Hate Mail

Stephen Gately was gay. And now he is dead. Therefore he must have died of being gay. Such is the deranged subtext of Jan Moir's Daily Mail opinion piece, which has apparently become the single most complained about newspaper article in the Press Complaints Commission's history.

In her column, originally entitled Why there was nothing "natural" about Stephen Gately's death, but later amended by a worried Daily Mail to A strange, lonely and troubling death..., Moir says:

Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one. Let us be absolutely clear about this. All that has been established so far is that Stephen Gately was not murdered. And I think if we are going to be honest, we would have to admit that the circumstances surrounding his death are more than a little sleazy.

She later goes on to claim that Gately's death "strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships", trying to link Gately's untimely death and Kevin McGee's suicide to a wider discourse about gay relationships being unnatural, phony and not equivalent to heterosexual relationships.

Whatever your views on homosexuality (and just to be clear, I believe that gay relationships should be treated in exactly the same way as heterosexual ones, and gay people afforded the same rights and respect as every other human being) it's pretty clear that in the way Moir has used language here she is consciously trying to associate Gately with some imagined seedy, hedonistic lifestyle while at the same time knowing literally nothing about the exact circumstances of his death. It just amounts to prurient and tasteless speculation, especially considering that the poor guy's body was not even cold in the grave when the article was published.

The Guardian's Charlie Brooker responded quickly to the Moir article in his customary style, describing it as "a gratuitous piece of gay-bashing" and adding:

It has been 20 minutes since I've read her now-notorious column, and I'm still struggling to absorb the sheer scope of its hateful idiocy. It's like gazing through a horrid little window into an awesome universe of pure blockheaded spite. Spiralling galaxies of ignorance roll majestically against a backdrop of what looks like dark prejudice, dotted hither and thither with winking stars of snide innuendo.

Elsewhere, thousands of online responses, the vast majority critical of Moir, were posted to the Mail's website, and many others complained to the PCC.

The recent killing of a gay man in Central London, for which three young people have been charged, should show that the distance between hateful words and hateful deeds is not that far. Words matter. Language matters. And I think there's a strong case for arguing that those who use hateful language ultimately bear some responsibility for what happens when words turn to deeds.

Happiness, suicide, Facebook and Bebo

Normally on this blog we've tried to cover material that's specifically about language topics that you study at A level or news stories that have relevance to wider issues about language that might interest us. The two main stories mentioned below are not really about language - and are genuinely sad, involving the deaths of three people - but have links to how we use language to express ourselves, so I hope that makes some sense.

In the first story, the death of Kevin McGee (Little Britain star, Matt Lucas's ex-partner) seems to have been widely reported with reference to his 21st century style suicide note: a Facebook update that read "Kevin McGee thinks that death is much better than life". When we look at the concept of mode and use it to think about differences between written and spoken texts, we've often considered the written mode to confer more seriousness, formality or permanence on its language, but what happens when you've got a blended mode form like Facebook profiles (typed on a keyboard, certainly not spoken, but not exactly written)?

I reckon the last thing on poor old Kevin McGee's mind was "where on the mode continuum will an English Language student place my suicide message", but doesn't this raise important issues about the status we give to social networking sites and the language we use on them?

Likewise, the pointless and tragic suicides of Niamh Lafferty and Georgia Rowe near Glasgow, earlier this week (and reported here) have led to many social networking tributes. And what's striking about these tributes is how different they are from the kinds of messages left engraved forever on tombstones. A message apparently left by Georgia's cousin reads "georgia a know we havent spoke in a very long time but u'll always be ma wee cousin an a love u. Hope ur in a better place now. R.I.P".

Again it may seem cold and callous to look at such a sad waste of young lives for the purposes of language analysis, but maybe this all tells us something about the society we live in, our reactions to the deaths of others and our changing attitudes to what is appropriate language in situations like this. After all, we're studying language not for its own sake but to give us an understanding of ourselves and others, aren't we? And maybe what's striking too about this particular "tribute" is its use of non-standard features - not just the fairly typical ones to do with abbreviation, letter homophones, clippings and non-capitalisation - but its apparently regional features of accent (a not i/I and ma not my) and dialect (we havent spoke not we haven't spoken). Does this make the tribute more "real"? Does the fact that it's written in a way that the speaker finds natural make it a less frozen, less formal, more genuine tribute to the person who's now gone?

This feature article in today's Guardian takes a not very linguistic, but interestingly psychological approach to tribute websites like Gonetoosoon and lasting tribute too, and I think it's worth a look.

Elsewhere (and it's a desperate attempt to finish on a happy note) this bizarre piece of non-research seems to be trying to work out how happy Americans are by "analysing" their Facebook status updates. It's worth a quick look, if nothing else.

Poison pens and private eyes

Forensic linguistics is rapidly becoming my favourite thing in the world: what better way to combine a love of language and The Wire in one job? So, this story on the BBC news website about abusive letters being sent to religious and political figures and covered in this week's Crimewatch is very exciting.

Apparently, a total of 57 abusive, racist and sexually graphic letters have been sent to various religious and political figures from the Southampton & Portsmouth area, and forensic linguist Tim Grant from Aston University's Centre For Forensic Linguistics has been called in to look at who the sender/s might be.

The article raises a number of interesting questions to do with language, some of them about gender and language use. While the linguist, Deborah Cameron lays into the generalised "myths" of clear differences between male and female language use in conversation, Tim Grant seems to suggest that men and women often tend to have distinctive patterns of written language:

He said: "One of the things that were striking about the letters was the heavy use of expressive adjectives, which is more typical of women than men.

"You could say women use more adjectives because they can be more socially evaluative but we don't look at why rather than how the two different groups behave.

"We just know that's the case because we read a lot of letters and make statistical correlations. The words (in the letters) used were things like 'squalor', 'dirty' and some sexual adjectives which were suggestive of women's writing.

"Another thing we know is that women tend to use fewer first person pronouns, such as 'I'."

Liar, liar, your pen's on fire

Forensic linguistics is a great area of language study. You can find out more about the range of activities the forensic linguists at Aston University do from their site here, but one of its many uses is to work out if someone is telling the truth or is who they say they are. This brief article from Physorg looks at new research into handwriting and truthfulness and links it to how the brain works when telling lies.

In short, "The researchers analyzed the writing and discovered that in the untrue paragraphs the subjects on average pressed down harder on the paper and made significantly longer strokes and taller letters than in the true paragraphs".

Getting the message

The debate about young people's literacy and the impact of electronically-mediated communication rumbles on. Many commentators argue that the use of texting, instant messaging, social networking sites and online chat forums is leading to poorer spelling, less confidence in standard grammar and shorter attention spans. Others make the pint that research into such areas hasn't thrown up any real evidence to back up these claims.

We have covered the Coventry University research into texting elsewhere on this blog, but a new piece of research from Canada authored by Connie Varnhagen (and reported here) seems to offer support to the idea that good spellers in formal written tests are often the ones who use online chat more than their poor spelling counterparts. But does it mean that chatspeak is actually having a positive impact on spelling habits, or are better spellers just the ones who communicate more often in all forms of written or blended modes? See what you think:

Varnhagen's findings come from a class-based study that was recently published in Reading and Writing. A group of third-year psychology students proposed and designed a study to test whether new Simple Messaging Service, or SMS, language—also known as chatspeak—which refers to the abbreviations and slang commonly used when texting, emailing or chatting online, had an influence on students' spelling habits. The group surveyed roughly 40 students from ages 12 to 17. The participants were asked to save their instant messages for a week. At the end of the study, the participants completed a standardized spelling test.

"Kids who are good spellers [academically] are good spellers in instant messaging," she said. "And kids who are poor spellers in English class are poor spellers in instant messaging."

Does this prove anything? Your comments would be welcome...

Teenglish? Allow that...

This article from Tuesday's Education Guardian is a good example of how some newspapers treat slang. While some of the definitions aren't exactly wrong (and it's tricky to say if a word meaning is ever really wrong if someone uses it in their own way with their peers) they're certainly only half the picture. To call these examples of "student slang", as Lucy Tobin does, seems to be forgetting that many of the terms (waste, wagwan, allow that/it, among others) originate specifically from young inner city (often black) roots. They might have spread to university campuses with the increasing numbers of working class and inner city students entering university over the last 10 years, but I suspect that only a handful originated on the campuses themselves.

However, grumbles aside, it's quite a good read as a source of inspiration for an ENGA3 Language Intervention (or even a B spec media text?) and there's even a quiz you can take here to test your skills.

Jolly Wicked Actually

Here's a link to a piece in last month's Sunday Times extracted from the linguist Tony Thorne's new book on British slang, Jolly Wicked Actually and how it reflects our national identity/ies. Tony did a great talk on slang at SFX last year and he is one of the top experts on the history and changing nature of British slang, so it's well worth a look.

Here's an extract about the expression innit:

By the end of the 1980s, innit — the unvarying question tag put on the end of sentences and used separately as an exclamation of agreement, “Innit!” — had become identified especially with black-British and later Asian-British speech patterns. So much so that, in the mid-1990s, my students at King’s College London were referring to their Asian fellows collectively as “the innit crowd”; and when Sacha Baron Cohen’s comic character Ali G parodied Asian and white “wiggas” (imitators of black styles), innit was incorporated in the title of a 1999 collection of TV shows. Since 2000, innit has been seen as one of the most recognisable features of “Hinglish” — south Asian English — and of multiethnic youth dialect, supposedly a new accent and vocabulary common to younger speakers across a range of ethnicities and mainly urban environments, which may eventually influence mainstream English. It is also seen as emblematic of the troublesome underclass known as chavs, and in 2005 jokes were circulating playing on the fact: “What do you call a chav in a box? Innit.” And: “What do you call an Eskimo chav? Inuinnit.”

And here's a link to arch-prescriptivist Lynne Truss's rather sniffy review of it.

CAPS LOCK AND SHOUTY MESSAGES

Sitting in my swivel chair while rubbing chalk dust from my scruffy tweed jacket's leather elbow patches, I've often told my A level Language students that writing about graphology is the last refuge of the loser. That if you write about graphology in an exam you would be best to write "Loser" as your name on the paper and write in the words "epic fail" where examiners should put their marks. We can all see that a heading is in bold to make it stand out, that a picture is centred to give it prominence, that the font is Times New Roman: none of that is language analysis and it's not worth any marks in exams. Loser.

But with Language & Mode now an AS level topic area, perhaps that's no longer the case. Graphology - the layout of words, images and headings on a page, the way things look on the page - is actually quite important when looking at differences between written and blended mode texts. The fact that a word on a web page is underlined might mean that it's a clickable link and therefore an interactive feature. The choice of font might actually convey some kind of tone too. And this piece on the BBC News website makes a number of interesting points about what we think about capital letters in emails or on web forums. As the piece tells us:

Most web users know capital letters are a capital offence - they're commonly thought to be online shorthand for screaming. But how did they get this reputation?

Ultimately, in the rushed world of online communication, all-caps has become a
bit of a "lazy" shorthand for yelling - it's faster than finding another way to
convey excitement or agitation. But the recipient feels like they are being
shouted at.

So, there's stuff here to think about for graphology and what it tells us about how we're being addressed by the writer of a text. The article also goes on to talk about different fonts and the history of some of them, which is interesting in a bit of a nerdy way, but it's the discussion of email etiquette and caps which is most useful, I think. So, graphology might now become quite an intelligent thing to write about in such situations. I take it all back: graphology is no longer the last refuge of the loser. Sorry.

Weasel words

Today's Independent features an article by columnist Johann Hari on the euphemisms he would expunge from the English Language. As he puts it, "The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee".

Among the expressions are "fair trade", of which he says:

This phrase suggests that paying desperately poor people a decent wage is a nice
ethical add-on, and a gratifying departure from the norm. In fact, it should be
taken for granted – the default position of civilised human beings. If we
believed that, the labelling would be reversed: it's all the other food that
should be labelled as "Unfair Trade", "Rapacious Trade", or
"Let's-Pay-a-Pittance Trade." The terrific comedian Andy Zaltzman suggests a sign
that could be on the packets: it is a silhouette of an obese businessman pissing
on an African child.

Fair enough. But several comments in response to the article accuse Hari of doing exactly the same thing that he's complaining about: giving a political spin to the language he uses and the meanings he creates. So, is any language genuinely neutral? Can we open our mouths and speak without allowing our language choices to inadvertently reflect our views and political/ philosophical outlooks?

Again, this is an interesting article not only for the language issues addressed but for its potential use as a style model for the text you'll be writing about a language issue in your ENGA4 coursework and the Language Discourses part of the ENGA3 exam paper.

For more on euphemisms - what they are, how they're often used and why they annoy people - try this 2007 post on the blog.

Texting is retarding our teens

It's true! It must be, because a neuroscientist is saying it's true. In this article by Michael Deacon from The Daily Telegraph, Baroness Greenfield is reported as blaming young people's alleged short attention spans on the brevity of text messaging. Deacon himself has strong views about texting, telling us that "If everyone in the world keeps texting, we'll all become as mentally stunted as each other, and so nobody will even notice that there's been a narrowing of the human attention span."

And in this piece from The Daily Mail, Greenfield offers more detail about her opinions. In one interesting part of it she says:

I believe that if the young brain is exposed from the outset to a world of instant action and reaction with the press of a key, such rapid interchanges might accustom the brain to operate over the same timescales.
The young brain, particularly until the age of ten, is incredibly impressionable. It is without the yardsticks we gain on our way to adulthood and against which we measure information. The young brain simply absorbs information and is shaped by it.
That's why, if a child learns to express themselves through text messaging - and at the same time reads less, writes less and communicates face-to-face less often - there is a case for questioning how it will impact not only on the way they communicate in later life, but also on the way their brain matures.

So, what do you think? Can you think at all? Have you been exposed to so much text messaging and such short, undeveloped fragments of language that you can't express yourself in complex sentences any more? Have you even read this far?
I'd be interested what readers of this blog have to say on this issue, partly because blogs are about sharing ideas and learning collaboratively, but also because at the end of next year many of you will be taking ENGA3 in which you'll have to think about, analyse and critique language debates such as this one.
 Greenfield, in the Daily Mail, uses the metaphor of language being "eroded" by texting, eaten away, reduced in some way. It's a metaphor that will soon be familiar to A2 students as we look at models of language change and arguments about such change - prescriptive and descriptive - and how we can explore where English is heading.
Along with ENGA3, you'll also be doing ENGA4 in which you'll need to write a creative piece about one of the topics you've studied for ENGA3. So, the Michael Deacon article in the Telegraph or the Baroness Greenfield one in the Mail can be really helpful style models for how critics of language change structure and express their ideas and arguments.

Hey-ho, mwah, and furthermore meh

The internet, and social networking sites in particular, appear to be having an influence on the appearance of exclamations and noises making their way into dictionaries as "proper" words. At least, that's according to linguist Tony Thorne (who spoke last year at SFX's teacher conference). In this BBC news website article, it is reported that the expression hey-ho is set to join the airkiss word mwah (as in "Mwah darling, how are you? You simply must sample this fennel tagliatelle: it's to die for") and the Simpsons-esque meh (as in "It wasn't good, wasn't bad, just meh").

According to Thorne, the reasons for such sounds and gesture-accompanying expressions entering the language in written form is down to the nature of internet language as a mixed mode form of communication. As the article explains:

"A lot of internet communication is written speech, or transliterated speech," says Tony Thorne, a language consultant at King's College London. "Social media is all about nudging and poking. It's a more amplified conversation."

Ultimately, finding written ways to express the visual - like shrugging - is a key component of internet communication and social networks, says Mr Thorne. "People introduce these light hearted conversational things which normally you only find in speech," he says.

In that way, he suggests, "hey-ho" could just be the new emoticon.

We looked at meh on this blog a while back and you might find this link helpful to find out more.

Elsewhere, The Daily Telegraph tells us that other sounds are appearing as words too, including heh and hmm. And they blame young people (as they often do) as well as the usual suspects: Facebook, Bebo and Twitter.

English in China

This article from Sunday's Independent looks at how the English language is growing at a rapid pace in China.

"Chinese people are becoming more and more obsessed with speaking English, and efforts to improve their proficiency mean that at some stage this year, the world's most populous nation will become the world's largest English-speaking country. Two billion people are learning English worldwide, and a huge proportion of them are in China."

In a separate article from The Daily Telegraph, the growth of ungrammatical (and often very funny) Chinese English - sometimes called Chinglish - is looked at. And you can probably see from some of the ridiculous signs why so many Chinese people are keen to learn better English...

Hedging our bets

One popular stereotype about women and men's communication is that men are direct and confident in what they say and write, while women are more tentative and uncertain. Well, as Deborah Cameron is at pains to point out in her Myth of Mars and Venus (helpful extracts here), such stereotypes are a load of old cobblers: some women are tentative in certain situations, but so are some men. Gender isn't the main factor at all.

And now a piece of research from the USA into male and female writing styles appears to back up Cameron's points. Nicholas Palomares at the University of California found that given a written email task, both men and women used tentative constructions (hedges, disclaimers and tag questions). Here's a bit more detail:

"I found that women are more tentative than men sometimes, and men are more tentative than women sometimes," Palomares said. "It depends on the topic and whether you're communicating with someone of the same gender. Gender differences in language are not innate; they’re fickle."

In his study, Palomares asked nearly 300 UC Davis undergraduates -- about half of them female and half male -- to write e-mails explaining how to change a flat tire or buy make-up, among other gender-stereotyped and gender-neutral topics. Students were given the name and gender of the person they were e-mailing.

Men were tentative when writing about make-up or other stereotypically feminine topics, especially when they thought they were writing to a woman, he found. For example, one man, believing he was corresponding with a woman, wrote: "… maybe girls prefer the quality of products at Sephora over other major department stores? I don't know."

Women were tentative when writing about changing flat tires and other stereotypically masculine topics, especially when they thought they were writing to a man. For example, one woman, believing she was giving instructions to a man, wrote: "I think they start out by raising the whole car, or maybe just the one tire with a tire jack?"

English around the world

Here's a quick link to an American article offering advice to American English speakers about how to avoid communication difficulties with other English speakers. It covers some of the main areas we'll look at in our A2 course when we look at Language Variation and how English is used around the world, specifically that the English used by non-native speakers is often a very different beast from what we use in the UK and USA. Here's an example:

Common colloquial American phrases will not mean much to a person who does not live in the United States. Telling a colleague that he or she should "go for it" will not take anyone anywhere and saying someone is "out of the loop" will likely put you there.

We've covered World Englishes (as they're often called) in previous posts, so if you want to stay ahead of the game...sorry, prepare so you are ready when we start this unit... have a look at these links:
The End of English - David Crystal's take on World English
Globish
French, English and American
Dirty English infects beautiful Italian

Vlogging a dead horse

The latest version of the Merriam-Webster dictionary is coming out and some of the words it has included are covered here in a Guardian piece.

Among the words are vlog (video blog) which you will know all about if you attended Kerry Maxwell's sessions last week. Also featured is another blend, frenemy ( a sneaky snake who pretends to be your friend but is in fact your enemy).

For more detail on vlog check the Macmillan Dictionary Word of the Week page on it here.

Ephebiphobia

Ephebiphobia: fear of young people. Some of us might have experienced it; others might find it bizarre. Perhaps Michael Jackson would have benefitted from it. But in this article from back in March, psychologist Tanya Byron argues that it's skewing our perception of young people and society.

This is the sort of text we look at as part of ENGA2 Investigating Representations and it's one to which there are some really interesting and provocative online responses.

Investigating Language

Here are the suggestions for language investigations that we've come up with in our intro pack. If you've got any adaptations to these, or ideas of your own, please add them here. But remember, that on the new AQA A spec the focus has to be spoken language.


An investigation into the ways in which two children of different ages use spoken language in similar situations.

A study of the use of metaphor in a political speech

An investigation into how three different teenagers use language while involved in a puzzle solving task.

A study of the language used by gym instructors or football coaches

An investigation into how males and females use similar or different language when describing a picture.

An investigation into the language used by teachers in 2 different classes of similarly aged students/pupils.

An investigation into how candidates on The Apprentice use language in the boardroom.

A study of attitudes towards different regional or national accents.

An investigation into how different ethnic groups use particular slang expressions in conversation.

A study of how Creole is used in three different generations of the same family.

An investigation into the differences between how the same person tells a story in spoken English compared to in a written form.

A study of the language of cinema trailers

An investigation into the language used by a range of radio DJs to introduce songs

Monkey magic

And following hot on the heels of the last post about research into child language and how it seems to support interactional theories of development, here's research on monkeys that seems to offer support to nativist theories. According to the BBC news website and New Scientist (quoted here) by playing repeated patterns of two syllable "words" to monkeys on one day and then mixing up the patterns on the second day, it could be observed that the monkeys were alert to differences in syllables:

The findings do not mean primates can communicate using language, but they do suggest that some of the skills required to use language may be linked to very basic memory functions.

One grammatical structure that is found across many languages is affixation: the addition of syllables, either at the beginning or at the end of a word, to modify its meaning.

For instance, in English, the suffix "–ed" is added to verbs to make the past tense. In German, the same effect is achieved by adding the prefix "ge–" to the front of verb stems.

What this doesn't "prove" (and to be fair, no one is claiming that it does) is that grammar is inbuilt. What it does seem to support is that some sort of learning process - which involves language in some form - is present is monkeys, our evolutionary relatives and that this process can be extended to "rules" of human languages.

Language development under the microscope

This article on the BBC news website offers an insight into one approach to researching children's language development at the moment. As part of the "speechome project", Professor Deb Roy and his colleagues are collecting a quarter of a million hours of data. And the other figures are equally staggering:

"The first task we set for ourselves was to transcribe everything my son heard
or said from nine to 24 months," he says. He estimates that there is somewhere
between 10 to 12 million words of speech to transcribe. "For anyone that has
transcribed speech, they will know that is a laborious and slow process," he
says, with a degree of understatement.

And some initial observations that Roy has made seem to offer support to social interactive theories of language development. The BBC site explains:

By analysing the length, and hence complexity, of sentences spoken by caregivers
to his son, he believes that he has shown that adults subconsciously simplify
sentences until the child understands the word. Once it has been understood, the
adults then build up the complexity of the sentences containing the word. "We
essentially meet him at this point of the birth of the word and gently pull him
into language," he says.

Elsewhere, there's more support for interactive models of language acquisition. A report from UCLA suggests that adult-child conversations can potentially offer six times as much language development improvement as talking at a child (parent monologues/reading) or the child watching TV.

"Talk is powerful, but what's even more powerful is engaging a child in
meaningful interactions — the 'give and take' that is so important to the
social, emotional and cognitive development of infants and toddlers," says Dr.
Jill Gilkerson, language research director at LENA Foundation and a study
co-author.

"It is not enough to speak to children," Zimmerman adds.
"Parents should also engage them in conversation. Kids love to hear you speak,
but they thrive on trying speech out for themselves. Give them a chance to say
what's on their minds, even if it's 'goo goo gah.'"

And finally, in a piece of investigation that could win the No Sh*t Sherlock award for 2009, researchers at Seattle Children's Research Institute have discovered that when the TV is on people talk less and use fewer vocalisations, potentially harming the language development of children who are in the same environment. What is interesting about this is the observation that it's not so much the TV programmes that could damage the children's language (although In the Night Garden is the work of Satan as far as I'm concerned) but the effect watching TV has on the family's spoken interaction.

The study found that each hour of audible television was associated with
significant reductions in child vocalizations, vocalization duration, and
conversational turns. On average, each additional hour of television exposure
was also associated with a decrease of 770 words the child heard from an adult
during the recording session. This represented a seven percent decrease in words
heard, on average. There were significant reductions in both adult female and
male word counts. From 500 to 1,000 fewer adult words were spoken per hour of
audible television.

A2 coursework & contributions to the blog

Exams may be over but we're going to focus on A2 coursework projects in this blog from now on, as well as all the usual links to language stuff in the media.

If anyone who has been using the blog would like to become a contributor to it, please email me on d.clayton at sfx.ac.uk (swapping the at for @). This would be especially good if you are planning to go on to university to study language or linguistics!

ENA6 - good luck

There's been nearly 1000 views of this blog today (not that I check...ahem), so I hope it's been of some use to you if you're revising for ENA6.

It's probably worth saying that even though I teach the unit and mark it, I have as much idea as you about what will turn up on tomorrow's paper (honestly!), so even though I've suggested various topics, if they don't come up don't get stressed: just make sure you read the material properly, annotate it sensibly and know exactly what's required on each part of the paper.

Here's what i put on the blog this time last year about what to do...

There are plenty of tips on this blog for how to approach this paper, but remember that reading carefully, annotating well and thinking about the specific demands of each question are the keys to success.

Don't spend too long on parts 1a and 1b: you should be able to get 10 marks for these in about 10 minutes maximum, leaving you about 50 minutes to analyse and evaluate the text for 1c. Remember that you're not just feature spotting (although that is part of your job), but you're supposed to be evaluating how the writer of the text represents the issue he or she is talking about. In the texts we've looked at in class (the ones that haven't been past paper questions), think about how the rabidly anti-PC David Gelernter constructed his attack on the feminist "language rapists" as he termed them, or how Michael McCarthy in his "I'm Happy to Boldly Get it Wrong" argued against prescriptive views in grammar and language change. The title of the paper is Language Debates and you will get more marks if you write like you're contributing to , and care about, the debate.

With part 2a, selecting your relevant sources is important: use a range of texts from the paper (and your own ideas and other study) and don't rely too much on the one you've just analysed for 1c. If you feel confident, tie this debate into that of other language topics. PC and Language Change are closely linked. Accents and dialects are changing too - they could be linked into Language Change. It's a synoptic paper, so look for links with other areas. But, be careful not to confuse your reader. You will be writing for a non-specialist audience, so take care to explain technical ideas and don't assume they will know who particular linguists are.

As for my top tips for which topic it might be, I suspect (based on previous papers and topics, not any inside information obviously) it will be either Political Correctness/ Language and Representation or something about Accent and Dialect. For the latter, I'd say look at ideas like dialect levelling and the ways in which new varieties of English have grown - MEYD, Estuary English etc. I got it right last year (attitudes to Language Change) but hopelessly wrong the year before (the speech of chipmunks and cheerleaders) so don't bet everything you have on my predictions.

Good luck!

Child Language Acquisition - mini-investigation

And here's a quick one in a 1b style for CLA.

Explain the methodology you would use to investigate how children acquire the sounds of English.

Remember to follow the 5 point plan as laid out below:

• AIM/ANGLE
• METHOD of DATA COLLECTION
• FRAMEWORK for ANALYSING YOUR DATA
• CONSIDERATION of EXTRA LINGUISTIC VARIABLES/ VALIDITY/ ETHICS
• WHAT YOU EXPECT to FIND

Child Language Acquisition - data set

And just to be on the safe side, here's a quick 1a style question on CLA. All you have to do is identify and label 3 "interesting" features from the data set below:

Data set:

1. I readed that book yesterday.
2. What that man doing?
3. Dat's gusting. I not like that dinner.
4. My tooth is hurty.

If you give your points as comments, I'll try to give you some feedback (my own child language data providers permitting).

ENA6 - revising dialects

Here's some stuff to help you revise dialect and accent.

Andrew Moore's pages on dialect levelling, Estuary and recent change
Features of traditional dialects
Features of modern dialects
Peter Trudgill on Language and Place

ENA6 - some language variation data

Here's a quick 1a style question for ENA6 using some examples of regional/social variation. The question (in the usual style) is "Comment linguistically on three features of non-standard language use in the data list below".

Data list

She were wearing a mask.
What are yous guys up to?
Second prize don't exist.
What's tha been doing?
There was bare mans.

If you post your 3 features as comments below, I'll give some feedback.

Good luck with ENA5!

Geek-speak

This is a bit of a weird one, but if you're looking for examples of how different social groups use language to cement their in-group status, then have a look here for expressions used by fans of science fiction and fantasy.

It's quite interesting stuff from a Language Variation perspective (like how different social groups use language in their own communities of practice) and could also be useful for Language Change when thinking about how words go through processes of abbreviation in contexts like this. A good example of this is the suffix -zine, which itself derives from a clipping of magazine, but is now used in all sorts of contexts (fanzine, e-zine, crudzine).

Communities of practice
A community of practice is an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavor. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations - in short, practices - emerge in the course of their joint activity around that endeavor. A community of practice is different as a social construct from the traditional notion of community,primarily because it is defined simultaneously by its membership and by the practice in which that membership engages. And this practice involves the construction of a shared orientation to the world around them - a tacit definition of themselves in relation to each other, and in relation to other communities of practice. The individual constructs an identity - a sense of place in the social world - through participation in a variety of communities of practice, and in forms of participation in each of those communities. And key to this entire process of construction is stylistic practice.

And it also gives me an excuse to use a picture of a cylon.

A post about the post

I've nicked this link from the Teachit Language sputnik (which is available to Teachit Language subscribers) as it's excellent material for revising the ENA5 Language Change texts from different times question. If you click here, you'll be taken to the British Postal Museum and Archive site from where you can download letters from different time periods - perfect for helping you see how similar themes are dealt with over the centuries.

For example, the 1750 - 1900 link has these letters: an early Valentine card, a letter from a slave owner in Jamaica and a soldier's letter from the Crimean War.

ENA6 - the topics so far

It's always a fun way to pass an evening, guessing which topic will be on ENA6, but this year will be the last chance we have as it's the end of the AQA A spec as we know it. Here's what's been featured so far...

June 2008

Political correctness and slang

1c. Zoe Williams Guardian article on slang that demeans women

2a. Article for online newspaper responding to Zoe Williams


June 2007

Attitudes to Language Change

1c. Kate Burridge article

2a. Broadsheet editorial on views about Language Change


June 2006

Male/female conversation

1c. John and Barbara Pease self-help book

2a. Radio script on male female conversation


June 2005

Child Language Acquisition

1c. Baby and You magazine article

2a.Magazine article


Feb 2005

Language and Representation

1c. George Orwell extract from Politics and the English Language

2a. Broadsheet feature article on language and its effect on attitudes


June 2004

Development of new accents

1c. Daily Telegraph article

2a. Broadsheet feature article on high rising intonation


Jan 2004

Language of texting and emails

1c. Guardian article Cn u txt?

2a. Radio script on texting and email language and attitudes to these forms


June 2003

Political Correctness in Language

1c. Terry Deary extract from Wicked Words kids book

2a. Broadsheet editorial on PC and attitudes to it


Jan 2003

Child Language Acquisition - interaction

1c. extract from Baby Talk advice book

2a. Magazine article on role of verbal interaction


June 2002

Male/female conversation

1c. Extract from John Gray Men Are From Mars, Women From Venus

2a.Broadsheet newspaper article on male/female conversation styles


My guesses for this year’s paper:

Language Varieties and Slang - perhaps something looking at the changing face of Britain’s accents and dialects - Estuary English, MEYD, development of new slang, dialect levelling.

Language Change & Technology* - perhaps something about text messages, emails, social networking and language, and attitudes towards these forms.

Child Language* - hasn't turned up since 2005, but has been set twice before. I suspect it won't appear, but be ready just in case!

Form of question in 2a? Be ready for anything, but letters to the editor and website articles haven’t turned up yet and might do this year.

*Edited to change from my publishing last year's advice - sorry!

ENA5 revision reminders

Just in case you're revising for Friday's ENA5 exam, have a quick look at advice for this paper in these older blog posts from last year and the year before:

ENA5 advice from 2008
ENA5 Language Change timelines
Top tips for ENA5 & ENA6
And don't forget Beth Kemp's website which has loads of stuff for this unit here.

T-weet t-who?

Twitter has been big news for a while among media folk, with lots of celebrity tweeters singing its praises. If you're unfamiliar with what Twitter is and what it allows you to do, check here. And if you want to see how it's relevant to your study of language, have a look at this blog post from earlier in the year.

But a report on today's BBC news website, casts into doubt some of the hype around Twitter. Who' s actually tweeting who(m)? According to the Harvard research quoted in the article, 10% of Twitter users generate 90% of the content and most people who sign up only ever tweet once:

"Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has
seen it has instantly loved it," said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard
Business School who carried out the work. On a typical online social network, he
said, the top 10% of users accounted for 30% of all production. This implies
that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more
than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network," the team wrote in a blog
post.

So, what are the implications of this research on our study of the language of Tweets and Twitter users? If it's less of a conversation and more of a broadcast or publication, then does this mean that it's more like a blog and less like email, text or MSN? In other words, is it less of a conversation and more of a series of monologues?

Perhaps more importantly, if it's all about numbers - as so much language change often is - and there's a limited core of Twitter users generating most of the content, will there be much of an impact on the language styles of the majority of Twitter users who don't tweet? In other words, will Twitter have much of an impact on the language styles of most of us? Probably not...

Sling some snout into the chokey

If you love slang and you love prison (and what south Londoner doesn't one day dream of slinging slang inside the glorious environs of Brikkie Pen?), then this is the story for you. It might also help you if you're looking for interesting examples of contemporary language change for Friday's ENA5 exam.

Yesterday's Daily Mail and today's Guardian feature articles on an apparently growing trend of prisoners reviving Early Modern English thieves' slang (or cant, as it's often called) to hide their illegal practices (mostly taking drugs and smuggling sim cards) from the ears of prison officers. As the Daily Mail explains, "The dialect, thought to originate from medieval gipsies, was used by all manner of villains in Shakespeare's England, becoming known as thieves' cant or rogues' cant. But it was thought to have become obsolete until its unexpected revival, believed to have been led by criminal members of the travelling community".

The Mail tells us that words like those featured on the list at the top are being used as code, while The Guardian goes into more detail about other types of slang (pig Latin and backslang) which help both exclude outsiders and foster in-group identity. What The Daily Mail doesn't really explain is how Elizabethan slang had words for crack cocaine and sim cards. Hmm...

As it happens, I'm reading a really excellent book on slang at the moment by Michael Adams, called Slang: The People's Poetry, which has some fascinating ideas about what slang is, how it's perceived and what it's used for. As Adams points out, slang has social value and he is concerned with finding out "how it marks groups off from one another and indicates group membership, its use among different races and genders, the extent to which it belongs to the young and eludes the old, and how we use it as social currency to negotiate our way through problems of living with others".

In this particular case, it would seem that an old form of slang has been revived as a means of eluding prison officers and fostering group identity among prisoners and their contacts on the outside, but also perhaps as a means of keeping a tradition alive. If, as the Daily Mail speculates, the slang being used has its roots in thieves' cant of the Sixteenth Century, perhaps it's part of a means of preserving a culture too.

Some more stuff on new words

Just a couple of quick things that might help with ENA5 Contemporary Language Change (or ENA6 if this topic turns up).

First up is glamping (glamorous + camping), a phenomenon of recent years in which people who wouldn't normally go camping (poshos) slum it with the rest of us and do it in typical middle class style (pink camouflage tents, flower design welly boots, wine cooler etc.).
So which word formation process has created this word?

Next come J-Lo (Jennifer Lopez), BoJo (Boris Johnson) and SuBo (Susan Boyle). There's been a trend to shorten celebrity names to these clipped versions, but the most recent one has to be rather ironic (and cruel, given her recently reported collapse). Any ideas what processes might be involved here?

And how about these words, all derived from the recent economic collapse (and found here): bailout, dead mall and green shoots. Could the first be a conversion from the verb phrase "to bail (someone) out"? What about the processes involved in the other two?

Attitudes to accents

Now the AS students have done their exams, we'll concentrate on the A2 units and here's a piece from The Guardian on Wednesday which looks at people's attitudes to regional accents. It's no great surprise that we all have different preferences and dislikes when it comes to accents, but what might be surprising is how little some people like their own accent.

Basing their research on government-funded radio and TV advertising, the Central Office of Information has found that respondents in some regions dislike the sound of their own regional accent when used as a voice-over, preferring other regional accents or even Received Pronunciation. In other areas, there's more warmth towards the local variety.

Tynesiders appear to be proud of their accents, according to the findings, but Brummies responded negatively to hearing their vowels on TV and radio, partly because they recognise they are ridiculed for them by some of their compatriots.

"The research clearly shows that the accent used in radio and TV advertising can have an impact on how the ad is received," said Brian Jenkins, the head of radio at the COI. "Regional accents can make a difference but not necessarily a positive one. There was quite a negative reaction from people in Birmingham and Bristol to their own accents," he said.

Jenkins added respondents in both cities were "very proud" of the way they spoke, but seem to have been affected by "other people's perceptions of their accent".

And it's this last point that's quite interesting as an explanation: that people perhaps internalise others' ridicule of their accent and feel less secure about their own voices as a result.

An article in The Guardian some 10 years ago (which I stumbled across while clearing out English Language coursework from 1999 in my classroom) sheds some light on historical attitudes to regional accents. In one part of the article, the link is made between region and social class:

Academic studies confirm that, socio-linguistically, Cockney has shared the bottom rung with Scouse, Glaswegian, West Midlands and Belfast. Almost certainly this is because, historically, they have all been essentially working-class accents - unlike Yorkshire, say, which might be middle class. This is one reason why Scots voices, and to a lesser extent Irish and Welsh ones, are different. A middle-class Scottish accent can signify a good education (lawyers, doctors).

So, how does this help with A2 English Language? Language variation is part of ENA5 and could also be a topic for ENA6 (Language Debates), so it's worth having a think about why certain accents give rise to certain attitudes, but it's also important to think about how regional varieties are changing and attitudes towards previously prestige forms (such as RP) are altering. In the COI survey above, it was noted that older respondents, and those who weren't "positively engaged with authority" (i.e. a hardened criminal or a junior gangbanger from some dodgy endz) had very different attitudes to RP:

Older people tend to be more accepting of ad campaigns featuring received pronunciation, perhaps because they grew up listening to the "cut-glass" English accents that featured on public information films of the past.

Younger people were more engaged by local accents, it found, but sometimes a more authoritative voice is more appropriate, according to the research.

Advertisements which encourage the public to comply with deadlines, including filling in tax returns, "need to impart trust and authority" the COI said, and are more effective when a Home Counties accent is used.

Local accents proved more persuasive in campaigns which include "credible real-life experiences" to try to change people's behaviour, perhaps to prevent drink driving or encourage homeowners to fix faulty smoke alarms.

The study also found that people who were already "positively engaged with authority" were more likely to absorb the message of campaigns using RP, while those who are not prefer to hear local accents.

Synecdoche SW12

Fancy stretching your vocabulary a bit further? Like a bit of lexical flexing? Try this 7 question quiz on the BBC website, inspired by the troublesome title of the latest Charlie Kaufman film, Synecdoche, New York.

There's also a brief article in today's Guardian about the word synecdoche, a term we've used in A2 lessons this term when looking at how some words and phrases used to label social groups have been formed ("Nice bit of ass" = an attractive woman etc.). Then there's metonymy, a similar process in which a metaphorical link is made between an object and the thing associated with it (e.g. "hoodie" becomes the person wearing it)

These are words that Sean and Gilberto already use with great perspicacity and aplomb, so see if you too can elevate your lexical performance to match their verbal gymnastics.

ENGA1 Language Development essay questions part 3

And here's another one we prepared earlier. It's a suggested approach to the phonology question (question 2 on the list below).

To use Teachit links you'll have to register on their site first, but it's still free. Go here, register, log in then follow the link above.

ENGA1 mode exercise 3

And now try analysing this text, which is also about the singer mentioned in mode exercise 2, Regina Spektor. This extract is taken from a Guardian newspaper review of one of her live performances, written by Maddy Costa. If you feel brave, you could even have a go at comparing the two extracts...

What a canny operator Regina Spektor is. She scuttles on stage every bit the little-girl-lost, her bashful expression and cute outfit (sparkly top, puffball skirt, flat shoes) creating the impression that this venue is too big, too daunting for her. So daunting, in fact, that she must sing as if no one else is in the room, unselfconsciously burbling notes the way one might in the shower, barely saying a word between songs. Which just serves to underscore how capable she is of mesmerising an audience: her voice is so pure, so vital, she could play a venue four times this size and still have everyone rapt.

But everything Spektor does is poised between extremes. She is at once artful and artless, mannered and unmannerly. Her eccentricity can seem contrived: Poor Little Rich Boy, which Spektor plays with one hand on the piano, the other bashing at a chair with a drumstick, has an air of party piece about it. But the eccentricity can also seem wholly natural: in songs like Music Box and Baby Jesus, her voice flutters like a hummingbird, her melodies are staccato and forthright, and her lyrics inject barbed social commentary into fairytale flights of fancy. This oddball theatricality is not adopted; it is part of her Russian-Jewish-New-York-immigrant heritage.

There is canniness, too, in the way Spektor marries outlandishness with the kind of sentimental gush you would associate with Celine Dion. Watching her is a game; it is never clear what is coming next. A trickle of syrup or a dash of salt? An irritating, unnecessary scat vocal line, or a melody of such beauty you catch your breath? That ability to create wonder, in both senses of the word, is Spektor's smartest trick of all.

ENGA1 mode exercise 2

Here's another extract for a bit of mode analysis. It's taken from a discussion forum on a music festival website. See what you make of it. If it's a bit blurred, click on the image to get a better picture. Try applying the same questions as the last revision post:

1. Where would you place this extract on the mode continuum?
2. Why?
3. What language evidence can you produce for your decision?

ENGA1 Language Development essay questions part 2

And here is a link to an approach to question 5 from the Teachit site. That's the one that asks you "To what extent do children acquire language by actively working out its rules?".

To use Teachit links you'll have to register on their site first, but it's still free. Go here, register, log in then follow the link above.

ENGA1 Language Development essay questions

As this is the start of a new specification, there has only been one "proper" essay question set on this topic so far, but many of the old spec's child language questions might be reworked (or recycled - it is the 21st century) into something suitable for the new spec.

Here's a list of loads of previous questions from the AQA A spec and in days to come we'll have a look at how you might approach these if they were set on the ENGA1 paper.

1. Discuss the ways in which young children up to the age of four learn words and their meanings.
2. Give examples of how children develop their ability to use the sounds of English. What do your examples reveal about the nature of children’s language acquisition?
3. To what extent do children learn language by copying the language that is spoken to them?
4. Give examples of how children learn to use the grammar of English. What do your examples reveal about the nature of children’s language acquisition?
5. To what extent do children acquire language by actively working out its rules?
6. To what extent is it appropriate to describe children’s early uses of language as wrong or incorrect?
7. To what extent do children learn language through imitation? Give examples of sounds, vocabulary, grammar and meaning.
8. How important is the interaction between children and adult speakers in the process of children’s language acquisition?
9. What have you discovered about the nature of language acquisition from the ways children develop their grammatical skills?
10. It has been suggested that children’s language acquisition is a more interesting process than the simple imitation of adult speech.
11. What have you found interesting about the ways children acquire language?

A plan for answering question 4 (grammar acquisition) can be found here on the Teachit website, if you want to have a look at some approaches to it.

To use Teachit links you'll have to register on their site first, but it's still free. Go here, register, log in then follow the link above.

ENGA1 mode exercise 1

Here's a quick revision exercise you can do using the mode continuum (see yesterday's post if you want to open a copy of the graphic).

The following is an online comment to The Daily Mail's website in response to a story about Chelsea's defeat at the hands of Barcelona last week.

1. Where would you place this extract on the mode continuum?
2. Why?
3. What language evidence can you produce for your decision?

Post your response as a comment, or just use it as a way of thinking about how you would approach an extract like this, if you prefer.

Chelsea have only got themselves to blame,they went to barcelona and were a total embarassment and were very lucky to come away nil nil,they made no attempt to play football and went there to get a draw.If you score goals you go through if you don't your out,it's as simple as.

ENGA1 mode continuum

Here's a quickly cobbled together graphic of the mode continuum which might help a bit with revision. In the next few days, and in the run-up to Friday 15th's ENGA1 exam, I'll add some short extracts of texts for you to place onto this continuum.

The millionth word

Today's Daily Mirror has a page dedicated to the English language and the story from the Global Language Monitor about English approaching its millionth word. According to the site today, the English language will reach its millionth word on June 10th. How they work this out, I'm not sure, and it's clear that proper, qualified linguists are sceptical too. Language Log calls it the "million word hoax" and criticises it as a publicity stunt to promote a book by Paul Payack the boss of GLM.

Whatever the pros and cons of the claim about a million words, the article in The Mirror gives a neat, potted account of the development of English and quotes language guru (and future SFX speaker) David Crystal which is always a good thing. It also mentions lots of new words that have entered the language through social networking, online games and gloomy economic conditions, so it's a very handy article to refer to if you want some examples for your language change essays on ENA5.

It's also got lots of fascinating language facts such as the most commonly used words in English, the longest words without vowels and much much more!

Sociable networking

Today's Guardian Technology has a good article about the language of social networking sites, based on research by Professor Mike Thelwall at Wolverhampton University. He's currently researching the language of MySpace and looking specifically at how sentiment is expressed, and how emotions are conveyed through creative grammar, puctuation and spelling. He's previously worked on swearing and gender on MySpace (covered in a good article in emag) and will be speaking at the next SFX teacher conference (he's appearing on the afternoon of Thursday 18th June, along with Bev Plester) about his research.

The article is a good read for anyone looking at technology and Language Change in A2, but it's also interesting from an AS Language & Mode perspective because it covers many of the features of computer-mediated communication and how orthography can be used to convey some of the patterns of spoken English.

The research is presented here in more detail and the previous work on swearing and MySpace is here.

As the article points out, MySpace is no longer the "top dog in social networking", having been superseded by Facebook and maybe to some extent Twitter, but the open nature of MySpace and the accessibility of its data makes it an attractive proposition for researchers. And who's to say that the patterns apparent in MySpace data won't be pretty much identical to those in other social networking applications?

The table here gives a quick rundown of some of the main non-standard features found in MySpace comments and should give you a chance to think about how this kind of thing might link to your ENA5, ENA6 or ENGA1 exams.

A new word every 98 minutes

The English language is heading towards its millionth word, according to an organisation called the Global Language Monitor who say that a new word is created every 98 minutes. It's a hotly contested claim and one that top linguistics blog Language Log takes issue with. But whatever the pros and cons of this claim, there's not much doubt that our language is rapidly expanding. This edition of the BBC News Magazine has a good article about new words, our own personal vocabularies and recent claims that young people are suffering from "word poverty" and need a boot up the lexical arse.

One interesting point for A2 Language Change students is the question of when a word is actually a "proper" word. For example, do these new words count: Obamamania, noob and airline pulp? And what about d'oh and meh, or even teh and pwn? See this post for more on some of these terms and the million words "hoax".

Will they last and should they be entered into dictionaries, or are they just silly expressions that no one will remember in 20 years?

OMG!!!! I hate exclamation marks!!!!!

"An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes," according to the late, great F.Scott Fitzgerald. Well, as someone who is sometimes lucky just to have an audience of one (myself) laughing at my "jokes", I know where he's coming from. He's so right!!!

