Language change - a crash course

If you're struggling to work out what happened when in the history of English language change go no further than this handy webpage by Philip Durkin at the OED. It's called Five Events That Shaped the History of English and it's very good.

Rastamouse: rewind

This is just a quick post as I know we've covered Rastamouse a lot recently, and I don't want you to think I am obsessed.

This article on The Voice's website is worth a look if you want to see how its (mostly) black readership have responded to the appearance of the reggae-loving rodent.

Language wars: some reviews

Henry Hitchings' new book on debates about "proper English", Language Wars, is a must-read for any A level Language student doing the AQA A spec. It's full of excellent material for the ENGA3 Language Discourses question, and you'll get a good sense of the overall history of the language from reading it.

These reviews from The Independent, The Observer and from Deborah Cameron in The Guardian should give you a good idea of why it's essential reading.

Rastamouse: the bloodclart blacklash begins

It's only been a couple of days since we covered the mighty Rastamouse on this blog and, frankly, that is too long. As predicted here, there have been accusations that the programme encourages young children to use grievous grammar and patchy patois (admittedly, it was the Daily Telegraph that reported this, not the Daily Mail, but just wait...I wouldn't be too surprised if the Daily Star linked Rastamouse to an alleged plot to kill the EDL leader next week).

The other accusation seems to be that the programme stereotypes Jamaicans and the Jamaican English variety - some claiming that it will lead to racism because (wait for it) white kids will start talking in Rastamouse patois and get beaten up by actual Rastafarians. No, really.

While that argument strikes me as almost completely deranged (and full of stereotypes of its own e.g. that black people have such gigantic chips on their shoulder that they will respond aggressively to any perceived slight) the argument about stereotypes and mockery is more serious and probably needs to be looked at a bit more closely than just dismissing it out of hand.

So, what do you think? If you've seen Rastamouse, do you think the programme mocks Jamaican patois? Or instead is it celebrating the language? Vote now in the poll on the right.

What's really depressing is to see some of the comments added by readers of the Telegraph piece, some of whom seem to genuinely feel that by having Rastamouse on TV British values (whatever those might be) are being undermined. Some of them honestly believe that Rastamouse is part of a liberal conspiracy to impose multiculturalism on an unwilling population. I've got to stop reading and responding to these loons!

ILY. WTF?

You may well be asking WTF? is this blog post about? But when you ask WTF?, do you actually say it out loud, or do you only think it? Is there ever an occasion when you would use it away from a keyboard? And if you do say the letters WTF out loud, do they mean the same thing as the words they stand for (which we all know is What The Flip?) or something a bit less rude? And furthermore, if we type or text these letters should it be WTF? (always with a question mark) or WTF (sometimes without)?

It seems odd to me that anyone would even say double-yew tee eff when they could say whatdaf**k so much more quickly - especially as speed and ease are usually the drivers of change with expressions like this - but if WTF? and what the f**k are actually quite different in meaning, then it makes a bit more sense.

These are important questions because we're increasingly hearing people using initialisms like ILY, OMG (thank you, Usher) and LOL (sometimes pronounced as L-O-L and sometimes as a word that sounds a bit like laaaaawwwwwllllll) and it's got linguists quite excited.

What we often see is the appropriation of words from spoken English into a written vocabulary - and some would argue, a casualisation or colloquialisation of the written word - but it's a bit rarer for words or groups of letters to go from a largely written or blended form into spoken usage. We've seen it on a smaller scale with pwn and n00b, but the more recent examples seem to have taken off among a much bigger part of the population.

In this article by Jocelyn Noveck, several linguists and commentators take a look at what's happening and consider the influence of age on this language use, as well as looking back at the history of acronyms and initialisms in language. It's an interesting read and offers some examples of usage that I'd not heard before (ILY = I love you, for example. Sob.).

Edited on 17.11.11 to change broken link to Noveck piece

Make a bad ting good

Popular culture has a great way of feeding new words into our vocabularies, or helping resurrect older ones that have dropped out of use, so the mighty Rastamouse who is righteously rocking the airwaves on CBeebies is the latest to do this.

Among the Jamaican English terms he uses, irie has apparently been a big hit, according to this story. I remember it from my 80s youth as a term of approval, expressing happiness and calm. Some have claimed that it is a state of extreme relaxation brought about by medicinal herbs, but I think that might just be a step too far.


Urban Dictionary defines it in several ways, the most voted for being "to be at total peace with your current state of being. The way you feel when you have no worries" which sounds fine to me. Wordnik has it defined as:

Positive emotions or feelings, or anything that is good. To be at total peace with one's current state of being. Phonetical representation of "all right".

This link about Rastafarian vocabulary on Wikipedia makes interesting reading too. And reading the bit about Armagideon/Gideon times makes me wonder if that is why George Osborne changed his name from Gideon (It's true: check the peerage website.). Is it all a conspiracy to hide the fact that with all his cuts we are really entering Gideon Times?

Can Rastamouse save us and make a bad ting good?

Edited to add: I've done a bit more about the grammar of Rastamouse over on the Teaching English Grammar in Schools blog.

p.s. thanks to Martina (aka Miss Osbourne - no relation to Gideon - for this top viewing tip) 
p.p.s and apologies to my good friend Gideon "Gid" Calder for mocking a fine name. 

Neither Hippy nor Hitler but intelligent descriptivism

While the title of this blog post is strange and obscure (unless you're a fan of 1980s anti-fascist skinhead socialist band, The Redskins and get the album title it refers to) it's kind of appropriate, because it's about extremes and finding a middle ground. The Redskins borrowed the "Neither Washington Nor Moscow but International Socialism" slogan from the Socialist Workers Party and I always thought that it was something to do with finding a position between the rampant capitalism espoused by the USA and the totalitarian state-socialism of the old Soviet Union. To be fair, the SWP were (and remain) much closer to Moscow than Washington, whichever way you look at them. And I try not to look at them for too long or they try to sell me a paper.

But what has this got to with language? This 2005 post on Language Log which I was alerted to by a tweet from Stan Carey of this excellent blog, makes a number of telling points about the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what is "correct" English.

The normal model seems to be to say that a person is either one or the other. If you're a prescriptivist, you're telling other people how they should write and speak and telling them what's correct. If you're a descriptivist, you're happy to let it all hang out and just go with the flow...all change is good...whatever man...just allow it.

But that's a bit of a lazy caricature and it's probably better to see views distributed along a continuum line, where different shades of prescriptivism or descriptivism can be seen. For example, you might have very strong views on the use of the apostrophe in academic writing but be happy not to use it in your text messages or Facebook updates. That doesn't make you either a crazy hippy or a grammar nazi.

Geoff Pullum puts it more precisely than me - as he always does - when he talks about correctness conditions: the norms for your own language usage in your own variety of English:

If you typically say I ain't got no hammer to explain that you don't have a hammer, then the correctness conditions for your dialect probably include a condition classifying ain't as a negative auxiliary, and a condition specifying that indefinite noun phrases in negated clauses take negative determiners, and a condition specifying that the subject precedes the predicate, and so on.

He goes on to explain:

Descriptive linguists try to lay out a statement of what the conditions are for particular languages. And it is very important to note that the linguist can go wrong. A linguist can make a mistake in formulating correctness conditions. How would anyone know? Through a back and forth comparison between what the condition statements entail and what patterns are regularly observed in the use of the language by qualified speakers under conditions when they can be taken to be using their language without many errors (e.g., when they are sober, not too tired, not suffering from brain damage, have had a chance to review and edit what they said or wrote, etc.).

So, what linguists are not doing is just saying that whatever anyone says is right because they said it and therefore that's the way we talk. They're looking at specific situations and patterns and describing them grammatically. As Pullum goes on to say, sometimes people just make mistakes that, if they were to look back over, they'd probably choose to put in a clearer way. These could be features of grammar, punctuation, spelling or lexical choice. I'm sure many of us have looked back at things we've written and gone "Urgh". Linguists themselves might make mistakes by incorporating these errors into their sense of what the correctness conditions for a particular variety might be, so in turn build up an unrepresentative picture of that variety. So, as Pullum is at pains to point out, linguists can be wrong.

But equally, prescriptivists are often wrong (and more wrong!) when they claim that such-and-such a structure (a conjunction at the start of a sentence, preposition at the end, double negative etc.) is always wrong just because them's the rules.

So, to cut a long story short, the debate between what's correct or incorrect is actually much more to with context than it is to do with hard and fast rules. And for A level English Language, which is what this comes back to, finding a more nuanced position between the extremes of labelling a language commentator as either prescriptive or descriptive, is likely to get you a lot of credit in the ENGA3 exam. While it's not for everybody, this sort of discussion could be the difference between a top B and an A grade, or even that elusive A*.

Lexical innovation

If you are studying Language Change for either ENGA3 (A spec) or ENGB3 (B spec) one of your most useful points of reference should be the Macmillan Dictionaries Buzzword pages. Every week, lexicographer and linguist Kerry Maxwell posts a new word or phrase that's recently appeared on the radar and talks about its origins and formation process. The words are logged in a very useful archive too, so you can see way back to the dawn of time (17th February 2003, to be precise) when textual harassment was all the rage or look at them alphabetically where you'll find at the top of the list a handy guide to the top 12 new words of 2010.

Kerry has done sessions at SFX for teachers and students in the last few years and her stuff is always clear, interesting and accessible for A level, so don't be scared. And remember that if you are doing anything on new words for your exam (or even your coursework intervention/media text) examiners and moderators get bored of the same old examples (Smog and motel are blends? Well I never!) and would much rather see some funky* new words that will really float their boats, and stuff.




*I know it's an old world. I'm sorry. I'm getting old.

"We Are All in This Together": analysing coalition cobblers

Today's Guardian features a great bit of polemic from George Monbiot that would make a nice bit of textual analysis for ENGA2. He starts with a reference to something David Cameron said about a tax cuts being off the agenda for the time being before looking at how a change in tax law means that some of the richest companies (the ones who got us in this mess) will now get exactly that. The whole piece is good (and pretty shocking) but it's the last two paragraphs that strike me as particularly effective:

Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries. Ours is a semi-criminal money-laundering economy, legitimised by the pomp of the lord mayor's show and multiple layers of defence in government. Politically irrelevant, economically invisible, the rest of us inhabit the margins of the system. Governments ensure that we are thrown enough scraps to keep us quiet, while the ultra-rich get on with the serious business of looting the global economy and crushing attempts to hold them to account.

And this government? It has learned the lesson that Thatcher never grasped. If you want to turn this country into another Mexico, where the ruling elite wallows in unimaginable, state-facilitated wealth while the rest can go to hell, you don't declare war on society, you don't lambast single mothers or refuse to apologise for Bloody Sunday. You assuage, reassure, conciliate, emote. Then you shaft us.

The use of pronouns, positioning of author, reader and government, the mixture of sentence lengths and syntactical patterns within them, all strike me as pretty effective and worth a closer look.

It's clear what Monbiot's agenda is here, so it's hardly what you'd call biased: he makes no attempt to hide his political colours, so it's not as if he's trying to trick us. Anyway, I think it's a neat example of how a writer deploys a whole range of linguistic techniques to make a convincing and passionate argument.

Below, I've put together a fairly simple list of bullet points for the kinds of language techniques you might want to look for in a text like this. If you're interested in finding out more about developing these approaches then have a look at emagazine 42 from December 2008 in which David Hyatt outlines a framework for critical literacy. Or go straight to the daddy of it all, Norman Fairclough, and his excellent book Language and Power.

A suggested framework for representation and language analysis

Pronoun use – which pronouns are used and how is the reader addressed? Are pronouns used to include and/or exclude? Is synthetic personalisation used to create a “faked” relationship with an imagined “ideal” reader?

Active/passive constructions – which voice is used within the text and how is agency handled? Can we see who is doing what to whom?

Modification – are adjectives used to evoke evaluation? How are adverbs used to present ideas? Are we being pushed in a particular direction by the ways in which nouns are modified?

Metaphor – are metaphors used in the text to present one idea in another’s terms?

Nominalisation – are processes and actions turned into nouns? Does this obscure agency (i.e. who carried out a process, or even that a process happened)?

Register and lexical choice – does technical, specialist or academic language create an impression of an educated and knowledgeable writer? Does a colloquial register seem to “bridge the gap” between reader and writer, creating a more believable tone?

Graphology – does the text present information in a graphical or pictorial form which might anchor particular meanings? Does the use of bullet points or headings “close down” other possibilities for discussion?

Rhetorical devices – does the author structure an argument and use language in such a way as to create a persuasive and convincing effect?

Sentence and clause linking – does the use of particular grammatical structures signal dependent relationships between elements in a sentence?

Sentence and clause structure – does the use or variation of particular sentence lengths and structures help create emphasis?

Tense and aspect – how does the use of past, present or future tense affect the meanings of the text? Does the use of aspect – progressive or perfective – affect meanings?

Subject positioning – from which perspective are events or issues perceived and recounted? Is one position given particular prominence and credibility?

Keeping it old school

Most of the links I put up here are to fairly recent news stories about language, but this one is nearly 16 years old. That means it's possibly older than some of you who use this blog for your AS levels. Wow.

Anyway, I stumbled across this Miles Kington article from The Independent of December 1993 while doing some research on attitudes to grammatical errors (which more often than not, aren't really "errors" at all) and it's a good read.

It's about people's language peeves and how they are often not really very well rooted in linguistic reality. My favourite bit concerns the guidance that we're often given about the adjective unique. In Strictly English, Simon Heffer pompously tells us that phrases like almost unique or nearly unique are "vacuous" because "something is either unique or it is not". Kington sees it differently:

Now, this to me is the kind of pedantic rule-of-iron that a third- rate schoolteacher falls back on. Not only that, but it is demonstrably untrue. For example, if there were two unicorns left in the world, and one was very ill, then the other one would be nearly unique . . .

A timely reminder about the Emagazine English Language conference

Apologies if you've already booked a place, or if you've had enough of the self-promotion, but our conference for A level students and teachers is still recruiting and we're heading towards capacity. Well over 600 students have signed up to attend - which is brilliant - and more are booking each day, so if you want to be sure of a place, get onto the English and Media Centre's site here and get your places booked!

We are also very keen to collect language data from those attending for use in Jonnie Robinson's session, so please add your data to the Survey Monkey questionnaire. You don't even have to attend to add your data: the more the merrier.

Hopefully, see you there.

Get a room

The language of lovers is often pretty sickening. It's even worse when you hear it murmured into a hands free mobile by the lovestruck man sitting next to you on a train, like I had to put up with this morning. But it's not just the babytalk-style phonology, or the wrinkling of the nose, or even the giggles of love, it's the vocabulary as well: snugglebunny, lickle lovebucket, poo poo poppet and agreeable bitch, being some examples. Actually the last two aren't his (and neither are the first two, to be fair) but Jonathan Swift's.

Now, some research  from psychologists in the USA suggests that people are attracted to those who have similar speech patterns. That may not be particularly surprising (unless you're Paula Abdul) but what's quite interesting about this is that the patterns seems to apply to online style as well as as spoken.

Research by the same team at the University of Texas has also indicated that language style matching (LSM) is apparent between couples when they're at their happiest in a relationship.

This is related to accommodation theory in sociolinguistics, where people change their speech style to either converge towards or diverge from other speakers around them. The extremes of divergence are noticeable in teenagers when they sometimes make deliberate efforts to avoid the speech styles of their parents, or in students with strong regional dialects who make a conscious effort not to blend in when they live in a different area, but it's not really much of a surprise to find that the closer we are emotionally, the closer we get linguistically.

This could make an interesting Language Investigation at A2: recording conversations between people who have been together for different lengths of time and identifying specific linguistic features that match or don't match.

"Crappy patois"

Yesterday's Evening Standard carried an op-ed by Henry Hitchings on the nature of changing London English. It's partly a response to Charles Moore's attack on changing English in the Telegraph and partly an advertisement for Hitchings' new book, which we mentioned on here yesterday.

Interestingly, Hitchings makes much of what linguists have called Multicultural London English, Multi-ethnic Youth Dialect, or what some journalists have called "Jafaican", which, as Hitchings points out, tends to cast it as an affectation or a fake dialect, rather than " an authentic, organic variety of English and it looks likely to become more prevalent". We've featured MEYD and MLE here on many occasions and if you click on the tabs at the bottom of this post you'll get some links to the research done by Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire (and others) into this fascinating area of sociolinguistics.

Sadly, anything about language change tends to aggravate those who see all change as a foul corruption of our beautiful tongue, or even (in the case of the Evening Standard article), deranged anti-Jamaican troglodytes who argue (or sneer, perhaps more accurately) that it's a "crappy patois" "derived from some of the most pointless countries in the world", and speaking it is likely to limit young people's life chances. Well, yes, but only if they speak it as their only variety, which is generally not the case, as Hitchings is at pains to point out. But why let a bit of reasoned argument get in the way of a good dose of prejudice?

Language Wars

Henry Hitchings' new book, Language Wars is definitely worth a look for any AQA A spec students planning ahead for the ENGA3 exam in June. The whole book is about what constitutes "proper English", so should be ripe territory for the Language Discourses part of the paper.

It's been reviewed and commented upon here, and you can see Henry Hitchings debate the subject with Simon Heffer (author of the dreadful Strictly English) at the British Library next Monday (7th Feb 2011).

Like being flogged with a warm lettuce

some budgie smugglers in action

Australian English is often held up as an example of a variety of English that is full of invention and wit, and I'm not going to argue with that because Australians are also very good at insults. We'll get to the insults in a minute, but for invention and wit, how about taking a look at these Macmillan Dictionary blog posts - one, two and three - and this Oxford Dictionaries article. There are some fantastic turns of phrase here, like tight swimming trunks being referred to as budgie smugglers. The image is an enduring one and reminds me of family holidays in Holland back in the late 1970s where hairy-chested German tourists would strut around the poolside in unfortunately tight Speedos.

Keeping up the theme of tight-fitting garments, the Australian English thong is a particularly dangerous term that gets lost in translation. If I were to get all Sisqo and ask to see you wear that thong-tha-thong-thong-thong, I'd be presented with a flip flop. And rightly so, because in Australian English thong refers to an item of footwear not a cheesewire between the buttocks.

The articles and blog posts above will give you many more excellent examples, including some fantastically rude ones, as well as some fairly obvious abbreviations (beaut, arvo and convo).

Moving on to insults, my colleague Jill (of Australian background herself) has passed on this link to an archive of abuse from the ex-Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, whose way with words puts the tame banter in our own Houses of Parliament to shame.

World Englishes are part of the AQA A English Language course (unit ENGA3) and not just a bit of fun, so you can actually use some of this in your exam.

n00bs and netizens

Technology has given us masses of new words, blends and compounds of old ones, as well as complete semantic shifts (cookie, menu, desktop, virus and spam all being good examples of semantic change) and this fun quiz on the Oxford Dictionaries site gives you the chance to test your knowledge of some of the more recent expressions.

It's always handy to have a range of good, recent examples to use in exams when you're talking about language change, so have a look here and make a note.

Word clouds and sputnik moments

The US President's State of the Union address always attracts a fair bit of media analysis, but in recent years the analysis has taken on an apparently more linguistic angle. Thanks to cool tools like Wordle and Concordle which allow you to paste in text and then create word clouds based on lexical frequency (see the graphic above, for a word cloud of this blog post), many commentators have started to argue that key themes can be discerned, and from these patterns judgements can be made about the president's concerns.

This link from the BBC news site gives us a chance to examine the relative frequency of 10 words over the last 220 years. Meanwhile, this piece from the BBC last year takes a look at the frequency of particular words in British political parties' election manifestos from 1945 to 2010.

On the surface this sort of analysis makes sense, but as linguists point out, just because you use a word many times doesn't necessarily mean that that specific word reveals a great deal about you. For example, I really dislike Michael Gove, the Education Secretary. The reasons are numerous and varied, ranging from a knee-jerk dislike of Gove's posh Tory background, through to Gove's dogmatic belief that all schools should become "free" schools or academies, Gove's scrapping of the EMA and his bizarre insistence that state schools' problems can be solved by frisking teenagers for porn and putting ex-soldiers in classrooms. But it doesn't stop there: I also have (an admittedly childish) dislike of his resemblance to Dobbie from Harry Potter. Now, if you were to create a word cloud of this post, I'm sure the words Michael and Gove would crop up quite frequently, leading some to suggest that this post is all about Michael Gove. It's not. It's about language, not about Gove at all. But presumably, you can see my point by now...

 This blog entry by the Lousy Linguist puts it more analytically (and more sensibly), so is well worth a read.

Arguably, one of the most telling moments in President Obama's speech this week was his use of the phrase Sputnik moment to draw a parallel between the US's economic and technological status in the world now  - and the need for a reinvention of the USA's research and development programmes - compared to the moment in the last century when the Soviet Union gave the USA a nasty shock by successfully launching the world's first satellite. However, he used the word sputnik only twice in his address, so such an interesting image is unlikely to be identified in a basic crunching of the data.
So, in short, word clouds and simple crunching tools such as those mentioned above can be really helpful for carrying out what corpus linguists like to call "quick and dirty" breakdowns of word frequencies in texts, but we always need to be aware of context and meaning if we're to avoid drawing unhelpful conclusions from the data. In many ways, a quick corpus analysis using something like Wordle can be a brilliant way of opening up new ways into a text, be it a speech, a poem or an extract from a novel, but it's not a substitute for detailed analysis.

Dear blog, cheers xxx

Hey...
          ...Hi...
                     ...Yo...
                                 ...Wassup...
                                                   ...Wagwan...
                                                                     ...Hello...
                                                                                   ...Dear ...

Which is the right one to use in an email? This BBC News magazine piece about the correct way to address the recipient of an email is a really good read.

I've always been stuck somewhere between Hi for people I know and Dear for people I don't, but it feels really weird to me to type "Dear such and such" in an email. And while I like hey as a greeting, I feel too old to use it myself.

It's all part of a shift away from purely written forms of communication into the less regulated territories of blended modes, where the "rules", as much as there are ever rules, become less clearly defined.

And as for signing off an email, I've nearly always used cheers in private emails, thanks in more formal ones, but then cheers is described in less than glowing terms by Jean Broke-Smith who says "What is 'cheers'? Clinking a glass? It's an irrelevant word."

Cheers for that.

txtng: some more db8

Today's Daily Telegraph upsets its readers with a report on new research from Coventry University about the effects of texting and mobile phone use on young people's literacy, namely the beneficial effects texting can have.

The research comes from Clare Wood and her team at Coventry (members of which came to SFX two years ago to talk about their work) and is part of a series of projects they have been involved in. Click on the texting label underneath this post to find all the other SFX blog posts about their work (and related articles).

To give you a taste of the reaction to this research from the Daily Telegraph readership, or at least the part of it that feels compelled to contribute to a message board, have a look at these extracts:

Really? These academics need to get out more and see the result of the texting game, many young people are not only unable to spell and write but sometimes incapable of expressing themselves. Wossit', innit' wha'ever, shu'up!!! 

I can only assume the researchers are from the same genetic pool that fill in recruitment forms for my company!?

This is just an attempt to cover up the failure of the teaching community to teach correct spelling and grammar.

The bankers get (rightly) criticised for wasting our money, it's about time these pseudo-scientific research studies get stamped-out. 

How on EARTH can "U alrite m8" boost spelling SKILLS?
What a load of stupid HOGWASH. 

Luckily, there are also some sane readers (OK, ones that I agree with) who have made a few interesting points about prescriptive attitudes to language change and the influence of technology, or about phonetic spelling actually being any use to English:

There have been numerous historical examples of shorthand writing that are reminiscent of texting, without civilisation coming to an end. It's just nothing new.

...you can always be sure with any technology that some will view it as the end of all things, and future generations will laugh at them. 

If English was a vaguely phonetic language, the article might make some sense. However, since we have 40 sounds in English but more than 200 ways of spelling them, I very much doubt that texting helps. 

David Crystal's Txtng: the Gr8 Db8 is a good introduction to some of the arguments about technology and language change, and he is of course one of the speakers at the Emagazine A  level English Language conference in March. Have a look here for more details about the conference and here for more links to articles and arguments about texting.

And, of course, all of this glosses over the true dangers of texting that can be seen here.

Blood libel: language change in a heartbeat

Following on from the post about violent rhetoric and metaphors of conflict, Sarah Palin has now come out with a bizarre phrase - "blood libel" - to describe "slurs" upon her and her Tea Party movement by those who've linked their inflammatory language to the Arizona shootings.

"Blood libel", had until fairly recently, only ever been used as a term to describe the unpleasant myth that Jewish people killed Christian children as part of some bizarre ritual. It's one of many racist slurs that Jewish people have had to put up with during an extended period of persecution. So why did Palin choose to use such an esoteric expression to respond to her accusers?

This article offers some suggestions and makes some fascinating points about how language changes as a result of social networking technologies and the web.

The first use of the phrase I uncovered came on January 9, one day after the shooting, on the website Renew America. As conservative activist Adam Graham put it: “When someone on the left says that the Tea Party movement is responsible for the shooting in Tucson, they are leveling the political equivalent of a blood libel that blames an entire political movement for the actions of a person who in all likelihood had no connection to the movement.” Note that Graham links to the Wikipedia page on “blood libel,” demonstrating knowledge of the traditional meaning of the term.

They also link to this article which makes the intriguing suggestion that internet "memes" spread more like a heartbeat than a virus, a model for language change that might start to rival the traditional wave and S-curve models.

Tired AF so just a short post

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have been analysing Twitter messages in the USA and found some interesting regional variations, which linguists have started to pick apart.

This report (which I found via this site) tells us more. It's no surprise that tweets reflect the regional, social, ethnic and age variations of the tweeter, but it's intriguing that such variations can be mapped so closely. For example, to find that intensifiers like hella, meaning really/very (as in hella tired) or dead ass (as in dead ass tired), or even a comparative version like AF (as in tired as f**k) can be traced to specific cities or states is quite a neat idea.

So, as we pointed out back here, Twitter is actually working to preserve some regional variation rather than lead to the dialect levelling that so many people predicted.

edited on 13.01.11 to add:

There's another blog post about Twitter that fits in with this recent research here.

edited later on 13.01.11 to add:

For an LA blog's take on their Twitter slang/dialect try here.

Murder and metaphor

The gun rampage in Arizona that has left six dead and Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords critically injured has initiated a great deal of discussion in the media in the USA and elsewhere. Many commentators have focused on Arizona's gun laws, while others have chosen to focus on the language of political debate and whether or not the febrile atmosphere stoked up by the right wing Tea Party might have contributed to a climate in which such an attack was inevitable.

Today's Guardian features an article by Jonathan Freedland in which he explores the language of conflict and warfare that has been used in recent political discourse in the USA. He picks up on Sarah Palin's visual imagery of crosshairs targeting Giffords' congressional seat as well as the combative streak that runs through her rhetoric, including her exhortation for her supporters not to retreat but to "reload": a bit ironic really, given that for all her love of guns, Palin is reputed to be a hopeless shot (as well as an imbecile, obviously).

Freedland makes a number of interesting points about the language of politics, one of which being that politics is saturated with violent metaphors:

...Palin is hardly the first politician to use the language of combat. She could argue that anyone who has ever referred to "battleground" constituencies, talked of candidates "wounded" by "fatal blows" or arguments "shot down" is just as guilty as she is. In this, she could cite the unlikeliest examples. It was the sainted Obama who revved up a crowd in 2008 by declaring of his Republican opponents: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun."

Elsewhere, the linguist John McWhorter  takes a look at the ways he thinks the internet is partly responsible for glib soundbites, rather than reasoned and nuanced rhetorical debate, taking hold of politics.

Emagazine conference site now up and running

The site to support the forthcoming Emagazine A level Language conference is now up and running. You can find it here.

At the moment, you can see the programme, the speakers' details and how to get there, and you can also book tickets for your school or college (if you are a teacher).

There is also a blog running alongside the site to help collect data from you for Jonnie Robinson's session and to submit your questions about language to David Crystal for his Q and A session. We'll be updating the blog regularly with information about each speaker, links to interesting research and some follow-up activities after the conference. You can find the blog here.

We're very excited about the conference, so get your tickets now!!!

Media texts and Language interventions

As loads of A level Language students (and teachers) are currently looking for style models to use for the A and B spec A2 coursework, I thought I'd try to make the search a bit easier by pulling together links to articles and stories that might be good to use.

I'll try to group these into broad areas that have been helpful for me in the past, but if you'd like to suggest other categories or argue about how I've grouped or defined these, just say.

(Updated with new links on Monday 17th October 2011)

Op-eds (opinion/comment pieces by named writers)

• Zoe Williams on slang that demeans women
• Zoe Williams attacks the word "chav" and all it stands for
• Paul Flynn on the word "chav"
• Beatrice Bray on words to define mental illnesses
• David Mitchell on language change
• Richard Littlejohn on "gollywog"
• Mad Melanie Phillips on "gollywog"
• Hannah Pool on "gollywog"
• Ziauddin Sardar on the place of political correctness in language
• David Gelernter on the perils of PC
• Anti-ebonics op-ed
• Max Davidson on slang 
• Christopher Howse on new words and dictionaries
• SFX blog post which links to several pieces by Simon Heffer about language
• Dr Bernard Lamb of the Queen's English Society bemoans low standards in English
• Henry Hitchings (author of Language Wars) on changing London dialect
• Charles Moore of The Daily Telegraph on why change is bad
• I h8 text messages: John Humphrys gets mad in the Daily Fail
• Cn u txt?: John Sutherland savages texting in The Guardian (2002)
• 2b or not 2b: David Crystal argues that texting isn't all bad
• The end of handwriting: Boris Johnson on the rise of technology and the end of writing

News stories

• "Man on the Street" offensive to women
•  The Sun on "youth"
• Texting is good for you
• Texting is bad for you
• Texting is edumacational
• Studying texting is dumbing down 
• More on texting and literacy (readers' comments range from hysterical to offensive)
• The Sun on slang (image file) 
• A strangely popular article about the rise of "regional super-accents". With pictures of Cheryl Cole.
• Twitter and regional dialect in the USA (thanks to Ant's blog)

Feature articles

• "Gang slang" in The Evening Standard (nothing to do with gangs really, but there you go...) and an op-ed response in The Voice
• Lucy Tobin on "student slang" (again, not really about "student" slang per se, but worth a look...)
• Anna Leach on geekspeak and the language l33t (really good article!)
• Seattle Times piece on worries over text language

• General advice from Tim Radford on writing about science for a non-specialist audience: useful tips

OK, that's a start for now, and I'll add more over the coming days. You can also look for the blog posts where these articles were first mentioned by putting various keywords and phrases such as language intervention, media text, style models, texting, slang, new words, political correctness in the search bar on the top left of the screen, or by clicking on the labels below.

You might also find this link helpful as it gives more info about what an op-ed is. I've always told my students it's an opinion editorial, but this link says that's not the case. Ho hum.

This is quite interesting on different types of feature article too.

All that junk inside your trunk

Happy New Year and all that. Just a couple of quick links here about new words for 2010 (junk being a potential word of the year) and reasons for English's continuing lexical growth. And here's one from today's Independent about political and professional language.

Normal service will be resumed once I've recovered from back to work depression and the experience of a Barbie Princess Castle alarm clock going off at 2am, causing my daughter to scream and think that the world had ended.

English, Englishes, Elves and Latin

There's a good introduction by Michael Rosen to the role of English as a world language in the BBC News magazine this week. He looks at the role of Latin as one of the first "world" languages (sort of...) before moving on to think about the ways in which English and its various Englishes have spread around the globe.

Some of the most recent debates around this issue have centred around the existence of a standard form of the language (Global English) or different versions of it (Global Englishes), or more recently around a phenomenon called ELF (English as a Lingua Franca). Anyway, Michael Rosen's article is a good start if you want to find out more about the background to the debate, and you can find some more discussion on this blog post.

Hit Me Up with some culturomics: new words for 2010

Moustache + November = Movember

As we get closer to New Year and the alcopocalypse that is the Christmas party season, many language enthusiasts like to have a look at the new words that have emerged or gained new prominence in the year so far.

It's been a good year for new words, with one of my favourites being a renaming of a whole month as Movember ( a blend of the clipped mo for moustache and November). Having spent a rare night out in Hoxton a few weeks ago, it was hard to distinguish the brave Movemberists from the usual hipsters who normally sport a pathetic caterpillar atop their upper lips.

Wiki- has grown in popularity as a prefix too, with Wikileaks being all across the news over the last month. We looked at the wiki- prefix a while ago on the SFX Moodle ENGA3 unit (and if you're an SFX student, it's still there and you can contribute to the new words wiki), but for those who aren't SFX students the etymology is here. At the other end of a word, you'll find a suffix, and the -gate suffix which first appeared, not as a separate morpheme but as part of the proper name Watergate, has been applied ever since as a suffix to any type of scandal. So earlier this year when the General Election was taking place (You must remember: it was when and Nick Clegg was telling students that he would scrap tuition fees and David Cameron promised that EMA was safe.) Gordon Brown got himself involved in Bigotgate. And connected to Wikileaks, we have cablegate, where the cables that were intercepted have had -gate tacked on the end.

Connected to Wikileaks again is hacktivism, which is a blend of hack (as in its computer hacker meaning rather than its other ones) and activism. The Visual Thesaurus article on new words has more on this and loads of other words, and, like most things on VT, is a really good read.

 The role of  social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter in spreading language and creating new trends (trending as a verb being revived thanks to Twitter) has continued to have power over many people, with the initialism HMU (Hit Me Up i.e. call me/contact me/ping me/BBM me/message me/give us a bell) coming top in the Facebook status updates top 10 list. Until the day I saw that report, I had never heard of or used HMU, but now I will. Every day.

Pamela Stephenson - a true GILF?

Another new word, which may well have existed for a little while, but came up at a recent teachers' reunion in a Soho pub (which probably tells you a lot about the ages and mental states of those involved) was GILF. If you already know what a MILF is then you should have a fairly good idea of what a GILF might be. And if you were to then think Pamela Stephenson on Strictly Come Dancing, you'd be close to the real meaning. What can I say? There are some sick people out there. I prefer the X Factor.

On a much bigger and more educationally respected scale, this report in today's Guardian reveals how a project at Harvard University is creating a database of billions of words by digitising more than 5 million books. They call  it culturomics: presumably a blend of culture and economics, with a bit of linguistics thrown in? a blend of culture and genomics (as pointed out by Ben Zimmer in his comment below).

What's particularly revealing from a lexical point of view is that the vocabulary of English is seen to be expanding rapidly. The figures quoted in the study show that in 1900 there were an estimated 544,000 words and then in 2000, 1,022,000 words, with an estimated growth of approximately 8500 words a year.  The report's abstract can be found here and there's a lot of good reading in there, including how grammar is changing over time. One of the most striking points about grammar is in the section on the regularization of past tense endings:

...each year, a population the size of Cambridge adopts “burned” in lieu of “burnt”...1% of the English speaking population switches from “sneaked” to “snuck” every year: someone will have snuck off while you read this sentence.

On that bombshell, I'll sign off. This will probably be the last blog post this year, so have a good Christmas break and New Year.

Pim-holes and Jeremy Hunts

Swearing is all over the media, literally in the case of Radio 4 last week which delighted/shocked (delete as appropriate) its listeners with two unintended utterances of one of the rudest words in the English language. It's a word so rude that if I typed it here, you would never again be able to read this blog at a school or a college, so I won't*.

Anyway, the use of this dreaded word appeared to be a genuine mistake on the part of the Today programme's James Naughtie, as he tried to trail the appearance of Jeremy Hunt, the Culture Secretary (as you can hear from this clip of his slip). Later that morning, on the same station, Andrew Marr repeated the word while talking about the error Naughtie had made. Naughtie later made an apology, claiming that the mistake was a Spoonerism, a substitution of initial sounds between two words (try swapping the initial consonants of "shining wit" or the name of circus accessories store, "Cunning stunts" and you'll see what I mean).

So, why the outrage? Well, swearing still upsets lots of people even though lots of us do it and have done for centuries. This article by Jonathan Margolis from back in 2002 looks at how attitudes to swearing have changed over the years and provides a bit of background, but if you want a really detailed look at bad language, you could do no worse than put Peter Silverton's Filthy English on your Christmas list.

Sometimes though, our willingness to be shocked can be rather odd. This report on the UK Polling Report site tells us that 61% of respondents in a recent survey thought that the word pim-hole should either never be broadcast on TV or only ever broadcast after the watershed. That's pim-hole. It doesn't actually exist as a real word, outside this 1990 Fry and Laurie sketch about swearing. The full report is available from YouGov here and contains strong language. Obviously.

We've looked at swearing before and you can find some interesting stuff here and here. Also, Steven Pinker's most recent book, The Stuff of Thought, features some really interesting stuff on the links between swearing and language evolution, which these short lectures throw a bit of light upon:

and:

*But what I can tell you is that it's a word most sensible people say whenever George Osborne appears on TV.

Variety is the spice of language acquisition

Some new research into children's acquisition of language, reported here, suggests that children who are presented with more diverse objects of a similar type are quicker at developing their grasp of nouns than those who are shown a smaller range. The report explains further:

Two toddlers are learning the word "cup." One sees three nearly identical cups; the other sees a tea cup, a sippy cup and a Styrofoam cup. Chances are, the second child will have a better sense of what a cup is and -- according to a new University of Iowa study -- may even have an advantage as he learns new words.

This might not strike you as such a great surprise, but it's a study that sheds a bit of light on the processes children go through as they develop a sense of what a word means and the limits to which they can stretch that word's range of meanings. The linguist and child language expert, Jean Aitchison, talks about children acquiring words and their meanings as going through a process of labelling, packaging and network building. As you can probably see from this research, showing children a range of different objects, all with similar characteristics, seems to help them with the packaging and network building elements of their language acquisition.

The research goes on to suggest that a knock-on effect of this early boost to lexico-semantic acquisition is an enhanced ability to generalise. So, when children were later asked to identify objects that they hadn't seen before (or types of objects that they had seen in slightly different forms) they were better able to label them:

When tested on unfamiliar objects that fit into the categories they'd been taught -- such as a bucket they'd never seen before -- kids in the variable group performed better. This showed an ability to generalize the knowledge. "We believe the variable training gave them a better idea of what a bucket was. They discovered that the buckets were all alike in general shape, but that having a handle or being a particular texture didn't matter," Perry said. "In contrast, the children exposed to a tightly organized group of objects developed such strict criteria for what constitutes a bucket that they were reluctant to call it a bucket if it was different from what they'd learned."

emagazine A Level Language Student Conference

Sorry for not posting much recently, but I've been busy with various things including some A level workshops, the day job (doing neeky grammar things) and organising (or organising how to avoid) trips to Mr Tumble in pantomine. The other thing I've been doing is helping the English and Media Centre organise what we hope will be a brilliant conference for A level English Language students.

All the details are here and if you want to attend as an A level student then badger your teacher to get a booking made. If you are a teacher, email Barbara Bleiman (barbara@englishandmedia.co.uk) at the EMC to express your interest and provisionally book some places. If you are a university student, there will probably be individual tickets available and more details will be made available soon after Christmas.

The details:
Wednesday March 16th 2011 – with David Crystal, Deborah Cameron and others...
At the Logan Hall, Institute of Education, London WC1 (10 min walk from Euston)
Following the success of the Literature and Media Studies student conferences in the Autumn Term, emagazine is planning a conference for A Level Language students in the Spring Term, for AS and A2. We are working with Dan Clayton to plan the day.

The programme will include lectures, a session on approaches to investigation, with an interactive element, and a short session modelling how to respond to data in an exam. At lunchtime, we are hoping to organise a ‘Language Fair’, with stalls from one or two university departments, a surgery held by the emag editors for anyone wanting to write for the magazine and a ‘resident linguist’ who will answer students’ questions and chat to them. We’re also hoping to set up a Conference blog, in advance of the Conference, to get students involved before the day.

Speakers confirmed so far:

• Deborah Cameron
• David Crystal (including a Q&A session, with David Crystal, based on students’ questions, sent in advance, and submitted on the day)

Programme: 10.30 – 3.15 to allow for ease of travel
Cost: £20 per school/college student. 1 teacher per 10 students goes free. £50 for teachers wanting to attend without students, as CPD.
A conference website will be set up at the beginning of next term, (accessible from the EMC and emagazine websites) with full details and the facility to make provisional and confirmed bookings. In the meantime, put it in your diaries and if you would like us to keep you informed, please email barbara@englishandmedia.co.ukwith ‘Emagazine Language A Level Conference’ in the subject line.

Hash, octothorpe or pound?

Several articles have picked up on the rebirth of the # symbol thanks to its use as a hashtag on Twitter. This article looks at its history and return to fame, while this brief piece in today's Guardian does something similar. It's also called a number sign on Wikipedia.

Other punctuation marks have had similar histories and undergone revivals thanks to multimodal forms of communication. Previously on this blog we've looked at the exclamation mark !!!, the l'il apostrophe , the hyphen and you can also read more about the @ here)