New words scrapbook

New words are emerging all the time. Before you can say "Rarsclart rudebwoy, why you flexin me?" a new word has sprung up and worked its way into our language. And as part of your A2 work on ENA5 you'll need to have plenty of good examples at your disposal. So, this post is designed to help.

"How?" I hear you ask. "You haven't given us any new words here. What are you playing at, man?" I hear you continue.

Well, that's because it's your chance to add comments to this post about new words you've come across. Together we can build a new words scrapbook.

"Scrapbook? Crapbook!" I hear you respond, somewhat rudely.

Well, it doesn't have to be rubbish, but it largely depends on you and what you post. If you can send in new words or links to articles about new words we'll soon have some examples to be getting on with, Then I'll try to offer a bit of analysis of what we've got, you can chip in with your ideas and we'll all learn something together.

"Yes, but where are the Haribo?" you ask.

Well, the Haribo prizes will be awarded to the top 5 most interesting new words posted as comments. There's no strict criteria for what makes an interesting new word, but if I like it I'll award you some Haribo. OK?

So to get the ball rolling, here's a link to something about Susie Dent's new Language Report and the words of 2000 - 2007.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

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

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.

Our magnificent bastard tongue...

...is an ace phrase and also the name of a book by American linguist John McWhorter who is one of several writers contributing to a special edition of Forbes magazine. In it (click here for the link) various experts and lexophiles have a good look at the growth of the English language as it (apparently and rather controversially) heads towards its 1 millionth word.

Among the articles are some really good pieces on how language changes and spreads, new words that have come from internet gaming, how new types of prefixes and suffixes have arisen, and loads, loads more.

I've picked out a few extracts below to give you a taste of what's covered, and I'm sure we'll be using some of this in class in the next two weeks (which is all we have left before study leave...woohoo! Sorry, I mean dammit).

On the millionth word topic:

An outfit called the Global Language Monitor claims that English is about to add its millionth word, boldly (and absurdly) projecting the event to transpire some time around June 8, 2009. But that gives the patina of precision to the ultimately subjective task of determining what counts as "English" nowadays--and what counts as a "word." Even if we content ourselves with the paltry number of neologisms that get included in dictionary updates, it's instructive to see which words make the cut. Recent additions to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, include biosignature, botnet, locavore, mocktail, plus-one and vanity sizing. In some cases we know exactly where these words are coming from. Locavore, meaning "a person whose diet consists only or principally of locally grown or produced food," was coined in 2005 by a group of four San Francisco women who challenged local residents to eat only food grown within a 100-mile radius. It was then picked up by like-minded activists around the country.

On new prefixes and suffixes:

Suffixes and prefixes are the Legos of word-making, handy attachments we slap onto words as needed. Most don't make us blink: like the "pre" and "s" in "prefixes" itself.

Others are a little more creative, gaudy and eye-catching. It's no longer unusual to spot "-y" suffixed words like "women's magazine-y" and "false-prophet-y" or words with " 'tude" such as "braindead-itude," "poor-human-being-itude" and "warlorditude." There's nothing new about "nano" in conjunction with a very small iPod or scientific words like "nanotubes," but slangy, informal words like "nano-brained" are adding fancy new features to the insulter's toolbox. The celebutante-inspired prefix "celebu-" has spawned many recent coinages such as "celebu-tats," "celebu-chefs," "celebu-ooops," and "celebu-scent."

On gaming words:

Sometimes new words are not invented, but are crafted from old words. In gaming, a "griefer" is a player who intentionally disrupts the gameplay of other players--a griefer gives other players grief. Gamers took a word that already existed and added the highly productive suffix "-er" to make a word that fit their language needs.

On the history of new words:

Shakespeare popped off hundreds of neologisms, such as "excellent," "lonely" and "leapfrog," that have long been accepted as words, but which, if dictionaries were being written in Elizabethan times, would have been flagged as suspiciously colloquial. Given that it is nearly impossible to create a word for something out of thin air and see it adopted by the rest of the English-speaking world--i.e., if you randomly decided to call the cover for your memory stick a "verch," no one else would join in--most of the words that have accreted in the vast English vocabulary over the 2000-plus years of the language's existence have been created in various ways.

