Phwoar, get a load of these

...these new entries into the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, that is. Sorry for the gratuitous picture of Barbara Windsor from the Carry On films (and more recently Eastenders) but phwoar was usually uttered when she was around.

The term phwoar was made famous in the 1960s and 70s by the legendary Sid James and has now made it, along with stud muffin and arm candy into this latest version of the slang dictionary . The story (all 4 paragraphs of it) is here on the Daily Mirror's website or covered in more detail in The Daily Mail here, and you can find out more about the new entries in the dictionary here.

And for this term's first Haribo competition, what word formation process is responsible for stud muffin, Glasgow kiss, happy slapping and arm candy? A bag of Haribo to the first 2 answers posted as comments here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

The A to Bee of spelling

Spelling and spelling reform have hit the news recently, with arguments over the English spelling system in several newspapers. If you believe popular opinion, we're all getting much worse at spelling and this is probably down to rubbish teachers, teenage fecklessness, utter indolence and text messaging. But as with much "popular opinion" or "it's obvious innit" schools of "common sense", it's not that simple.

The English spelling system is a strange beast and one that reflects a lot about the history of our language - its origins in other languages, its changes over time, and the influences of technology and social change - and a lot about the ways we pronounce words, or used to. And it's this mish mash of different influences that makes it such a difficult system for many people to master. Not only that, but to say it's a system implies there's a logical structure to it, and that's not always the case.

John Sutherland, in this article in The Independent, looks at the issue of spelling reform - changing the way we spell words - and the debates over it. Elsewhere, the views of John Wells, the President of the Spelling Society (there is indeed such a thing), the man who kick started this current debate about spelling by arguing that we should relax spelling rules, are covered in this Times piece, this Daily Mail article and this Guardian article which is good if you're looking for the historical background to some of our spelling patterns.

In a slightly different way, this article in yesterday's Guardian - a profile of the top linguist David Crystal - makes the point that texting isn't really the true villain in all this, as some commentators are claiming, but just the latest technological advance to carry the can for making us communicate more inaccurately.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

CSI Nokia

Forensic linguistics is a growing field and one that directly applies skills of textual analysis to a range of everyday communications - letters, texts, internet discussions, recordings of speech - in a bid to accurately trace the user's identity.

Science Daily reports on one particular case in which a man was convicted for the murder of his ex-partner largely through the evidence of messages sent on her mobile phone. Dr Tim Grant of Aston University explains:

‘Jenny Nicholl disappeared on 30th June 2005. A linguistic analysis showed that text messages sent from her phone were unlikely to have been written by her but, rather, were more likely to have been written by her ex-lover, David Hodgson. A number of stylistic points identified within texts known to have been written by Jenny Nicholl were not present in the suspect messages. Instead, these were stylistically close to the undisputed messages of David Hodgson.

Hodgson was convicted partly because, in text messages he sent on her phone after she disappeared, he spelled "myself" as "meself". In her own text messages, Nicholl had spelled the word "myself".

‘The kind of features we were interested in were the shortening of “im” in the texts from Nicholl contrasting with “I am” in the suspect messages and the lack of space after the digit substitution in items such as “go2shop” contrasting with “ave 2 go”’.

So, while your skills of textual analysis and understanding of new modes of technology will obviously help you do well in your A Levels, they might also help you become a crime-fighting super sleuth.

Useful for:
ENGA1 - Language and Mode
ENGA3 - Language Explorations
ENA5 (old spec) - Language Change

The rents won't get it

A story in today's Daily Mail tells us all about a new guide to teen slang available from here on the Parentplus website. The guide is supposed to be a "jargon buster" for parents who can't understand the language their kids are using. The article uses the usual trick of journalists (and sad English teachers like me) of trying to insert slang terms into "normal" speech for comedy effect, but fails by trying too hard (like a sad English teacher). Have a look at some examples here for a taste of what's on offer.

Language students might argue about the use of the word jargon here - it's not really jargon as such (technical language associated with a given job or activity) but slang that they're really talking about. But it's an interesting snapshot of what's going on with slang at the moment and the influence of American English, London English and especially Black British English on mainstream language.

As with any guide to slang it's got a short shelflife, with new words rapidly appearing, to take the place of old ones. Words like ace and magic which were used as terms of approval when I was a kid (the 1970s if you must know...) got replaced by sick and wicked, and now words like nang, off the hook and gully (although they're probably out of date already).

Dirty English infects beautiful Italian

It sounds like some obscene liaison between Russell Brand and Sophia Loren, but it's all about language really.

According to this story in The Daily Telegraph, language purists in Italy have had enough of English words being thrown into daily conversation and have said no to Anglitaliano. Words and phrases such as weekend, know how and cool have appeared on a list of "ugly English words" and are being derided as unpleasant and affected.

The French have usually been the ones who complain about this sort of thing, as this post from March illustrates, but it all seems part of a wider response among people in all societies who worry about language change and losing the "purity" of their language, be it Italians appalled at English words or English speakers sick of American phrases.

Are we bovvered?

A recent Telegraph report provoked 120 comments online. The views expressed ranged from angry to sarcastic and incredulous. The intensity of feeling was surprising and included harsh lexis such as: ‘nasty’ ‘scum’ ‘insanity’ ‘pompous little Hitlers’ ‘petty minded Fascists’ ‘halfwits’….. the list goes on.

So what stirred up such a reaction? In an attempt to be avoid offence and to be sensitive to individuals and certain groups Chichester District Council has written a 7 page booklet as a guide for their employees. The term ‘general public’ is promoted as a positive alternative to ‘Man on the street’ to avoid offending women.
See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2619171/Man-on-the-street-is-offensive-to-women.html

How angry does this make you feel? Or does this not bother you at all?

Possibly the comments received online by the Telegraph are more interesting to debate than the leaflet alone. Here we see Political Correctness described as ‘highly offensive’ and ‘a sickness.’ The negative sexual connotations of ‘woman on the street’ are highlighted in more than one comment. Some historical context is given for the usage of ‘man’.

As English Language students you need to form views and express opinions on language issues both in Paper 5 and Paper 6. Exploring the comments expressed by ‘the man on the street’ in response to articles about language issues may help you to form a view. It is not just your teachers who get excited and passionate about language debates!

(Unfortunately my lack of technical ability prevented me from including a google image of a 'man on the street' that would definitely cause offence here in Chichester!)

Welcome

Welcome to the blog, if you're a new student at SFX, or have just started this course at another school or college.

We're hoping to get a few more contributors to add posts this year and as ever we welcome your views. Please just click add comment on a post to give your own view or link to a story that interests you.

Grammar rage!

You know what really makes my blood boil? It's not knife crime, the prospect of David Cameron being the next Prime Minister or global warming: its people who dont no how to use proper grammer and spellings.

Have a look at this list of grammar crimes and feel your own blood boil...or not.

Fewer items, less trouble

Tesco have made grammar purists everywhere jump for joy by changing their "10 items or less" signs to "Up to 10 items". But why?

According to the BBC website it's all about the difference between less and fewer.

The new wording was suggested to Tesco by language watchdog The Plain English Campaign. Tesco said the change would be phased in across its stores."Saying up to 10 items is easy to understand and avoids any debate," said a spokesman for The Plain English Campaign.

"Fewer" should be used when you are talking about items that can be counted individually, for example, "fewer than 10 apples"."Less" is correct when quantities cannot be individually counted in that case, e.g. "I would like less water".

But is this change important? Does this distinction actually matter? Everyone knows what's meant by "10 items or less". In fact, isn't "Up to 10 items" actually less clear? Does it mean up to and including 10 items or up to the point where 9 becomes 10, but no further? In fact, does it matter at all when most people actually pretend they can't count and just take 20 items?

The debate - oh yes, there's a debate about this - is followed up in comments on the Daily Telegraph's website, where you can see some very poor spelling and grammar from those who claim to be grammar experts. Tut tut...

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Medal that man

The changing function of some words in English gives certain people an attack of the shakes. Nouns like medal and podium have been used as verbs in reports on the Olympics in Beijing (for example ,"Chris Hoy has medalled" and "the athlete podiumed three times").

David Marsh, the style guide editor for The Guardian has written an article here about these uses and found that "to medal" as a verb has actually been knocking around since at least 1822.

The process is called conversion and we've seen it before with nouns like fax and text becoming to fax and to text, and with a verb like to ask becoming a noun an ask (as in football commentators describing a difficult challenge as "a big ask").

As David Marsh explains, some people find these shifts in function very upsetting and see them as Americanising the language. Others make the point that English is amazingly flexible, so why not just use it to its full extent?

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Serious pwnage

The internet has speeded up the pace of language change and led to new varieties of English which are often limited to relatively small communities of practice (groups of language users linked by a shared interest or practice, such as online gaming, hacking, phishing, 419 scams etc) but which often leak out into wider society and affect the mainstream.

Many of the words associated with online gaming in particular are interesting from a language change point of view, often consisting of the usual blends, acronyms and initialisms, but also a weird range of semantic changes and random fluctuations and errors which become "real" words in their own right.

One word, the blend playbourer - a person employed to "farm" gold in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) and then sell it on to other gamers - is reported on in today's BBC News. It's a form of sweatshop labour that fuels a black economy of gold-spammers (people who send you endless spam messages about buying virtual gold with real money) but I can't see a World of Warcraft fairtrade movement springing up any time soon.

Elsewhere terms like owned and pwned have grown in popularity. Owned has a similar meaning to the London slang boyed: defeated, beaten or humiliated. So, to get owned (the passive form of the verb) is is to be beaten. In gaming this seems to refer to any dramatic defeat at the hands of NPC (non-player character) enemies or other players. The obvious link to the traditional sense of to own - to possess or have - suggests that this usage might be seen as a broadening, a form of semantic shift where a word changes its meaning while leaving the original word with its original meaning. And rather like to boy, or even to merk/murk (generally meaning to beat up, destroy or kill, possibly* derived from a shortened version of mercenary, a paid soldier), slang terms with connotations of victory, violence and competitive prowess often move into use in areas of sexual behaviour. Take the recent Dizzee Rascal and Calvin Harris track Dance Wiv Me, which features the romantic chat-up line "You've got a body to die for: let me merk it"...

Pwned is a weirder and maybe more interesting example of how keyboard technology can lead to variations in language use. According to this definition and this one, pwned was probably a typo (with 0 and p being adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard) but has now become a word in its own right. A similar example is book to mean cool, created by the predictive text on mobile phones selecting book as the first option. Again, despite originating in a mistake, this has taken off as a slang term (or at least did for a while).

And what do linguists make of this? This week's Word of Mouth on Radio 4 (listen again here) includes an interview with renowned linguist David Crystal who makes the point that the internet is spreading language change so quickly that the days of prescriptivism (the movement to regulate and "fix" spelling, grammar and meaning) are numbered as we let our fingers do the talking.

Useful for:
ENA5/ENGA3 - Language Change
ENGA1 - Language and Mode

*I say possibly as there are loads of different ideas about where this word comes from

Chambers dictionary new word entries

The latest edition of the Chambers Dictionary includes a number of new words and phrases that you might have come across. The editor-in-chief claims that these words present "a vivid picture of current interests and concerns", while others bemoan the inclusion of business jargon and ephemeral expressions.

Take a look at some of the media coverage of the new dictionary inclusions for a taste of how people feel about some of these new words and phrases, and find out more about where the words come from and how they're formed.

Guardian - WAGS and War on Terror
Guardian - Electrosmog and wardrobe malfunction
Telegraph - WAGs, HIPs and credit crunch
BBC - Electrosmog enters the dictionary
Chambers Dictionary Word of the Week

2008 exam results

Congratulations on a really excellent set of exam results this year - we're very chuffed and hope you are too!

Obviously, not everyone gets the grade they want, so if you are unhappy with your result and want to talk it through, email me on the college address and I'll see what I can do to help.

Word of the week

Just a quicky to recommend this link to Kerry Maxwell's Word of the week on the MacMillan Dictionaries site.

Each week she looks at a new word that has emerged and explores its meaning, etymology and use. Very handy for A2 Language Change.

Chavs and chav nots

Turn away now if you sat (or marked) an ENA6 paper last month, as Zoe Williams is about to reappear. In her Guardian online column she responds to yesterday's call by the Fabian Society to stop using the word chav. Yes, it's a nasty word, redolent of prejudice and snobbery, but banning words is not a great plan, she reckons.

Meanwhile, one of many responses to the article in yesterday's Guardian about what to do about offensive language in a post-PC world makes the point that Zia Sardur missed out women from his lists of groups susceptible to bigotry. The correspondent says "Although not strictly a "minority", women have been verbally abused since time began. Sadly, vicious insults such as bitch, tart, chick and even whore are increasingly used against us now, after a couple of decades when such words were rarely used. The idea that these references are "ironic" is merely a smoke screen".

Axe the chav and more tales of PC

Two articles in today's Guardian feature discussions about language and how it represents different groups and individuals in society. In the first piece by Ziauddin Sardar, the idea of language in a post-PC world is discussed. The argument goes something like this: if the term PC (Political Correctness) is discredited and the ideas that go with it are suffering splashback as a result, then what should we do to make sure that people are sensitive and careful about the potential impact of their words on others? As Sardar says:

We shape our language, but language also shapes us. Giving a currency to demeaning language can blind us to the fact we have embraced demeaning perceptions about other people.

And he expands on this:

Derogatory words make way for degrading treatment. Language is more than our basic tool of communication; it shapes perceptions and so influences behaviour. Referring to "faggots" or "wrinklies" strips people of respect, and it's just a short step to thinking them less equal. Terms such as "cripples", "spastics", "thick" and "retarded" stigmatise disabled people as less human. A recent increase in attacks has its roots in such language. If "terrorism" is constantly linked to the "Muslim community", as though it is one monolithic entity, it is not surprising if 69% of Britons see all Muslims as terrorists and feel fear and loathing towards them.

It's an argument that should be familiar to most A Level students who've looked at Language & Representation or done the recent Language Debates ENA6 paper (which I'm still marking...). Basically, what Sardar is proposing is an argument inspired by linguistic determinism: that the language we use is a framework through which much of our perception of the world is dictated, or at least influenced.

Elsewhere in the same edition of the paper, Tom Hampton of the Fabian Society, a left-leaning think tank and pressure group, argues that the word chav should not be used as it is "deeply offensive to a largely voiceless group and – especially when used in normal middle-class conversation or on national TV – it betrays a deep and revealing level of class hatred".

This time what's being proposed seems to be a reflectionist argument: that the language we use reflects our social values and attittudes, and that if these values stink (racism, snobbery, sexism etc.) then we should try to moderate our language. The article goes on to talk about the use of racist, homophobic and generally abusive language, so it's a good read for anyone studying ENGA2 (new spec) next year or ENA6 (old spec) from September.

Txtl Analysis

David Crystal is renowned as one of the country's top linguists and in an extract from his new book on language, in The Guardian today, he looks at the rise of texting and the arguments about its effect on our wider communication skills.

Some of the background to texting is covered - the number of messages sent each year & the typical abbreviations used - but maybe more interesting from an English Language A Level point of view is the debate over what texting does (or doesn't) do to our language. Some views are particularly strong...

Crystal quotes a 2002 John Sutherland article (which actually featured on an ENA6 paper a few years ago) in which texting is described as "penmanship for illiterates", and a more recent article by John Humphrys which tell us that the "SMS vandals" "are destroying it (English): pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped."

But as Crystal points out, "Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language. Scares accompanied the introduction of the telegraph, telephone, and broadcasting". He makes the point that texting is just another example of language change in action.

People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of it uses a distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

So is texting destroying our language, turning us into a nation of lazy illiterates? Or is it just a form of technology that helps us communicate quickly, a form with its own rules that we can switch into and out of when we choose? Sounds like a language debate to me, so fair game for assessment on ENA6 and the new ENGA3 spec.

Dictionary takes the biscuit

Custard cream is entering the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time, along with muffin top, leetspeak and fascinator. Today's Daily Mirror tells you more about these new additions, while the press release and guide to new entries from the Concise OED reproduced below might give you more of an idea about how dictionaries are put together, where idioms such as "freeze the balls off a brass monkey" and "take the biscuit" come from and what's happening to our language.

Your guide to some of the new entries in the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary

lookbook
• n. a set of photographs displaying a fashion designer's new collection, assembled for
marketing purposes.

on-trend
• adj. very fashionable: her fitted jacket is bang on-trend.

fascinator
• n. a light, decorative woman's headpiece consisting typically of feathers, flowers, beads, etc. attached to a comb or hairclip.

muffin top
• n. informal a roll of fat visible above the top of a pair of women's tight-fitting low-waisted trousers.

body-con
• adj. denoting a style of clothing characterized by very tight-fitting garments: the body-con trend is big news at the moment.
— origin shortening of body-conscious.

vanity sizing
• n. the practice of assigning smaller sizes to articles of manufactured clothing than is really the case, in order to encourage sales.

custard cream
• n. Brit. a biscuit with a vanilla-flavoured cream filling.

sleb
• n. informal a celebrity.
— origin 1990s: representing a colloq. pronunc. of celeb.

channel
• v. emulate or seem to be inspired by: Meg Ryan plays Avery as if she's channelling Nicole Kidman.

cosplay
/"kzpleI/
• n. the practice of dressing up as a character from a film, book, etc., especially one from the Japanese genres of manga or anime.
• v. engage in cosplay.
— derivatives
cosplayer n.
— origin 1990s: blend of costume + play.


academy
• n. Brit. an inner-city school which is funded partly by the government and partly by a private individual or organization.

biosignature
• n. another term for biomarker. naturally occurring molecule, gene, or characteristic by which a particular medical condition, disease, etc. can be identified.

bootstrap
• v. start up (an Internet-based business or other enterprise) with minimal
financial resources.

boiler room
• n. a room or office in which many operators engage in high-pressure telephone sales, especially of risky or worthless investments.

botnet
• n. a network of private computers infected with malicious software and controlled as a group without the owners' knowledge, e.g. to send spam messages.

bragging rights
• pl. n. a temporary position of ascendancy in a closely contested rivalry: it's
over 25 years since Burnley last had the bragging rights in East Lancashire.

busted flush
• n. (in poker) a hand containing four cards of the same suit and one of a different suit. informal a promising person or thing that turns out to be unsuccessful: her leadership is already a busted flush.

car crash
• n. informal a chaotic or disastrous event or situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for onlookers or observers: her life is turning into a car crash.

cc (also c.c.)
• v. (cc's, cc'ing, cc'd) send a copy of an email to (a third party).

crunch
• n. a severe shortage of money or credit: the beleaguered company has become the latest victim of the credit crunch.

demob-happy
• adj. feeling elated because one is about to leave a stressful or responsible job or situation.

drookit
/"drUkIt/ (also droukit)
• adj. Scottish extremely wet; drenched.
— origin
C16: origin uncertain; cf. ON drukna ‘to be drowned’.

fit
• adj. — phrases
fit for purpose (of an institution, facility, etc.) well equipped or well suited for its designated role or purpose.

go-bag
• n. chiefly N. Amer. a bag packed with essential items, kept ready for use in the event of an emergency evacuation of one's home.

goji berry /"g«UdZi/
• n. a bright red edible berry widely cultivated in China, supposed to contain high levels of certain vitamins. See also wolfberry. either of two shrubs (Lycium barbarum and Lycium chinense) on which goji berries grow.
— origin from Chin.
gouqi.

gorilla
• n. [with modifier] a dominant contender within a particular sphere of operation or activity: they'll be up against the 800-lb gorilla in this business, Sony.

leetspeak
• n. an informal language or code used in Internet chatrooms, email, etc., in which numerals or special characters are used to represent standard letters.
— origin from leet, representing a pronunc. of elite, and -speak.

locavore/"l«Uk«vOÉ/ (also localvore /"l«UkÒ«ÔlvOÉ/)
• n. N. Amer. a person whose diet consists only or principally of locally grown or
produced food. — origin C21: on the pattern of carnivore, herbivore, etc.

microgreens
• pl. n. the shoots of salad vegetables such as rocket, celery, beetroot, etc., picked just after the first leaves have developed.

mocktail
• n. chiefly N. Amer. a non-alcoholic drink consisting of a mixture of fruit juices or other soft drinks. — origin 1930s: blend of mock + cocktail.

