless it remains remarkable that his reading ability “just happened”, as his mother put it, and the researchers concluded “Existing cognitive accounts are inadequate to account for the development of literacy in this child”.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition

"Your mum is a terrorist whore"...

...the words Marco Materazzi allegedly spoke to Zinedine Zidane, moments before getting butted in the chest by an international legend turned demented billygoat. Whatever happened to "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me"?

In a great article in today's Guardian, Stuart Jeffries looks at the background to "your mum" insults and asks why certain types of abuse are viewed as grossly offensive in certain cultures and societies. It's a well researched article with some good background from Deborah Cameron and discussion of "the dozens" and "yo momma" games in the USA. It even quotes from one of my favourite rap tracks of the 1990s, The Pharcyde's Yo Mama and one of my favourite comedy sketches, Newman and Baddiel's History Today professors ("You see your bike; it's a girl's bike. It's for girls.").

The article contains rude words, so don't let your mum catch you reading it. Oh I forgot, she can't catch you reading it: she's out buying crack/selling her body/eating food from bins (delete as inappropriate).

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
EA4C - Language Investigations

The Institute for Domestic Incarceration Survivors

What's wrong with being a housewife? I can think of plenty of things to do with the "job" itself, but The Women's Institute has been discussing the word instead. According to an article in The Guardian last month "Progressives argue that the word - meaning a woman who keeps house - is outdated and derogatory. Traditionalists are furious and adamant that even discussing the matter is the result of political correctness". Elsewhere, Jane Shilling in The Times suggests that women should reclaim the word: "It’s been done successfully for the n-word and “queer”, those terms of vile insult turned into triumphant badges of identity. Why not for housewife? Go on, ladies, say it aloud: I’m a housewife, and I’m proud". In a separate article from The Times, the connotations and marketabilty of the term are considered: "Barbara Littlewood, a lecturer in sociology at Glasgow University, feels the change is necessary if the organisation is to survive. “The use of the term housewife could well be putting off the younger generation and even those in their 40s,” she said, adding that it had connotations of being forced to stay at home darning socks and could be seen as harking back to the 1950s when men were the sole breadwinners". So what's wrong with the word and what might its alternatives be? Free Dictionary defines it as "A woman who manages her own household as her main occupation" while a search on Wikipedia redirects you straight away to an alternative term "homemaker" and describes it as "a person whose prime occupation is to care for their family and home. The term homemaker is used in preference to either housewife or househusband because it is inclusive, defines the role in terms of activities, rather than relation to another, and is independent of marital status. The terms stay-at-home mother and stay-at-home father are also used". Even looking at the standard defintions of the word as derived from "hus" + "wif" isn't the whole story, as the word "wif" has drifted in meaning over time from "woman" to "married woman". And a look at Etymology Online flags up an even more damning drift: the word "hussy", once a shortened version of housewife, now means something much more pejorative: "Gradually broadened to mean "any woman or girl," and by 1650 was being applied to "a woman or girl who shows casual or improper behavior," and a general derogatory sense had overtaken the word by 19c." It's a blooming minefield of semantic shifts and derogatory connotations. So, what are the alternatives if you're not married to the house? "Homemaker", as suggested by many feminists, just makes me think of sweaty-arsed builders waving England flags from their white vans. Maybe that's just me. Various spoof Political Correctness guides use the term "domestic incarceration survivor" to relate the experience of "keeping house" (uurgh) to a prison sentence. But what of the "progressives" in the W.I. themselves? "Homecraft" seems to be their favoured alternative, but quite how that switches from being an abstract noun to being a term that can be used as a title is unclear, and might lead to all sorts of clunky formulations such as "homecraft practioner", "homecraft engineer" and "homecraft bod". Anyone for "domestic goddess"? Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 - Language Change

5-times-a-night-Tony Blair & Margaret Thatcher in stockings

If either of the images in the title of this post make you feel queasy, you're not the only one. So imagine what it was like for poor David Cameron, fresh-faced new leader of the decidedly ancient Tory Party, when Jonathan Ross asked him a peresonal question about his sexual fantasies as a young lad.