H.E.I.D.I.s thrive while Ladults leer

This post started with an article in Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter which got me chasing up some links. In it he reports on the rise of two new words, "Ladult" - a blend of "lad" and "adult" supposedly describing a particular type of bloke in 2005 - and "HEIDI" - an acronym standing for Highly Educated Independent, Degree-carrying Individuals, a particular type of woman.

For more on each word, read on:

Enter the Ladult

A year after the wristband generation sought to Make Poverty History, we are on the brink of a nouveau hippy movement, combining spirituality, care for the environment and other people and a life code , says Ian Pearson, futurologist at BT. 'We've had Make Poverty History and this is part of the same trend. It only needs one or two charismatic people to trigger it, which could happen at any moment,' he said.

The New Man and the Metrosexual are dead. Long live the Ladult. He is single, assured, solvent and secure in his new-found masculinity. Aged between 25 and thirtysomething, the Ladult works moderately hard at middle management. His suits and shirts come from Paul Smith, Zegna, Thomas Pink and Reiss. He spends a lot on gadgets and DVDs, and enjoys poker, online gambling and even fly fishing. He irons his own shirts and can cook simple meals. He has no problem with the notion that women are his equals, but secretly thinks they are different.

Further up the age spectrum, the baby boomers are hitting 60, which could ignite generational conflict. 'They're the best-off, best-educated parents ever,' said Tom Bentley, director of the think-tank Demos. 'They have a postwar consensus mindset that tells them not to sink quickly into middle age. They want to make the most of the consumer and spending power they have. But the thirtysomething generation - the David Cameron generation - is moving into instrumental positions and has different priorities.' These include climate change; will the baby boomers do their bit, or turn into grumpy old men and women?

HEIDIS on the march

Highly Educated Independent, Degree-carrying Individuals, or HEIDIs, are set to become one of the most influential sectors in modern British society and any self-respecting brand ignores them at their peril. According to a 2005 study by Allegra Strategies and The Future Laboratory’s findings from its 2,500-strong LifeSigns Network, there are almost 7.2m HEIDIs in the UK.

They are in their late 20s and 30s and their contribution to the economy is vast. A typical HEIDI is selfmotivated, in control and articulate about herbespoke needs and brand-related purchases. Thanks to an affluence born of credit, lifestyle is her buzzword, and achieving one that is smooth, luxurious, immersive, hassle-free and aspirational is her goal.

So there you have it; if you exist as a human being, someone out there in focus group land has a word to label you with. But what's driving this language change? Are there really new "types" of people emerging who have to be labelled? Is this like the Industrial Revolution where new words sprung up to label the multitude of new products and inventions, or existing words were co-opted into employment? Hardly...

What seems to be driving this change is not supply and demand, but a very 21 st century phenomenen: consumerism and its reinvention of existing material, marketed in a new way, to sell us what we already have, or don't actually need. In other words, the creation of "new" social groups and their subsequent promotion in lifestyle magazines and newspaper articles is part of a process that targets us as consumers. So "new words" might be seen as complicit in all of this - they make these new classifications seem exciting or sexy.

Or am I being paranoid? Do we really take these words at face value and unthinkingly adopt them as part of our vocabulary? Probably not: we're clever enough to raise a quizzical eyebrow, laugh it off and get on with our lives most of the time. But it's an interesting idea, I think, that new words are being created as part of a commercial strategy.

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

Made up words and fruity phrases

Two interesting articles in The Independent last week take a look at how language changes and what we think of these changes. In the first article, Philip Hensher responds to the new words in the Collins Dictionary (as covered here) by asking if some of the new words featured actually exist in real usage, a question that students have asked every year when we’ve covered this topic in class. I mean, who uses bromance, manboobs and bobfoc?

Hensher’s article is worth a read for his wider take on the nature of language change:

Language is a living thing, not something to be entombed and frozen. One of the ways it changes most rapidly is through its vocabulary. It's not the only way novelty makes itself felt, but it's the easiest to grasp. A new term for an old thing emerges - "banging" for "excellent", taking over from "wicked". Or, occasionally, a new term for a new thing - no one knew any term for "carbon footprint" before that particular term, because nobody had the concept. The appeal of novelty demands to be recorded, however bogus the particular instance.

