War of Words

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigations

Wrinkly coffin-dodgers need not apply

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

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

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Muffin tops, salad dodgers and munters

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations

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

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

Accents hold the comedy key

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

"PC gone mad" parts 301 & 302

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hyperlexia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition

"Your mum is a terrorist whore"...

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

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

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

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

The Institute for Domestic Incarceration Survivors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation

ENA6 then it's all over...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck!

Don't tupac your WAGs

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

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

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

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

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

Celibacy and gradable adjectives

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

As Mangan puts it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
ENA1 - Textual Analysis language frameworks

More gayness!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your views would be most welcome!

Is your ringtone gay?

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

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

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

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

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

Voice of the people?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Useful for:
EA4C - Language Investigation

Top tips for ENA5

Following on from the top tips for ENA 1, here are some suggestions for what you can do to mug up on ENA5 Language Varieties and Change: today, the textual analysis and contemporary language change questions, later in the week, the varieties question...

ENA5 can be a tricky paper as you’re expected to have a decent knowledge of language change over time & attitudes towards change, as well as a sound grasp of more advanced elements of grammar. You can revise the change aspects using a range of online resources, but the grammar bit needs plenty of practice. There are some resources you can have a look at to help you test your own knowledge of grammar, and then you can try to apply this knowledge to some older texts. Try the Internet Grammar of English and English in Use sites and then take a look at the History of Prose Style and British Library online sites for examples of older texts.

I’d suggest looking at really short extracts of a range of forms and genres and see what you could usefully say about particular lexical and grammatical features in each text. So if you’re looking at one of the selection of recipes available on the British Library site, you could think about pronoun use, modal auxiliaries, sentence function and uses of subordinate clauses of condition in the context of what the recipe’s main purpose is.

Alternatively, with a piece of philosophical or political writing, you might get mileage out of looking for particular noun types, semantic fields and sentence types: you might find that there are more complex sentences featuring relative or dependent clauses, because that type of text requires more complex logical relationships as part of its subject matter.

For the contemporary language change essay question, it’s important you have a range of examples of new words that have come into the language over the past 50 years as well as the linguistic terms used to label the processes that have created them (clipping, compounding, blending etc.). It’s also useful to look at semantic change and have the same set of terms at your disposal to describe changes in meaning (pejoration, amelioration, semantic reclamation, broadening etc.). One of the best places I've come across for discussion of new words is the MacMillan English Dictionary site.

Try to get a sense of the reasons for change too: new technology and the influence of the media are two such factors but there are many wider ones to do with social and political change (gender, sexuality and race issues and the language associated with them) and education.

With attitudes towards language change, I think it’s important to know your history and realise that people have always moaned about how language changes, while others have embraced the changes as part of a natural organic process: progress, if you like!

So, look at the background to things like Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 and Jonathan Swift’s calls to introduce an academy for language. The best places I’ve found to mug up on these have been Melvyn Bragg’s Adventure of English and the BBC series, the Routes of English .

For a critical look at attitudes to language change, your best bet is to read the chapter at the back of your ENA5 resource pack (if you haven't already) which covers Jean Aitchison's approach to others' attitudes (from her book The Language Web). These links created by the late Andrew Moore are very helpful in looking at language change and Aitchison’s views.

If you can get hold of it, David Crystal's new book How Language Works has a good section in it about change and the whole prescriptivist/descriptivist debate called "How Not to Protect Languages".

For more variety you could have a look at Eats Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss and Adrian Beard's Language Change (check chapter list for the one on attitudes).

Londonstani

With all the recent media coverage of Sue Fox's research focusing on the made-up term "Jafaikan" and the Caribbean influence on English slang and youth dialect, it's easy to forget that most of her research started off looking at the Asian influence on Cockney in Tower Hamlets. A recent book by Gautam Malkani called Londonstani is written in what sounds like a form of the Multi Ethnic Youth Dialect that Sue has researched, and it's been widely talked about (a bit like the film Kidulthood) not just for its violent and disturbing plot, but for its grasp of the "real" sounds of speech from the street.

So how does it sound? Here's an extract as quoted in The Guardian's review of the book: "your glasses r so smashed up u can't count? Shud've gone 2 Specsavers, innit. How many a us bredren b here?".