And according to a report a couple of weeks ago in The Guardian, Britain's political discourse took a further downward turn when it was revealed that during a cabinet reshuffle, Margaret Beckett's response to being offered a new post was one word - the f-word.

Two different articles in two different newspapers offer two very different takes on these stories. In The Times, Minette Marin argues that these incidents are part of a radical coarsening of political language, while in The Guardian, Mark Lawson argues that swearing is a means of expressing rebellion against the constraints of the dominant culture of political soundbites, that in a way it's a response to the shackles of New Labour speak.

But it's also interesting to look at Marin's wider argument. As she says,

In a few years culture has become so hyper-sexualised that in order to speak demotic you need to talk dirty — or at least politicians and celebrities think you do. They feel the way to appeal to the voter or the punter is to pepper what you say with sexy words and sexy allusions, because that’s what most voters and punters increasingly do themselves.

There was a time in this country when only the working classes and the upper classes went in for effing and blinding and swearing like troopers, and not all of them. The respectable middle classes didn’t swear or talk dirty at all. Something changed in the 1960s; would-be left-wing intellectuals felt that to show solidarity with the masses they should talk like them. Hence student mockney, hence a fashion for swearing and talking dirty. Middle-class guilt made students feel they shouldn’t talk in the mannerly tones of middle-class privilege. This has persisted and spread.

So, it would appear that Marin believes our politicians are increasingly accommodating their language: downwardly converging to the vernacular they believe their target voters speak.

A quick look at this post from last month - Voice of the people - should give you a bit more background on this too, but the whole topic looks like a pretty good Language Investigation to me...

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation

ENA6 then it's all over...

I know it's late, but here are some last minute tips for the ENA6 exam. I wouldn't normally bother as it's so close to the exam but I know that people have been using this blog for their exams right up to the last minute: in fact there was someone searching for ENA5 stuff on Monday at 12.30 which was an hour before the exam started. Stop it! Sort your life out! Have some lunch!

Anyway, the secret of doing well in this exam is a bit like the secret of good comedy................... timing.

There are 5 very different questions and if you stick to giving the short, 5 mark questions the time they deserve, and use the rest of the time to plan and write detailed answers to the big two questions (1c and 2a) you'll probably do yourself a favour. If you have the right technique on 1a, 1b and 2b you should be able to have them out of the way in no time at all (15 minutes maximum).

So, looking at them how do you do that? Question 1a requires a 3 sentence answer. Use linguistic terminology to label the 3 features/processes you're asked to find and give a brief explanation. That's it...

Question 1b requires a 5 point approach. You have to have some sort of aim, a method of collecting data, a framework to analyse that data, an awareness of extra linguistic variables and issues of ethics and validity, and an idea of what you will find and what it means. There is more detail on this available on the AQA site here (aimed at teachers but useful for students if you know what you're doing).

Question 2b can almost be done as you do 2a. If you build in 3 linguistic features to comment upon, you'll be able to refer back to them in your 2b answer. Remember to quote specific egs and label them linguistically before explaining your intended effect.

Question 1c is a textual analysis but requires an added level of evaluation from what you did in ENA1. Try to respond to the ways in which the writer makes his/her material accessible and interesting to the non-specialist audience. There's more to this question, but it's too late to go over the frameworks now and you should already be secure on these.

For question 2a, all I can really advise is be engaging and creative. Examiners will read loads of scripts that re-hash the source material in various ways, but will be happy to come across scripts that take risks and make reference to other sources of information and language debates. It's a synoptic unit, so try to show your grasp of the links between the different topics you've studied and your engagement in the language debate that the paper is focused on.

Good luck!

Don't tupac your WAGs

With ENA5 coming up tomorrow (Monday) here are two new words for your delight and delectation: the verb "to tupac" and the acronym W.A.G.

The first is a conversion from proper noun to verb, of the rapper, Tupac's name. It was used ironically by hip hop supremo Rick Rubin to refer to flogging new versions of tracks on CDs long after the death of the artist, something that Rubin himself has been happy to do with the work of Johnny Cash recently. Cashing in, if you will. Ha ha. Not my joke, but one from today's Observer.