And he raises another possible take on new words when he says “You can't make up language as you go along; it would be truer to say that it invents you, the way you have of seeing the world as well as expressing it”

In a second article, Joan Bakewell looks at swearing and taboo language, especially the changing responses to “bad words” over time. This is made all the more relevant by the recent n-word and p-word scandals on Big Brother. And she links language change to the wider currents of change in society when she says,

Sexual words... now have a wider currency and acceptability. They crop up in the workplace, shops and offices, the school playground, and they litter the vocabularies of comedians and comic shows… With the loosening of sexual behaviour has gone the parallel freedom of language.

The rising taboo words are now concerned with race and discrimination. The BBC's survey found that "P*ki" was now rated the most offensive word of all, with the n-word a close second. And it was reportedly an untransmitted rhyme that used the P*ki word that invited Ofcom's most severe criticism of Big Brother. If swear words are those that have the most power to offend, then it appears we aren't really worried about religion and sex any more, but we do really care about racism.

So, if you use the New Words, New Woes post to mug up on processes of language change, these two articles give you a wider perspective and some useful material to look at the contexts to our language use.

Useful for:

ENA5 – Language Change

Thanks to Chas for these links

Birthers of new words

Morphology - the study of the form of words - is an element of grammar that sometimes gets overlooked at A level in the rush to analyse word classes and sentences, but it's an interesting and productive area. It's productive in that it helps us produce lots of new words and word forms, and productive in that it can help you produce good material in exams.

It's a particularly interesting language framework/method in two areas, child language and new word formation, and it's the latter we'll have a quick look at here. First of all, to refresh your memories about morphology, it's the study of how words themselves are made up of smaller units. Not all of this is essential reading for A level, but I think it's quite interesting to know (and A level should be more than just about doing what the spec tells you to do, shouldn't it?).

There are basically two types of morphology: derivational morphology is about creating (deriving) new words out of other units, while inflectional morphology is more to do with the ways in which words change depending on grammatical functions and forms. For example, to illustrate the latter, verbs inflect depending on the tense and aspect they're in (I walk - I walked - I am walking), the grammatical person they agree with (I walk - she walks) and nouns on whether they're singular or plural (dog - dogs), and there are plenty more too (An Introduction to English Morphology by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is a good read if you want to find out more.).

Derivational morphology is to do with putting morphemes (small units that make up words) together to create new words, so respect can become disrespect, terror become terrorise, and so on. A great deal of word formation in recent years has been the product of blending and compounding (bromance, staycation, podcast all being blends, and laptop, muffin top and bunny boiler all being compounds), but a tweet from MacMillan Dictionaries linking to this site offers some interesting examples of new words formed by derivational morphology.

They look at the use of the -er suffix in recent American neologisms. So, the people involved movement that claimed Barack Obama wasn't actually an American and demanded to see his birth certificate, became known as birthers. The US's satirical magazine The Onion even created a spoof movement that denied the providence of Obama's birth certificate after he had produced it, who were called Afterbirthers (demanding to see the placenta).

The Fritinanacy blog also mentions that those who refused to accept the official version of events for 9/11 were called truthers. Now we even have deathers, who refuse to accept that Osama Bin Laden is actually dead, an dthink that his burial at sea was all part of a cunning plan. There are older ones too. They point to right wingers, nutters and we even have some of our own, homegrown British ones such as lifers (prisoners on a life sentence) and ravers (people who like a particular club-based lifestyle).

So, if you're looking for some good examples of word formation processes to impress your ENGA3/ENGB3 examiners this summer, have a think about including morphology and the processes of prefixation (adding morphemes at the start of a root word), suffixation (adding morphemes at the end of a root word), or even infixing (adding morphemes in the middle of a root word...like hoo-f***ing-ray). It will help you avoid being a failer.

Reflecting on new words

After all the posts on new words of 2009, and new words of the last decade, and all the other posts about new words on this blog (probably about 50 of them over the last 5 years), here's a really excellent feature article from the Sydney Morning Herald that takes a more reflective look on which words last and why certain words become popular.

Among the many good observations Jacqueline Maley makes in her article is the point that "technology, along with American English, is by far the biggest force for change in the English language today". And she goes on to ask "How can we determine which neologisms are passing fads and which should be included in dictionaries, our lexicological gift to the next generation? How to decide which words are worthy of being anointed official representatives of our language? Or is it our dictionaries that must change, moving from stolid documents of rusted-on record to more dynamic, changeable texts?".