So, does it sound genuine or not? Depends what you hear around you and how successfully you think Malkani has translated this into prose on the page. He's certainly not the first to attempt to convey dialect and accent on the page; as an article by Pete Bunten in the latest E Magazine explains, writers like Charles Dickens and D.H. Lawrence have used regional varieties to flesh out their characters' voices and identities, while more recently Scottish writers Irvine Welsh and James Kelman have used the voices of working class Scots to tell their complicated tales of drug addiction, alcoholism and dead-end lives.

A couple of reviews in The Guardian and Telegraph take differing positions on the novel and are linked here for you to look at. In terms of the usefulness of this for A Level study, ENA5 asks you to look at both change and varieties, so anything on emerging new dialects covers both topic areas, while ENA6 is all about language debates - issues around language that cause discussion or argument - so this could easily be part of that debate. For Lang and Lit students, it's perhaps helpful too to study the ways in which writers try to mimic spoken language in their prose style and the various technique sthey employ to capture the spoken voice.

Gangsta rap is "offensive and horrible"

A report in today's Guardian tells us that "a headteacher in charge of the government's taskforce on school discipline has urged parents and schools to ban children from listening to "offensive and horrible" sexist and racist rap music lyrics".

Whatever you think of the practicalities of stopping people listening to gangsta rap (Do teachers have to enforce a "no hoodies, no hats , no pimpin my hoes" rule in the classroom?), what do you think about the lyrical content of such beautiful gems as "Nothing left to do, but buy some shells for my glock/Why? So I can rob every known dope spot ... Gotta unlock it, and take me up a hostage" or "And what's between your legs is the product/Use it properly/And you'll make dollars, bitch"?

Many argue that the lyrics of this type of rap glorify violence, criminal lifestyles, abuse towards women and minority groups, and generally perpetuate a worldview that is negative and self-defeating. And I tend to agree, to an extent. Much as I liked the rap of my own era (and I'm showing my age here with names like Public Enemy, De La Soul, Paris, The Goats, Hijack and Ice Cube) a lot of the more recent lyrical output of 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg and many others seems to me to celebrate being an idiot. Maybe it's just my age...

But my opinions aside, is there a linguistic focus for all of this? Could we really argue that the words of these songs affect people - especially vulnerable, disadvantaged young boys - into behaving in more extreme and violent ways? The Sapir Whorf hypothesis (or at least the strong version of it, linguistic determinism) would propose that language can change the way we think, while reflectionists might argue that it simply tells us about a society that's going down the plughole.

Many A2 students have looked at the representation of women in rap lyrics as part of their Language Investigation coursework, and others have explored the different styles of language used in lyrics, but how about exploring the themes of violence and abuse, or looking at the connections between language and attitudes/ language and lifestyle choices?

I know the AS exams have only just finished but now's a good time to start thinking about coursework for next year...

You can join the Guardian debate on this story here too.

Good luck!

Good luck to all of you taking ENA1 and ENA3 today. Make sure you have some lunch before you start and don't revise up to the last minute!

Two cheers for PC

For those of you revising for ENA1 Language & Representation, this article by "Teacher of the Year" Philip Beadle has some good stuff to say about PC and attitudes towards it. (And on top of that, I like Phil Beadle - he's got a sound educational philosophy and his teaching is inventive and fun.)

In particular, this paragraph hits on issues around language and disability which some of you have asked for advice about:

Take, for instance, the phrase "Aids victim". During the early 90s, there
was a drive to tag people as "living with HIV", as opposed to being "victims" of
it. There are few, outside the most militant political group, who would argue
with this drive. The word "victim" implies defencelessness and defeat, whereas
"living with" suggests the fat lady hasn't even begun tuning up yet, and that
the person in question is vital, active, getting on with the task of living, and
not the passive recipient of an immediate death sentence.

If you need more advice on ENA1 work, try looking here and here, and do a search using the blog search toolbar at the top of the page using keywords like "political correctness" & "racist language".

Going grrrr can be grrrreat in some conversations

Most of us know that if we're angry it isn't always easy to make our point in a discussion (and research seems to support this), but what about if we're only pretending to be angry?

If we put on an angry face and behave in an angry fashion (without actually losing control) can we get better results in some conversational situations? Research from the British Psychological Society's research digest seems to suggest that such an angry act can get us results.

“Whereas feeling angry has been shown to lead to bad negotiation outcomes, we showed that expressing anger can lead to good negotiation outcomes” said researchers Marwan Sinaceur and Larissa Tiedens.

First they asked 157 students to imagine they were a salesman for a technology company, and to read a fictional account of a negation between themselves and a buyer. Afterwards, the students who read a version in which the buyer got angry agreed to more concessions than the students who read a version in which he stayed calm, but only if they were told beforehand that their business was struggling at the moment.

Could we apply some of these findings to conversation analysis ourselves, or perhaps link it to what we've seen with The Apprentice and the boardroom showdowns at the end of each episode?

Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting through language

What do we mean by 'words'?

There was an item a few weeks ago about how many separate words there are in English. David Crystal has various suggestions in his Cambridge encyclopedias - and elsewhere - and you can easily find other figures bandied about by other linguists.

But it's not as easy as it might seem to calculate a precise figure. What do we mean by 'words'? Do we include every morphological variant of a root word, with every possible permutation of affixes? Do we just mean 'headword', as lexicographers term them? Some scientific and other specialist glossaries contain thousands, maybe even millions of entries that never make their way into 'English' dictionaries. So beware of easily swallowing stories like: 'English nears its millionth word'; the picture is more complex and multi-faceted than it appears. Here are two links for more nuanced discussion of this fascinating topic:

http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/
Merriam-Webster site on this (a very useful site for exploring in general, btw)
http://www.m-w.com/help/faq/total_words.htm

Simon

Internet gives language change free reign

Discussions about language change often seem to focus on new words and the ways in which words change meaning over time, but what about spelling (or orthography, as we tend to call it with A Level Language)?

A brief look at older texts - from Old English through to Middle English, and even up to Late Modern English - should reveal that spellings have undergone significant changes over time. Some are due to fairly simple typographical conventions of the time - how will smilies like this appear to readers in 20, 50 or 100 years? ;-) - while others seem to change for other reasons, such as particular foreign influences. How about French/Norman "querunto", American "color" or Jamaican "sekkle"?

An article in today's Guardian points the finger at one of the media for spreading changes in orthography: the internet. According to Patrick Barkham, dubious spellings of common expressions and cliches, whose meanings and original forms have become lost in time, are increasingly being disseminated through the internet. Take for example some of these:

"slight of hand" instead of "sleight", "phased by" when it should be "fazed by", "butt naked" instead of the correct "buck naked" and "vocal chords" for "vocal cords."

Many of these are quite baffling and rely on words that have either dropped out of usage or have changed meaning over time, but with the increased speed of communication that the internet offers, the "wrong" spellings seem to spread like wildfire.

But as Catherine Soanes, of Oxford Dictionaries goes on to explain in a pleasingly descriptivist way, "We have to accept spelling is not fixed and can change over the years. You only have to look back 100 years, when the word rhyme was spelled rime. But since then we adopted rhyme as the correct spelling because this is more like the Greek word from which it originally came".

And for this week's Haribo prize, what's the deliberate spelling mistake in this post's title, and what should it be? The first two answers posted as comments below get the prize...

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Wengerian

My first contribution to this site: thanks for inviting me.

After Arsenal's (lucky?) passage through to the European Cup Final the other night after a less than inspiring performance against plucky Villareal (Spanish for 'royal villa', not 'real villa'), their French manager was interviewed on tv.

He began by acknowledging that his team had not played well. The way he said it was wonderful; it was something like, 'Footballistically we didn't play well'. A delightful new word; how have we survived so long without it?

Btw, isn't it curious that his first name is French for arsenal (well, almost).

Unlikely to make the front page of The Daily Mail...

Those of you who remember the case of the 10 year old boy who was being prosecuted for racially abusing a schoolmate, may be interested to know that the case has been dropped by the CPS (Crown Prosecution Service). But the details of the case have also turned out to be more serious than was widely reported at the time, particularly in the right-wing papers which love to attack Political Correctness at every opportunity. But don't expect to see a Daily Mail front page tomorrow apologising for its reporting of the original story...

Top tips for ENA3

During the holidays I put together a list of top tips for approaching the ENA1 unit, so I'd like to do the same for ENA3. However, someone has beaten me to it and done it much better than I could manage, so I'm going to use hers instead and let you peruse this excellent site for help with all areas of this unit.

The dying art of conversation

The BBC website magazine featured an interview last week between Ron Carter (top linguist) and Ros Taylor (psychologist and business advisor) about the supposed death of "proper" conversation.

It's worth a read , I think, for a couple of reasons: firstly, it offers a broad discussion of what makes conversation work (good for ENA3 essay questions); secondly, the format of the interview could be of help to those of you working on radio scripts or web site articles for ENA6.

Have a look here for the article and here for another article about what we talk about in the office. Well, I don't work in an office. And you probably don't either... so I suppose it's what people in offices talk about then...

HRH Speech (literally)

Just watched the Prince's speech (sad I know, but somewhat justified in that I was actually waiting for the news to come on afterwards...*cough cough*)- and wanted to know if everyone agrees on HRH's accent as RP, or if we possibly have a case for a watered down version.

To put it more sensibly, is it only me (or should this pronoun be 'I'?) who found non-standard/non-RP features in the way he spoke? Discuss...

Charissa

More on jafaican/jafaikan...

The whole "Jafaikan" / "Jafaican" issue seems to have caught the media's imagination, so here are some links to other features on it:

Daily Mail - Jafaican is wiping out inner-city accents
Daily Mail - Understanding Jafaican
Evening Standard - Why we is all talkin like Ali G

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change & Varieties

Thanks to Helen, Opey and "The Library Skets" for some of these links.

Language & Liberty

In response to the Judge Feinstein outburst about "political correctness gone mad", ex-deputy Labour Party leader Roy Hattersley has made a vigorous defence of PC. He stops short of supporting prosecuting the child at the centre of the furore, but argues that

We think in words. If we use words that suggest there is something reprehensible about gays, women or ethnic minorities, that is how we come to think about them. What is more, our bad example can cause prejudice in others. Political correctness has helped change the world. It is at least in part because decent people denounce talk of poofters and queers that something approaching legal equality has been afforded to gay men. And it is because such language is still defended in the name of liberty and plain English that there are still some dark corners of society in which they are regarded as inferior.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Favourite words

Rather like Charissa's post about Moving Words last week, this is one about people's favourite words. In yesterday's Independent a range of writers and lovers of English chose their favourite and least favourite words, explaining why.

So what's your favourite word and why? And your least favourite?

Jafaikan demeans women

In a response to the article mentioned in the "Can you speak Jafaikan?" post, Zoe Williams argues that we shouldn't be celebrating such slang developments but looking at why they disproportionately label women rather than men. She makes the point as follows:

What all these words in fact have in common is that they define women by sexual function - denigrating them if they show any interest in sex themselves, ranging them according to their physical attributes and dismissing them once their physical peak has passed.

It's an interesting response and one that I feel a degree of instant sympathy for, but having said that, when hasn't slang denigrated women? Julia Stanley's research in the early 1970s found over 200 terms used to derogate women, and only about 20 for men. Others have contested these figures and carried out their own research using online databases , but the pattern holds true for the most part: there are more terms around to label women than there are for men.

Is this because - as many feminist linguists suggest - men dominate language as they do society (Dale Spender's Man Made Language being a good example of this view)? Or is it down to the nature of slang itself?

Slang tends to serve many functions in society, but one of its main ones is to put other people down, so it's hardly surprising that new slang developments do that too. But Zoe Williams has a good point - if we uncritically embrace all new language just for the sake of appearing cool, hip, nang or whatever new word means "up to date and fashionable" then we might miss some of its nastier influences.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Can you speak Jafaikan?

A piece in yesterday's Guardian looks at the influence of Jamaican English on London dialects. Referring to Sue Fox's research on changing London accents and dialects, the article brands such a dialect "Jafaikan" (fake Jamaican, geddit?). The author, Emily Ashton (a ghetto name if ever I heard one) then gives us a quick slang glossary before heading back to her ends for a cup of rosy lee.

Like a lot of articles about changing language, this one takes a fairly superficial view of what's a very complex pattern of subtle shifts and influences, but it's not a bad read and you can have a laugh at the definitions. In fact, Sue Fox's research will be given a more thorough explanation by the woman herself at next week's SFX Language Conference (plug).

Edited on 06.02.13 to add:
If you're coming here from The Guardian Society link then you can find some better discussions about Jafaican/Jafaikan, Multicultural London English (MLE) and Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect (MEYD) here and here.


Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties and Change

"Playing like a spaz"

Tiger Woods, the golfer described his own performance the other day by saying, "I played like a spaz"... and I had typed a very long piece about this, full of references to negative semantic space, historical tributes to an icon of my teenage years (Joey Deacon) and Language & Representation, but some s*d just blew a fuse in our house, so it's all gone. Curses!

So have a look at this article about the words "spaz" and "spastic" from the BBC news website and its disability issues site, Ouch,and I reckon you can work out why it's interesting and how it might help you with your work on ENA1 Language & Representation.

And check out the top 10 most hated words as voted for by Ouch's readers. What's interesting to me is how different the two sets of charts are: the words hated by disabled people are quite different to those voted for by non-disabled people. Why might this be?

More grammar

Michael McCarthy, whose views on grammar and language have been mentioned here previously, has another article on the subject in yesterday's Guardian. In it he defends the use of certain types of more convoluted grammar in certain texts, mostly academic texts, and makes an excellent argument for viewing all grammar within its context: not judging the grammar of spoken English as poor, or criticising the grammar of academic texts as too complicated. It's a good, descriptivist argument and one that should help with A2 topics on ENA5 and ENA6.

Playground insults

The story of the 10 year-old boy who called his classmate a "p*ki", the n-word and "Bin Laden" and ended up in front of a judge, has been the lead story in several newspapers today. So, is this "political correctness gone mad" as the judge in the case himself claimed, or a reasonable attempt to clamp down on racist bigotry? The judge, Jonathan Finestein argued (according to The Telegraph) that "he used to be called fat at school and said that in the old days the headmaster would have given the children "a good clouting" and sent them on their way". Aah, those good old days when you could beat children and call a spade a spade, or a darkie, or whatever else you fancied... Err, racism aside, is it such a great idea to beat 10 year-old kids (or any kids for that matter) for things they say? And is calling someone "fat" really the same as calling someone deeply unpleasant racist names? There aren't gangs of demented murderers rushing around killing people because they're "fat", but there certainly are if they're black; you only have to look at the horrific cases of Anthony Walker this year, and Stephen Lawrence and Duwayne Brooks over ten years ago, to realise that people still get killed for the colour of their skin. So, "fat", "p*ki" and n-word are hardly equivalents, your honour... But might taking this language to court be a step too far? Can't the school punish the child and deal with it sensibly? Looking through the various stories in the press highlights each paper's political agenda and what they choose to report, or not. For example, Channel 4 News' website reveals that the child had refused to accept a "final warning" while Sky News tells us that the child accused his alleged victim of calling him "white trash" before he himself insulted him. Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror, which has had a more progressive anti-racist attitude than many papers, adds more detail to the insults offered. Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation

Seeking out new words and new civilisations...

The latest edition of Macmillan English Dictionary update has a brilliant feature on how new words are created, which is perfect revision for A2 students looking at Language Change. It explores processes like blending and compounding as well as looking at completely new words. Have a look here for more.

On the subject of Language Change, Beth Kemp's English website for King Edward VI College, Nuneaton. has some good revision material for this topic (and others) and has recently been updated. You can find it here.

Useful for:
ENA5 Language Change (Contemporary Language Change essay question)

The grammar debate revisited

This is just a quick follow up to last week's post "To boldly get it wrong" in which Linguistics Professor and co-editor of the Cambridge Grammar of English, Michael McCarthy argued that grammar rules are only as useful as we make them.

In this response to the Cambridge Grammar, "Dot Wordsworth" (a pseudonym, apparently) in the Telegraph attacks McCarthy's descriptivist attitude:

Without a knowledge of grammar, the young will be no more able to write down their thoughts coherently than they could text-message without knowing how to use a mobile phone. This will frustrate them, and relegate written English to the same kind of ghetto of incompetent self-expression with which we are familiar from graduates of art schools who have never learnt to draw.

Meanwhile, the whole issue was debated last week on Radio 4 and should be available to listen to again here

Useful for:
ENA6 - Language Debates

BBC English: Moving Words

Check it out- the BBC World Service (English divison)'s exhibition of 'Moving Words'

(-which to me is more like a memorable quotes site.)

>>http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/movingwords/<<

They're voting for the most moving quote under the heading of ''Which Words in English have Moved you?" I assumed you could suggest your own quotes but it seems that 'language God' (not my term I can assure you...) David Crystal has selected for us from hundreds of our nominations.

The US Declaration of Independence is amongst the selected gems of the English language... (need I say more...)

Vote, post, reply, cuss...ok maybe not too much cussing, but response and interest is welcome.