And then to the acronym. Never have more fake plastic cleavage, dodgy lip gloss and stupidly priced handbags been seen than among the Wives And Girlfriends (WAGs) of the England football squad. Well, maybe not since last night in various Romford nightclubs...

But what's our favourite word of the moment? Well according to the OED it's the noun "time".

Anyway, new words and old words aside, good luck tomorrow with your ENA5 exam.

Celibacy and gradable adjectives

So from one form of sexuality to another, or rather lack of any sexual activity... don't worry: it's not another autobiographical posting. A piece by Lucy Mangan in today's Guardian (That long Victoria line trip from Walthamstow to Stockwell is great for reading the papers!) looks at Robbie Williams' use of the adjective celibate, when he describes himself as almost celibate.

As Mangan puts it:

If we take the Shorter OED definition of celibacy as "the state of being unmarried", the man is clearly barking. He has, as many a recent interview attests, never found a woman with whom he could contemplate submitting to the bonds of holy matrimony and therefore cannot be almost unmarried. So one must conclude that the Robster is using the word in its more modern sense of sexual abstinence. Robbie, it seems, ain't gettin' any. Or rather, he almost ain't gettin' any.

One could phrase the pertinent question in the abstract: can one be almost celibate or is it an absolute state, an abstemious wasteland sharply delineated by the carnal woodlands abutting every border? Or one can put it more individually: is one man's "almost celibate" another man's "five-year period of being linked to some of the most desirable women in the world, including Kylie, Nicole Kidman and erm, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, but not having quite as much sex as you would like"?

Prurient interest in Tara Palmer-Tomkinson aside, it's perhaps interesting to look at the use of adjectives like celibate, certain and unique (but probably more interesting to look at posh Tara...sorry). Can we premodify these adjectives with adverbs - almost celibate, completely unique, virtually certain - when the adjectives themselves mean something in an absolute state? In other words, how can you be almost celibate when the word celibate means "completely free of sexual activity"? You either are or you aren't... or are you?

Traditionally these adjectives are referred to as non-gradable, as opposed to adjectives like lucky and happy which are gradable (really lucky, very happy etc.), but perhaps the point is that when we use adverbial modifers in front of non-gradable adjectives we're actually saying something about our own attitude to the thing being described.

An example in the recent ENA1 exam is the adjective British which you might think was an either/or description, except it's not that simple. A quick look at the press conference yesterday when the brothers arrrested for suspected terrorism offences in east London talked about their love of London and their country, might tell us that there are clearly different notions of Britishness (a clumsy abstract noun) depending on who you are and what you believe: some would say (wrongly) that you can't be British if you're a Muslim of Bangladeshi origin, while others claim a much broader definition that encompasses Owen Hargreaves, Greg Rusedski and anyone who is born here. So if we can't decide on what British means how can we say the adjective is non-gradable?

Perhaps it's not a case of being grammatically inaccurate, but of adding a subtle nuance to what we feel about the idea being described. So maybe when Robbie Williams talks of being almost celibate he perhaps means that he's only one (ahem) snog away from the barren wasteland of celibacy, close to the edge. Or maybe he just can't use grammar properly.But that isn't completely unique, is it?

Useful for:
ENA1 - Textual Analysis language frameworks

More gayness!

The discussion about the word "gay" caused by Radio One presenter Chris Moyles' comment about a "gay ringtone", has been picked up more widely and caused some friction between those who see "gay" as a harmless example of language change in action, and those who still see it as a word loaded with negative connotations.

Here's a link to yesterday's Guardian which ran a front page G2 feature on the word "gay", while here's a link to three letters in today's Guardian responding to that article. Underneath, I've cut n pasted some comments from contributors to Urban 75, a Brixton-based discussion site ( I can't link to the actual posts as you have to be a registered user to access the boards). These responses give you some sense of the issues at stake and the range of viewpoints:

EquationGirl: You may think you're not using it as a homophobic statement, but you're linking a word used to describe homosexuals as a slur, a derogatory statement, to mean something bad. In time, the word 'gay' just means something bad.You should stop, you know. I personally find it offensive, whether or not it's meant. It sends out the message that it's ok to use 'gay' to mean something bad, when it isn't.

Xes: Can I just say,that as a gayer,I'm not offended by the term "that's gay" I even use it myself.cos some things,just,are.