NEET
• n. Brit. a young person who is not in education, employment, or training.
— origin acronym.

non dom

• n. Brit. a person who lives in a country but is not legally domiciled in it, thereby sometimes obtaining tax advantages in the country concerned.

plus-one
• n. informal a person's guest at a social function.

poke
• v. (on the social networking site Facebook) attract the attention of (another member of the site) by using the ‘poke’ facility.

pump and dump
• n. the fraudulent practice of encouraging investors to buy shares in a company in order to inflate the price artificially, and then selling one's own shares while the price is high.

relatable
• adj. enabling a person to feel that they can relate to someone or something: Mary-Kate's problems make her more relatable.

able to be related to something else.

sub-prime
• adj. referring to credit or loan arrangements for borrowers with a poor credit
history, typically having unfavourable conditions such as high interest rates.

train wreck
• n. informal a chaotic or disastrous situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for onlookers or observers: his train wreck of a private life guaranteed front-page treatment.

The universal language of hand gestures

Research at Chicago University and reported here in The Telegraph seems to suggest that a "universal language" of gesture might exist regardless of the grammar of spoken language used by people around the world.

To help settle a long-running dispute about whether language influences the way we think, psychologists tested 40 speakers of four different languages: 10 English, 10 Mandarin Chinese, 10 Spanish and 10 Turkish speakers, first asking them to describe an action in a video in speech, then only with gestures.

What was remarkable was that, when asked to describe the same scenes using only their hands, all of the adults, no matter what language they spoke, produced the same order - subject, object, verb (woman knob twists, for example). Meanwhile, when asked to describe the scenes in speech, the speakers used the word orders typical of their respective languages.

What the research seems to be pointing towards is that certain conceptual frameworks exist beyond speech and language and that it's these frameworks that we see the world through, rather than language. Linguistic determinists and relativists such as Sapir and Whorf argued that it is language that controls our perception of the world.

So why - if people use a universal gesture "language" regardless of their actual spoken language - do different world languages have varying surface structures? In other words, why do some languages have Subject - Verb - Object word order, while others have Subject - Object - Verb? Is there, as Noam Chomsky famously suggested, a deep structure underneath all human languages?

If you know the answers, please tell me...

Edited to add: Language Log runs this story with a degree more scepticism here and refers to the original article in New Scientist here.

And no one has mentioned the fact that I've got to the end of this post without guffawing childishly about the words woman , knob and twist being in the same sentence. Ha ha.

Blendtabulous tabloids

Apparently some Scottish bloke has won a game of "tennis" at "Wimbledon", so the tabloids are very excited. But more exciting than this victory for our great nation, is the range of glorious headlines in the tabloids (and some broadsheets):

Muscles Murray (Daily Mirror) - alliteration and possible pun on "Muscle Mary" (a slightly derogatory term for a muscular man)
Mighty Murray (The Sun) - alliteration
It's a Murracle (The Sun again) - blend of Murray + Miracle
Mooray! (I just made that one up) - blend of Murray and hooray!

So how about a mini-investigation into the devices used in newspaper headlines as a nice, gentle way into A2 coursework?

And some other blends have been appearing in the papers recently. Yesterday's Guardian had mumager (mum + manager) , or momager if you're American, a term relating to young celebrities whose careers are managed by their mums.

Stagflation (stagnation + inflation) has made a comeback. Originally coined in 1965, according to Wikipedia, it's now being used to describe the current economic downturn.

And then there's cashtrati which seems to be a blend of cash + castration + the suffix -i (as in literati or technorati) and means a group of men who have been affected by the credit crunch and financially castrated ( I think). Ouch.