Charissa

Lazy frogs & bullsh*t

Two articles in the media over the last couple of days look at offensive words from different perspectives. In the first, Jeff Jarvis looks at the banning of the word "bullshit" from the American airwaves and what he sees as the political agenda behind such an act, while in the second an airline boss gets into trouble for labelling striking French workers as "lazy frogs". It's easy to criticise strikers from the comfort of your exec suite though isn't it?

With language investigation coursework coming up after the exams (oh joy!) these might be potentially good areas to start looking at now.

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

Yet more top tips for ENA1

Indeed, these are tips, and lo they shall be top. Or something like that. I covered textual analysis a couple of days ago and CLA yesterday, so now it's the turn of Language & Representation. Again, the stuff here isn't comprehensive: it's just a few ideas gleaned from previous experience of teaching the paper and marking it. Any other suggestions or questions would be very welcome. Language & Representation This essay question deals with the links between language and thought - whether we control language or it controls us - and the ways in which language is used to label different groups in society. First off, it's important to be clear that this topic has nothing to do with how different groups in society use language varieties such as accent, dialect or sociolect (that's on ENA5 in the second year) so don't start writing at length about Black British English, Cockney, restricted codes etc. Secondly, you need to be clear that when the question talks about "social groups" (as it often does) , it's referring to ethnic groups, the different genders, social classes, age groups, or even what people often term subcultural groups like grungers, goths and rap fans. You can also add to that list groups defined by their sexuality, and disabled people. Of course, some of these labels themselves are problematic and you can talk about how they define individuals as parts of larger groups, removing their distinct identities and generalising about them, if you wish in your answer. Thirdly, you could (for revision purposes only of course - it's not a good idea to do this for fun) write down as many unpleasant words you can think of for each of those social groups and start to look at the common threads that emerge. We might find that words used to label gay people focus on their difference from the norm ("queer", "bent"), their supposed sexual practices ("batty man", "shirtlifter") or throw up some words which you'll have to explore more etymologically (Where does "faggot" come from? What did "gay" used to mean? What's a "chi-chi man" when he's at home? Well, probably still a homosexual, but you get the picture...). For women, many of the words that emerge are used to trivialise females as sweet, edible, consumable items, usually a bit decorative, but certainly not there to be taken seriously ("tart", "crumpet", "sweetie", "cupcake"), or again focus on a particular body part to define a woman solely by her appearance/sexual function to men ("the club was heaving with fanny", "oi, big jugs!"). Ethnicity and the words used to label different ethnic groups allow us to explore the etymology of terms like the n- and p-words, "pikey", "cracker", "coon", "half-caste", "taffy" and "gyppo". A quick look at the OED online or online etymology should help you track how these words have originated in racist attitudes (or not, as the case may be) and developed over time. And remember, white people are an ethnic group too! Have you ever met a black chav?! Actually, Croydon readers need not answer that rhetorical question... But of course, words like "black" and "white" can be explored in themselves for their negative and positive connotations, the words they tend to collocate with, and indeed the word "chav" is interesting as it is believed to has its roots in Gypsy slang for "child" or "lad" but has been used against Gypsies (and now any working class white person who dares to sport Burberry, Reebok Classics or sovereign rings). The next step is to look at some of the linguistic concepts and terms that can be used to explain these words and the patterns we notice. This sheet on the SFX Resource site should help. You could also look at research/texts by linguists such as Dale Spender (Man Made Language), Deborah Cameron (Verbal Hygiene), Muriel Schultz and Mary M Talbot whose work on gender is pretty interesting. There have been loads of blog posts about racist language so you could do a search on here using keywords and find material to bolster your knowledge. In terms of theory, it's important to understand linguistic reflectionism, determinism and wider concepts such as relativism and universalism, so an article in December's E Magazine by a strange looking white skinhead with a lop-sided mouth should help you. If it's not on the E Magazine site, it's certainly in the library. Alternatively, you could use Wikipedia and look up "Sapir Whorf" and find out where this bald man drew his "inspiration" from. While you're at it, you could search for "Political Correctness" as key words and have a look at why there has been a move to change language. The trickiest part is linking this together, but good answers can take many forms. You could explore the links between offensive words and the attitudes that create them - or even the language that shapes these attitudes - or you could take a range of examples and look at why they've changed over time and what this tells us about the society we live in. There are plenty of good, model answers we can give you too. I've probably missed lots of things out here, but you can fill in the gaps...

More top tips for ENA1

Now for the rest of ENA1, which consists of Child Language Acquisition (and Language and Representation which will follow tomorrow).

CLA
You can check the past questions on the AQA website or have a look at the SFX Resource Site for a downloadable document with previous questions and essay planning sheets, before doing any revision, and that should help you realise that there are several key things you need to know whatever the question.

1. You need to know the language framework and how each element is acquired (e.g. grammar, phonology, lexis, semantics, pragmatics).
2. You need to know the competing theories and how they offer competing explanations for the CLA process.
3. You need to have a grasp of relevant terminology (eg overextension, overgeneralisation, morphemes, consonants etc.)
4. You need to have a good range of examples of child language data.
5. You need to have a good grasp of the stages of CLA.
6. You need to have a knowledge of case studies that provide evidence for/against certain theories /positions.
7. You need to have your own view!

Looking at the previous essay questions should alert you to the fact that the questions follow one of three styles:

• they pick out a framework element and ask you to explore how that element is acquired (eg "how does grammar develop?"/ "how do children acquire words (lexis) and meanings (semantics)?"
• they pick out a theoretical position and ask you to explore its pros and cons (eg "to what extent do children learn by copying/applying rules/ interacting?")
• or they offer you short extracts of data and ask you to analyse it and relate it to theory.

Whatever happens, you should never uncritically accept either Chomsky's Nativist or Skinner's Behaviourist theory as the holy grails, but offer an open-minded approach to the reasons behind CLA.

Top Tips for ENA1

As many of you are now revising for your AS and A2 exams, I thought it might be handy to give some advice on what to revise and how to get yourself primed for each exam. So, every few days I'll try to post material on each unit (ENA1,3 5 & 6) to give you a bit of extra help, some of which is delivered with my examiner's hat on (it's a black and white cowboy hat, if you're interested). If you have any suggestions of your own - or questions - just add them through the comments icon.

ENA1
The paper consists of a written textual analysis question worth 40 marks, and a choice of essay questions on either Child Language Acquisition or Language & Representation worth 20 marks. A further 10 marks are allocated across the paper for AO1, which is your own written accuracy (punctuation, spelling, linguistic register and structure etc.).

Question 1 - types of text.
There's been a range of different written texts set for this question: newspaper interviews (Peter Fox last year), comment pieces (Vanessa Feltz on Miss World), reviews (film review of Moulin Rouge), obituaries (Joe Strummer in The Guardian); advertisements, both charitable (National Blood Service & Woodland Trust), educational (How to Become an Environmental Health Officer) and commercial (Nokia and Virgin phones).

To answer this question well, you'll need a combination of engagement with the text and a good grasp of language frameworks. For AO3, you are awarded marks for your ability to find significant language features (rather than just count random features and hope you'll pick up marks) such as word classes, verb tenses, verb aspects, verb forms and moods, and significant patterns.

So, looking at the mark scheme should tell you that if you start generally at pronouns and then gradually work your way through types of pronoun (first, second, third, plurals, reflexives etc), up to adjectives, nouns and adverbs and then up to types of noun (abstract, concrete, proper etc.), adverb types (time, manner, place etc.) you should be heading up to the 15 or 16 out of 20 area. If you can then explore tenses and aspect (e.g. present progressives, past tenses), modal verbs, types of adjective (superlative, comparative, evaluative etc.) you'll be hitting the top of the mark scheme.

You don't need to look at clause structure or types of sentence on this unit (so don't waste time looking at simple, compound, complex and subordinate or coordinaate clauses) and no marks are awarded for doing this.

Revising this part is fairly straightforward and you should try to look back through the early pages of your text book and class notes, making sure you're clear on how different word classes function in sentences and how they can affect meanings in different ways. The knack then is to pick out the features in the text that have a significant impact on the way the text works, and explain those effects.

Your model should be the "analytical sentence" in which you pick out a feature, illustrate it, linguistically label it and then explain its possible effects. An example might be as follows: The use of a modal auxiliary verb in the second paragraph ("He could have been very successful in this field") demonstrates the potential that Gary Barlow failed to achieve, linking to earlier points about his ever-decreasing chart positions.

For AO5 it's a less exact science, but you should try to read a range of past papers to get a feel for the nature of the texts set. Get used to the broadsheet register and try to build up an understanding of the vocabulary that's often used. Try to engage with how an idea is presented and the ways in which writers express their own attitudes towards their subject matter. At its simplest, AO5 is all about interpreting the material in an intelligent way and engaging with meaning.

The next time round, we'll have a look at the essay questions.