Wookie: I went through a lot of pain in order to be able to say 'I am gay' and be proud of it. To hear the word used to mean something shit, lame and defunct is hurtful in the extreme. It has nothing to do with inverting the meaning of 'gay' from 'happy and carefree' to something which is bad. It has everything to do with equating gay people with disfunctionality, and it's utterly unasseptable from people wishing be in the same room as me.Say it if you want by all means. But please stop kidding yourself that you aren't replicating homophobic ideals, because you are. And don't do it within arm's reach of me unless you have a comprehensive dental plan.

JHE: I don't like this use of 'gay' as a term of disparagement, but I suppose my dislike is partly generational. It strikes me as a silly schoolchild's usage.However, it's also an interesting reminder of the limits of attempts to reform language. 'Gay' was deliberately adopted (by the GLF?) to mean homosexual, because the term 'homosexual' sounds very clinical or scientific and all the other terms ('queer', 'poof' etc) were pejorative. It worked to a large extent. It is rare nowadays to find anyone who moans about (what many used to claim was) the misappropriation of the word. Yet the 'positive' word is now also used in a pejorative way - and its meaning, insofar as I understand it, is often similar to 'poofy'.

Your views would be most welcome!

Is your ringtone gay?

Well mine certainly is, but what about yours? Obviously I don't mean homosexual, but "lame", "crap" and "sad". According to the BBC Board of Governors, these are the modern meanings of the word "gay" alongside its other more traditional ones of "happy" and "carefree", and of course "homosexual" (which has been one of the word's other meanings for longer than many might expect).

In articles, here in The Times and here in the Daily Mail (spit), the BBC explain their position on the word "gay" and their decision that Chris Moyles' use of it to describe a ringtone was acceptable and not homophobic (compared to rapper, The Game's use of the term "faggot" to describe gay men which was labelled unacceptable and led to a ban on further interviews).

All of this raises interesting issues about language change and the processes that drive it, but also the decisions that lead to the acceptability or otherwise of particular words. It's not as if any of this is set in stone either: changes in meaning aren't decided by committees and then imposed on us, but rather certain groups of people and organisations tend to have more power to influence opinion and usage.

So, can using "gay" really not be homophobic? Or is the fact that it's now broadened to mean "rubbish", "lame" and "crap" just a symptom of a homophobic society?

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

Voice of the people?

We all know that these days politicians strive for that common touch (and I don't mean John Prescott yearning for desk action with a secretary) but how far are they prepared to go to reach out to the masses in their own language?

A report in yesterday's Observer tells us that "David Cameron, the somewhat posh Old Etonian leader of the Tories, comes over as a more credible 'man of the people' than Gordon Brown, the 'down-to-earth' Labour Chancellor and probable next Prime Minister, according to a new study of top politicians' vocabulary".

The report goes on to explain that the criteria used to ascertain this "common touch" come from a programme called "Everyday English" which monitors sentence length, the use of core vocabulary and teh number of syllables used.

"All of which, it turns out, favours Cameron over Brown. The Liberal Democrat leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, lags behind them both. Tony Blair finishes slightly in front of Cameron, though John Major registers more convincingly as 'one of us' than any of them. And none can hold a candle to an EastEnders script that was fed through the computer filter."

So, does this mean that Blair and Cameron genuinely speak the language of the streets ("Wahgwan Gordon, dat rave was heavy, blood") or just that they have mastered the art of accommodating towards what they see as their target audience? And what does this tell us about their perception of the language and identity of their target audience - i.e. the swing voters who might switch allegiances before the next election - that they are aiming their language at?

The danger (as we've seen with Labour moving into political ground once occupied by the Conservatives and the Conservatives desperately trying to recapture that ground) is that the politicians speak a language they think we want to hear but in the process have no distinct voice of their own. The upshot of this is often to give us smooth soundbites in easily digestible language, which mean absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, those with an identifiable voice (however objectionable) become more attractive as they appear to be speaking from the heart (witness the growth of nazi nutters, the BNP in Barking & Dagenham and other areas across the country).

You can find out more about the programme used to analyse the language and its uses here.

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation