When is a gang not a gang?

When it's a group, an anti-social gathering of hoodies, or a click/clique. That's what the Youth Justice Board are saying anyway, and they should know as they've been studying youth behaviour and crime and they think that labelling a gathering of youths as a "gang" actually makes the young people concerned more likely to see themselves as social outcasts and push them towards a genuine gang culture of organised crime, illegal cash and drug dealing.

And we all know where that leads, don't we? Rarely to the multi-million dollar incomes and uber-bling lifestyles of knuckleheaded gangstas like 50 Cent and The Game, but more often to Feltham, smelly stairwells in rundown towerblocks, crack pipes and the sharp end of another idiot's shank.

So, getting linguistic about this (and moving away from my pulpit) are the Youth Justice Board adopting a position of linguistic determinism? Is the label "gang" actually influencing young people's behaviour? Well, apparently it is. According to the BBC article about the YJB's report, they argue that "glamorising such offenders may encourage them to become involved in more serious criminal behaviour".

And it's a double-edged label too:

Young people themselves resent the way the word gang is used to describe any group behaving in an anti-social way. It suggests the term "group related" rather than "gang related" is a better way to describe their activities.

So, just a day after the ENA1 Language & Representation paper, why cover this? Well, I've always argued that English Language is for life not just for exams. Or was that dogs and Christmas... I get confused.

And if you want to read a genuinely well written account of London's gang/group-related culture then take a look at this article in today's Guardian.

And to find out more about the words "gang" and "clique", have a look at the OED online (if you use college computers, you'll be able to access it for free).

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation
ENA6 - Language Debates

Good luck!

Good luck to everyone taking ENA1 and ENA3 tomorrow morning. Remember to eat some breakfast (to feed your brain!), to get there early, and to read the question papers properly. Stick to your timings and remember that the first question on each paper is worth twice as much as the essay question, but that you should give yourself enough time to answer both fully and a bit of time at the end to check those pesky apostrophes, spellings and sentence boundaries.

Mental, bonkers, one sandwich short of a picnic

Just a quick link here to an article in last week's Guardian (that I was too buried in coursework marking to see at the time). It's about the language used to label people who might otherwise be known as "mad" or "crazy". As the writer Jo Brand explains:

The liberal consensus is that the careless and flippant use of words such as "fruitcake" and "wacko" reveals a disrespectful ignorance towards people with mental health problems. The Guardian's own in-house style guide counsels against using such "clearly offensive and unacceptable expressions as loony, maniac, nutter, psycho and schizo". But if you want to talk about mental incapacity in English you will not find yourself lost for words. This is one of the richest areas of our language, and we seem to revel in the joyful creativity of coining words that skip around, compartmentalise and poke fun at the serious issue of mental illness.

Another social group for your answers on ENA1, perhaps?

Useful for:

ENA1 - Language & Representation

Exams, exams, exams

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

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

ENA1

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

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

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

ENA3

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

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

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

ENA5

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

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

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

ENA6

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

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

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

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

Stop the cusswords in classrooms

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

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

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

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

N-words with attitude

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

Stop the cusswords in hip hop. Y-O.

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

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

Watch the clip here.

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

An article in The Independent reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for: ENA1 – Language & Representation

Scrobbling Avril Lavigne

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

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

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

Top tips for AS and A2

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

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

ENA3
Top tips for the whole paper

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

ENA6
Top tips for whole paper

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

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

Please post any revision questions here as comments.

The changing face of "whatever"

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

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

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

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

1982: Meaning "you decide", San Francisco Examiner

1980s: Used regularly by California "valley girls"

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

1990s: Used by the Jerry Springer crowd

Late 1990s: Reaches UK's rich female teenagers

Early 2000s: UK street language

2003: Little Britain's first TV series

Sources: OED, linguist Tony Thorne

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Accent change revisited

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

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Accent change? You're having a laff.

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change & Varieties

We’re not loving it

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

Haribo crisis

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

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

English accent = bad teeth and booze problem

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Varieties

Nasty names

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

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

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

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

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

New acronyms: FIDS and FUDS

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Today's cliché is tomorrow's proverb

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

Language change - a mehness to society?

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

NYPD Black?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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