What I really like about this article is that it takes a wider view. Rather than just list loads of new words (like many recent broadsheet news articles on the same theme) it considers what's going on in the longer term, and asks some interesting questions about where language is heading. Plus - to be totally reductive and make it all about A level English - it's a brilliant style model for feature articles in ENGA4 Language Interventions.

A Word of Warning

While some changes to language are roundly condemned by pedants, purists and prescriptivists - creaky voice, rising intonation, split infinitives and literally not actually meaning LITERALLY AT ALL - new words often get an easy ride. People generally like new words and can see why they appear in the language, even if some of them seem a bit silly (Awesome sauce and amazeballs? Really?) or likely to last as long as a David Cameron promise on tax credits (dadbod and mantihose?). In fact, new words now get wall-to-wall media coverage.

So, this week we have seen the latest additions to the Collins Dictionary feature in pieces such as this (from the Dictionary-makers themselves), this from The Guardian, this from the BBC and this from the Daily Fail.

But among the hype and the celebration of an evolving and vibrant language, naysayers complain that some of the new entries are just trendy fads, too ephemeral to be included in esteemed dictionaries.

As Robert Lane Greene explains in a blog for The Economist, the whole process of putting new words in a dictionary is quite an intensive exercise, admittedly now made much easier by the internet: something that early lexicographers could have only dreamt of. A further explanation is given in this helpful video clip from Oxford University Press, which describes how a new word (in this case selfie) might enter their dictionaries. As the clip explains, the naysayers are partly right that things have been changing faster than before, because the new words don't have to have had a very long existence before being added to the online versions of the dictionaries. But in a way, that just reflects the rapid pace of lexical change these days. Perhaps, as John Sutherland argues in this article, language is "evolving at a faster rate now than at any other time in history because of social media and instant messaging".

Is this rapid change leaving some behind? One argument often put forward by more prescriptively-minded people is that if language changes too fast, we lose mutual intelligibility; in other words, one generation may not understand the language of another. Older people (anyone over 30) will lose any semblance of understanding of what young people are talking about, goes the argument, and that will lead to social breakdown and chaos. Indeed, this is the argument peddled in rather dubious articles like this one in yesterday's Daily Fail which claims that parents haven't a clue what their kids are saying because they're using a secret sex and drugs code, grandad!

For example, the seemingly innocuous "netflix and chill" now takes on much more sinister connotations. The innocent Snapchat message from your teenage daughter to her bae saying "Do you want to come over? We could Netflix and chill." actually means "Buy drugs, come to my boudoir and let's have hours of dangerous chemsex". Apparently.

The fear that young people's language is constantly evolving as a nefarious means of hoodwinking their prying parents or to hide other dubious activities (smoking tobacco, drinking alcopops and playing CoD until after bedtime) is one that has been around forever. This piece in The Daily Telegraph from 2013, this one from the Daily Fail (again... almost like they don't like young people), or even these from as far back as the 17th Century, all say similar things.

And if people have been complaining about it and we still manage to communicate fairly effectively with each other after all this time, surely the doom-mongers are barking up the wrong tree.

Exam revision - getting started

It's getting near that time again, with exams looming ever closer. If you are starting to think about revising for your exams then here are some pointers as to where you can look and what you can do. This post is designed for A2 students and there'll be one for AS students to follow soon.

ENGA3 consists of three parts: Language Change, Language Variation and Language Discourses. Your paper is 2 hours and 30 minutes long, which is nice. You get a choice of question 1 or 2 (Qu 1 is on Language Change and Qu 2. is on Language Variation) and then just one question 3 which you have to do. The first bit of advice is don't just revise either Change or Variation. Because you don't get any choice with question 3, it's a very good idea to make sure you're rock solid on both Change and Variation, so that you're ready to answer a language Discourses question on whatever crops up, be it debates around Political Correctness (change), male female talk (variation) or attitudes to accent (variation).

The next bit of advice is to think about the different types of question you'll get. Language Change questions may have a focus on older texts, in which case you'll be asked to analyse them for what the writers are saying, how they are saying it and how the language of each text represents the time period it's from. So to revise this, try looking at plenty of older texts from different genres. Go to the British Library texts in context site and browse through texts from Early Modern English onwards. Mug up on your language frameworks too,  by checking Beth Kemp's A level site. Don't forget to use the emag site (with your SFX log in that can be obtained from the LRC) and Kerboodle (log ins are on Moodle).