Apparently, these days we're seeing more exclamation marks than ever before in written and - especially - blended mode communications. In this article from The Guardian, earlier in the week, Stuart Jeffries looks at the exclamation mark and what it means, and how it's changing. Interestingly, he makes the point that 30 years ago, some manual typewriters (those things that existed before word processors and PCs) didn't even have exclamation mark keys:

It is important to realise that advances in technology (if that's what they are) affect how we write. And how we write includes how often we deploy the beloved gasper. Before the 1970s, few manual typewriters were equipped with an exclamation mark key. Instead, if you wanted to express your unbridled joy at - ooh, I don't know - the budding loveliness of an early spring morning and gild the lily of your purple prose with an upbeat startler, you would have to type a full stop, then back space, push the shift key and type an apostrophe.

He goes on to look at how women and men use the exclamation mark in computer-mediated communication and refers to research that suggests women use them more than men:

But technological change is not the only reason for variations in the use of exclamations. Carol Waseleski's unexpectedly diverting paper, Gender and the Use of Exclamation Points in Computer-Mediated Communication, found that women used more exclamation marks than men. But why was this? Are women more excitable? Some theorists (notably D Rubin and K Greene in their paper Gender-Typical Style in Written Language) had argued that the exclamation mark was often a sign of excitability, and that "a high frequency of exclamation points can be regarded as sort of an orthographic intensifier signalling 'I really mean this!'" They also argued that this might convey the writer's lack of stature; that, in fact, a confident person (read: man) could "affirm their views by simply asserting them". Perhaps then the use of multiple exclamation marks is not simply a sign that someone is wearing underpants on their head, but of deeply unmasculine insecurity about expressing one's thoughts. Or maybe that's just my theory!

Waseleski found otherwise. She concluded that exclamation marks were not just marks of excitability but of friendliness, and suggested that one reason women use them more than men is because they were, as a gender, less likely to be socially inept, funless egotists - which isn't quite how she put it. Instead, she wrote: "The results point to the need to reconsider the negative labels that have often been associated with female communication styles, and to investigate [their use] as they relate to email and other forms of computer-mediated communication."

The rest of the article is a good read for anyone interested in language change - especially orthographic change - over the centuries. So read it!!!!

Our magnificent bastard tongue...

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

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

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

On the millionth word topic:

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

On new prefixes and suffixes:

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

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

On gaming words:

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

On the history of new words:

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

Twitter gives descriptivists a treat...

...or a tweet. In this article from the Greensboro News Record, Mike Clark takes a look at arguments about outside influences on our own ways of communicating: be they accents in new areas we move to, or technologies like texting and Twitter. He makes a number of interesting points for English Language students about how our individual language (idiolect) changes based on the contexts we're using it in and goes on to suggest that we'll switch between different types of language:

How you talk is often influenced by where you are, by the context of the communication, and that’s just fine. Kids who are born and spend a few years in one part of the country and then move with their families to another will often become bi-dialectal. They’ll play with their new neighbors outdoors, speaking with the patois of those new friends, and revert to the dialect of their own family when they’re in the house. I feel pretty confident that the same transformation can occur, will occur, in fact, does occur with today’s young people as they move from technology-based talking to formal writing, from daily talk to giving a speech, and so on.

Far from being responsible for the demise of formal written English that some prescriptivists have argued, texting and Twitter messages might actually help us develop clearer and more creative language styles:

And think about those parameters. Imagine what a good exercise it is to write something in 140 characters (including punctuation and spaces) max. I think it was Pascal who wrote: “I’m sorry for the long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” If you’re a teacher, you must like that kind of discipline for your students; it forces them to focus, to write with attention and precision. The preceding sentence is 141 characters. Can you effectively remove one character? Twitter people can, even the young ones. Let’s say hello to a new age of talking.

ENA6 - 1a word formation processes

Here's a 1a style question for ENA6 based on the post below about words from politics, technology and economics.

Comment linguistically on three processes used to create the following examples of recent words and phrases:

• credit crunch (a term used to describe the lack of credit or lending available in the current economic crisis)
• zombie (originally a word used to describe a body brought back to life by magic, now used to describe a computer taken over by a hacker and used to perform illegal activity)
• downturn (a word used to describe an economic decline)
• bankster (a word used to equate bankers' behaviour with criminals')
• virus (originally a term used for an infectious disease but now used to describe a code that affects a computer)

Best two answers get the Haribo...

Words of warcraft

Today's New York Times runs an article on the changing language of the Whitehouse under Barack Obama's administration. It's not "a war on terror" anymore; it's overseas contingency operations, and it's no longer "terrorist attacks" but man-caused disasters.

Why should we care? They're just words, aren't they? And words don't kill people: weapons do. Well, kind of, but words are part of war and the groundwork that goes into softening up a population for war, or in Obama's case (we hope) a step away from the deranged war his nutty predecessor decided to wage.

Peter Baker explains in his article:

Every White House picks its words carefully, using poll-tested, focus-grouped language to frame issues and ideas to advance its goals. Mr. Bush's team did that assertively. The initial legislation expanding government power after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was called the USA Patriot Act. The eavesdropping without warrants that became so controversial was rebranded the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The enemy was, for a time, dubbed ''Islamofascism,'' until that was deemed insensitive to Muslims.

And he goes on to argue that while Obama is keen to change perceptions about his policies, in Baker's view, the substance of Bush's policies actually remains in place:

He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered the Guantánamo prison to be closed in a year but has not settled on an alternative way to house inmates deemed to be truly dangerous.

Are the Obama administration's words a whitewash then? Is the emphasis on a change of language just a way of hiding the fact that the policies remain the same, or does the shift in tone signal a profound shift in direction to come? The jury's out...

And how is this useful to you at A level? The contemporary language change question on ENA5 often asks you to consider how new words and phrases come into existence or how existing words change, and politics has been explicitly mentioned on a couple of occasions as an are to look at (along with technology, communication, youth culture, immigration and war), so it's worth trying to have a few examples from contemporary news stories at your fingertips.

You might also want to look at how the recent global economic crisis (a nice new noun phrase) has led to new expressions, or how technology has co-opted older expressions and recycled them. How about these examples:

• credit crunch
• financial liquidity
• quantitative easing
  
• fiscal stimulus package
• avatar
• icon
• virus
• bankster
• menu
• zombie
• downturn

Chatting gas

Here's a very dubious poll that claims men gossip more than women. It's not dubious because men don't gossip (they do, but they probably don't like to call it "gossip"), but it's dubious because it's such a rubbish set of questions and relies on such sketchy data. Have a look here for The Telegraph's take on it.

As Deborah Cameron points out so clearly in her excellent Myth of Mars and Venus (covered here), we shouldn't generalise about what men and women do in conversation, because there are so many different types of men and women and we all "do" masculinity and femininity in different ways depending on where we are and who we're with, but one big stereotype about gossip is that it's just a girl thing.