Another type of Change question could presentyou with new words, or old words with new meanings, and use these to stimulate discussion about how and why language changes and where new words come from and how they are formed. There's masses of stuff out there about new words and you should have a look at the MacMillan Dictionaries Buzzword pages for lots of good examples of new words. Also, try this link to a page full of old blog posts about new words. Don't forget that you may also be presented with numerical data, perhaps in the form of charts and graphs showing you how frequently a word might have appeared over time and in different places. Make sure you mug up on wave theory and other processes of language change from your A2 textbook.

Next time, we'll look at ENGA3 Language Variation and then at Discourses. If you have any questions, please post them as comments and I'll try to answer them.

#WOTY

2011 is over and 2012 has already been going for a couple of weeks, so I'm a bit slow in adding these links to 2011's Words of the Year.

The American Dialect Society hosts the biggest, and probably most linguistically-informed, end of year poll for new words, and they opted for Occupy as their Word of the Year. As Ben Zimmer explains in the ADS press release, “It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life
and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement.The movement itself was powered by the word”.

The event was live-tweeted throughout with the WOTY hashtag, and for me # has been the word of the year, even if it isn't really a word. So much of last year's political activism was fuelled by or commented upon as it happened by social media - the occupy movement, the summer riots in the UK, the Arab Spring - that it seems natural to have words and symbols from these fields creeping into our everyday language. It was an uncanny feeling to be sitting in the sunny south of France on holiday reading tweets about some of my favourite bits of London getting destroyed, so Twitter words loomed large in my new words of the year, even though I'm a bit late to catch onto it.

The ADS Word of the Year poll also included some less serious entries, such as assholocracy (rule by obnoxious millionaires, or for those of us in the UK, Tories), humblebrag (an expression of false humility) and amazeballs (a slang term for amazing which appears to be totally unnecessary).

Elsewhere,the ever excellent MacMillan Dictionary blog pulled together other contenders, the Evening Standard ran its own list of new or pimped up words and the OED had squeezed middle as its word of the year (despite it being two words).

And if you're looking to keep up to date with the new words of 2012 you can do no better than Kerry Maxwell's excellent Buzzwords column for MacMillan Dictionary, which is always full of proper linguistic analysis and up to date examples.

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

Having a bog shaker as you get decruited

Office slang is always an inventive source of new language and this piece in The Daily Telegraph gives some really good examples of new words and phrases.

Among my favourites are:

Cashanova (a blend of cash + Cassanova) : a person who brings in money to the business through using his charm
To be decruited (an application of a different prefix to recruit): to lose your job
Bog shaker (a compound of the slang word for toilet and shaker): an emotional breakdown in an office toilet cubicle.

For ENGA3 it's always helpful to have up to date examples of new words and an idea of the processes that lead to their creation. As Kerry Maxwell explains on the Kerboodle videos about new words and lexicography, lots of new words and phrases rely very heavily on existing patterns of word creation, as well as on existing words and phrases, so it's no surprise to see credit munch (a cheap meal) appearing as a response to credit crunch.

ENGA3 Language Discourses: some pointers

With ENGA3 coming up at the end of this week and several requests for help with section B of the paper, here are some pointers about the topics and what to revise. 

There have been three ENGA3 papers set so far, and the topics for language discourses have been as follows:

Jan 2010

Popular psychology/ linguistic self-help books looking at male and female communication

Jun 2010

John Humphrys arguing prescriptivist views about language change

Jan 2011

Will Self and Lynn Truss discussing their attitudes to texting and txt language

There’s no point trying to “question-spot” and putting all your eggs in one basket, by proclaiming that as regional accents haven’t turned up yet it’ll definitively be that topic, but it can be useful to think about the types of questions that have been asked and those that haven’t yet.

So, the topics that haven’t cropped up yet are:

Changing varieties of English. There’s been quite a lot of discussion about how regional accents are thriving and local accents dying out, as well as new ones (like MLE/MEYD/”Jafaican”) emerging, and whether this is a good or a bad thing.

World English/es. This hasn’t cropped up yet and could appear as it’s on the spec. What could be asked about this? Well, there have been quite big debates around the world about the role of Standard English and whether we should be imposing World English (one variety) or showing awareness and understanding of different varieties (World Englishes) and how English changes thanks to local language and culture. There are also several interesting historical angles about why English has spread and whether this will continue in the same way.

New words and attitudes to them. While language change has cropped up before in the form of John Humphrys bemoaning the state of our common language and Truss and Self talking about texting and its impact on language, there is also scope for something on new words. Many new words have entered dictionaries in recent years and some commentators find this deeply discombobulating. “How can OMG and LOL be “words”? “ they cry. Dictionary compilers have argued in response  that they’re reflecting the changing nature of our vocabulary and that they have a duty to record new words.

Political correctness and Linguistic engineering. The need (or otherwise) to impose changes on language and remove offensive terms is a very good topic for debate and leads to some very polarised opinions. One man’s throwaway remark about chavs is another’s systematic demonization of the working class. Likewise, terms for gender, race and sexuality have been discussed recently in regard to the changing roles and status of different groups in British society.

Variation that isn’t gender or region-related. The topic of language variation doesn’t just have to cover females and males or regions; other areas on the syllabus that could appear are age-related variation, work-related variation and what might broadly be termed “communities of practice”.

Technology and changing language. Texting cropped up recently, but other technological advances and forms of Computer-Mediated Communication, like Facebook and Twitter, could be a focus for debate. 

Knowing something about the topics is only part of the knack to doing well in this exam. Equally, if not more, importantly, you need to know about how to analyse the language used to construct the debates. What are the writers saying and how are they expressing their views? What kinds of wider debates are these discussions tapping into?

Over the next day or two, I'll add some points about what often works on this paper and give some examples of how good students have approached language discourses.

Boys will be boys, girls will be girls and hen will be both

Back in 1884, Charles Crozat Converse decided that English needed a new pronoun, a singular and gender neutral pronoun. He proposed it be called thon, apparently a blend of that + one. In 1971, Casey Miller and Kate Swift proposed that we introduce three new pronouns - tey, ter and tem (to operate as singular versions of they, their and them). In 2005, Dr Richard Neal applied for intellectual property rights over two similar pronouns hesh and hir (the former being an alternative to he and she or s/he, the latter her/his). None of these really caught on, as this 2007 OUP blog post by Ben Zimmer explains in more detail.

So, are all such attempts doomed to failure? If new words as varied and inconsequential as jeggings, upcycling, bromance and mankini can be readily accepted, why not new pronouns? Clearly these terms haven't entered standard usage, but there has been an increase (at least, anecdotally and in my own experience) in attempts at gender neutrality through s/he, he or she and the use of they.

Perhaps these words are harder to change because they are so common. Research a few years ago suggested that our most commonly used words are the most resistant to change, despite often being the most irregular. So, while we're happy to adopt jeggings as a word (although the day I wear the actual clothing is the day I die) but slow to adapt our pronoun use.

Perhaps we should all just give up and accept that English was historically built by men, written by men and is probably destined to reflect an imbalance that favours men? Perhaps not.

While prescriptivists will no doubt cry that changing or inventing pronouns to avoid gender bias is "PC gone mad", and pedants will argue that the current best-placed alternative they shouldn't be used for singular subjects (because it's always been a plural pronoun), we know from academic research that gendered terms (including pronouns) do matter.

Words have a huge impact on how gender is constructed and words can often hold the key to how we define ourselves in so many different ways. Just have a look at a catalogue for children's toys and how gender roles are not only differentiated by colours and activities but by words and phrases.Then have a look at this piece of research from 1972:

In 1972… some three hundred college students were asked to select from magazines and newspapers a variety of pictures that would appropriately illustrate the different chapters of a sociology textbook being prepared for publication. Half the students were assigned chapter headings like “Social Man”, “Industrial Man”, and “Political Man”. The other half was given different but corresponding headings like “Society”, “Industrial Life”, and “Political Behavior”. Analysis of the pictures selected revealed that in the minds of students of both sexes use of the word man evoked, to a statistically significant degree, images of males only — filtering out recognition of women’s participation in these major areas of life — whereas the corresponding headings without man evoked images of both males and females…. The authors concluded, “This is rather convincing evidence that when you use the word man generically, people do tend to think male, and tend not to think female” ([Miller et al. 1980, pages 19-20], quoted by Spertus; emphasis added).
(source: http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/grammar-and-syntax/gender-neutral-language/ )

Swift and Miller (referred to both in the first paragraph and in this quote) later went on to write their influential Handbook of Non-Sexist Writing which played a significant part in drawing attention to the systematic derogation (or outright denial of the existence) of women in some aspects of language. But in an earlier book, Words and Women, they set out to - in the words of Swift in this illuminating interview with the writers - draw attention to the imbalance in language:

All we wanted to do was to point out to people that ours was a male-centered language. We all have this male-imposed view when we first acquire language, and it gets reinforced in the recess of using language. We wanted people to think about this and then try to come up with their own ways of solving the problem. There is no set solution such as every 'man' should become 'person,' so we refused to make this a how-to-do-it book.

When it was released, it garnered favourable reviews and in the words of Benjamin DeMott of the New York Times was...

...a complacency shaker. It convinces you, if you need convincing, that belief in the inconsequentiality of many of the customs and conventions under examination is, in fact a species of complicity in the continual humiliation of half of the human world. 

So, why come back to this 2012? Hen, that's why. Swedish writers have now taken up the cause and produced their own new gender neutral pronoun, hen, which is explained in this Slate article. There's an interesting take on it from this blogger too, who argues that "It is simply another form of domination and since it lacks substantial support among grass roots it will not succeed".

Will hen catch on as thon, hesh, hir, tem, tey and ter failed to? God knows and hesh ain't letting on yet.

Out with the old, in with the new

When we look at Language Change we often get interested in new uses of words, or even new words which crop up. So, today we looked at semantic change in one class and thought about words like bitch, gay, moist, sick, grimy and beef which have changed meaning over time and the processes behind these semantic shifts. Last week we looked at new words and word formation processes: blending (moobs = man + boobs, autocutie = autocue + cutie); compounds (studmuffin = stud + muffin, muffintop = muffin + top); initialisms (FBI, BBC); acronyms (HEIDI = Highly Educated Independent Degree-carrying Individual, BOBFOC = Body Off Baywatch, Face Off Crimewatch, BOGOF = Buy One Get One Free).

But what about old words? In two articles in Monday's Times, old words get discussed and their inclusion in the dictionary debated. In this excellent article, David Crystal - all round language God and one of the speakers at next year's teacher workshops at SFX - talks about what happens when words stop being used or go out of fashion. In this article, The Times ask readers to vote for words they wish to keep in the dictionary and why.

English: refreshing the lexical gaps that other languages cannot reach

“If a language is not capable of creating new words to describe new advances, it will die.” These are the words of Alfred Gilder, terminology chief at the French finance ministry, speaking at a recent Swiss conference about the spread of English around Europe and the state of the continent's native languages. "Modernise or die!" was his message. There is a growing concern in many countries about the seemingly unstoppable rise of English as a global language and the effect that this is having on the health and integrity of other languages. So, when words like laptop and roaming, and a phrase like last but not least make it into another language - be it Swiss, German, French or Turkish - the native language takes another step towards losing part of its identity and global English takes another step into another nation's territory.

But why are speakers of other languages using these English words? Why don't they come up with their own new expressions in their own mother tongues? Well that's what Alfred Gilder would like to see, but it's hard to imagine it happening when English has become so ubiquitous and so, well...global. With English being spread through technology, commerce and culture around the world, it's hard to resist its influence. But perhaps there's something about the language itself that makes it attractive - something internal, rather than external - such as its adaptability and tendency to innovate. In short, the fact that English is constantly adding new words and phrases to its vocabulary could be the reason why it's spreading so quickly: it's refreshing the lexical gaps that other languages cannot reach, to nick Heineken's old advertising slogan. In effect, language change - so often derided by prescriptivists as leading to the degradation of our language - has helped push English to the forefront of world languages.

And returning to the article in The Journal of Turkish Weekly, where this conference was covered (linked from Macmillan Dictionary's language in the news roundup), there is recognition that this isn't a new thing, but it's something that is happening at a much swifter pace than ever before:

Of course borrowing words and expressions from other languages is a natural function of language development and English itself has absorbed countless influences in its history – from Latin, French and Hindi, to name but a few. What is different about the current dominance of English is that it is the first truly global language and it is spewing out words at a pace that other languages have no chance to compete with. This rapid evolution favours those who can ride the English wave but creates a language divide, akin to the digital divide, for those who are poor in English.

Where will this lead? At worst, it could lead to the deaths of certain languages around the world, some of which are nearly on their last legs, if this report is anything to go by.

Welcome to the "Croydon Facelift"

Or to put it more technically "a UK female hairstyle which pulls the hair back tightly from the face, supposedly giving the effect of a facelift; stereotyped as that of working-class young women". And how about prison whites: "expensive trainers favoured by rap stars and their acolytes; the implication is that such shoes are worn by young black men, who are de facto criminals".

These are new entries in Jonathon Green's Chambers Slang Dictionary (a reworking of his Cassell Dictionary of Slang, or "that big yellow swearing dictionary on the shelf" as it's become known in my classroom). The Daily Telegraph offers its views on the dictionary in an article here; it's a decent read, as it goes beyond the usual novelty take on new words and instead has a think about where the words come from and what this tells us about the English Language and its development over the last century, with a shift away from homegrown Cockney slang towards American influences:

But while the themes of slang have stayed much the same, the sources have changed hugely. Until the start of Second World War, slang in this country was basically home-grown. There was cockney rhyming slang, of course, with its cheery costermongers banging endlessly on about their 'apples and pears' and 'plates of meat'. But there were also numerous other secret languages, designed to be understood only by a small group of people. As words and expressions passed into more common usage, so slang evolved in order to retain its exclusivity.

All that changed, though, with the Second World War. 'After D-Day, American slang - principally black American slang - took over,' says Green. 'In the 1960s, middle-class white people used words like "cool" and "groovy" without realising that they were incredibly old black words. Actually, "groovy" started out in the early 20th century as an expression meaning "staid" or "unfashionable" - that is, stuck in a groove. By the 1940s, though, it was being used by jazz musicians to refer to "slipping into a groove" while they were playing.'

But whereas it used to take several years for new words or phrases to move into common usage, now it happens in a few days. 'That's been the biggest change recently. If you look at black rappers and hip-hop, which is undoubtedly the cutting edge of slang at the moment, they're coming up with words that the white middle classes in America and England are immediately trying out for themselves. That's why you get all those floppy-haired public schoolboys making complete idiots of themselves by referring to their girlfriends as "bitches".'

But the Telegraph article takes a bit of a strange sidetrack when it claims that Black British English (and to some extent Asian British English, if there is such a homogeneous thing) has lagged behind its US counterparts. Green seems to suggest that most Black British slang is just imported from the USA via rap music, but I'd argue that we still have a fairly healthy homegrown slang. Yes, it riles me (it vexes me even) to hear British teenagers describing the police as the "feds" (feds being a clipping of the full words of FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, an organisation we don't have in the UK): why not stick to coppers, boy dem or the rozzers?

But then trying to impose rules on slang - or arguing with someone about the etymology of a particular slang term ("Listen here, my good man. This homework cannot be "gay", as you suggest, for it is an assignment without sexuality of any kind") - is pointless. Green is to be admired for his love of language and desire to find out more about it. Maybe next time round, we'll see some citations from our own students and your research into some of these words.

And here's a link to a video clip of Jonathon Green talking about his dictionary.

Useful for:

ENA5 - Language Change

ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Word formation processes and language change

This piece by Stan Carey on the MacMillan Dictionary Blog is worth a look if you're trying to come up with examples of recently created new words. As he points out, with words like staycation and daycation, many of these new words are the result of similar processes, in this case the blending of  whole words or elements of existing words, so stay + vacation = staycation, while day + vacation = daycation.

You can also see some examples of new words that relate to specific events, such as flunami ("an extremely large increase in the number of people suffering from flu" formed by flu + tsunami) being linked to the recent spike in flu cases, while snowpocalypse (snow + apocalypse), snowmageddon (snow + armageddon) and blizzaster (blizzard + disaster) all relate to the USA's recent bad weather and increasingly inventive ways to describe its magnitude.

Of course, as we find ever more inventive ways to express the size of something massive, the original words that used to mean that something was impressive or big tend to get bleached, losing their power and forcing us to find an expression that's more powerful.

Language change - a mehness to society?

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change