More word hating

The Oxford English Dictionary is running a vote (with a prize!) asking you to choose your least favourite word from their list. It's here if you want to vote.

Beware Barbie culture

According to this article in The Daily Mail
(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1077444/Barbie-doll-girls-want-WAGs-win-X-Factor-complains-Culture-Minister.html)
our society is in danger of being 'Barbie dolled'. This is interesting in a number of ways:

-it is a clear example of the process of conversion
- it sounds a little less violent than representations of 'knife crime' and 'hoodies'
- it is written by one half of a couple known as 'Barbie and Ken!' Her views are not taken seriously despite her Government position. (Take a look at the audience positioning).

Barbara is accused of believing all girls are 'Vicky Pollards'.
So this is what Culture Ministers debate: WAGS, X-factor and Little Britain!

Word hating

As John McCain's ratings slide in American opinion polls and the election looms ever closer, the language of his supporters and even of McCain himself becomes more and more angry. According to various reports, including this one from the BBC, McCain's supporters have taken to shouting words like "terrorist", "Arab" and "traitor" whenever Obama's name is mentioned. Meanwhile, McCain himself has attracted criticism for referring to Obama as "that one" and gesturing in an offhand way towards him during a TV debate, and a black TV cameraman was told to "sit down, boy" by a white Republican supporter at a recent rally. Maybe he thought he was at a KKK rally. Veteran civil rights activist, John Lewis makes the point that "toxic language can lead to destructive behaviour" and the language of race and ethnic identity in the USA is fraught with painful history. Obviously, this blog is pro-Obama, so I'm biased, but the festering racism lurking under the surface of a lot of these increasingly desperate Republican yelps makes for interesting reading from a language point of view. Admittedly, no one from McCain's camp has gone on record as saying something as blatant as "lynch the n-word" or to describe Obama as "an uppity negro" - the bald racism of the segregation era - but the lack of respect in "that one" and "boy" can be decoded pretty quickly. On a different tack, here's a very good article on and interview with Sarah Silverman, the Jewish American comedian who is trying to rally support for Obama among one of its less obvious demographic targets, elderly Jewish people. Her use of racist language is set in the context of its anti-racist roots, making it clear that it's not the words you use but the way you use them which is really significant. Useful for: ENGA2 - Investigating Representation

Word loving

The BBC News Magazine has been inviting entries for its readers' favourite words. Have a look here for examples of some strange and beautiful words, including the verb to defenestrate and the noun slubberdegullion.

Next week, we'll be starting a new Moodle-based wiki, an interactive website which will allow its users (you and me) to add pages with new word definitions.

Ambient replenishment controllers...

...or to put it more clearly, shelf stackers. How about "Technical horticultural maintenance officers"? Gardeners. Or a "Knowledge navigator"? A teacher.

Jargon - technical language associated with specific occupations - can be completely baffling to lots of us, which is why the Plain English Campaign will be happy to see that some local councils have decided to ditch their insane obfuscations and ludicrous circumlocutions (look 'em up) in favour of clear and straightforward language. Huzzah!

This piece in The Daily Mirror gives some shocking examples of how local authorities and businesses dress up mundane jobs and activities in fancy language to make them look really important, and how some local authorities are deciding it's time to change their tune.

We've looked at jargon elsewhere on this blog - here and here - so have a look.

Useful for:
ENGA1 - Investigating Representation
ENA5 - Language Change

In other words

A piece by John Walsh in The Independent a couple of days ago gives a new "visual dictionary" website, Wordia a bit of a savaging. Wordia claims to be "redefining the dictionary" but is described by Walsh as "misleading", which is no use for a dictionary, and he goes on to wonder...

...whether a dictionary can usefully be run by chat and semi-consensus; and whether it's right for readers to "select" a meaning they find "relevant", rather than one that's actually correct.

The idea behind Wordia is explained in the article:

The everyone-join-in dictionary is called wordia.com, and is the joint offspring of the television producer Edward Baker and Michael Birch, the internet entrepreneur who founded Bebo, the social-networking site. They've linked up with HarperCollins, the blue-chip publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch, to make use of their electronic dictionary of 76,000 headwords and 120,000 definitions. But the unique selling proposition behind wordia.com is visual: they want to compile an archive of videos in which thousands of members of the public will offer their own definitions of favourite words and have them posted on YouTube, with which Baker and Birch are also in partnership.

But, as Walsh points out, dictionary definitions aren't decided upon by random celebrities; they're decided upon by qualified language experts who know something about the language and where the actual words derive from. That's not to say that we can't have our own ideas about what certain words mean to us - they're more the connotations of words than their denotations - but that if we don't have accepted and agreed definitions to words we'll be left floundering in a sea of vagueness and, like...whatever.

The other point is that dictionaries do respond to new words and new meanings, but they're a bit more careful to source these than Wordia. Look here and here for more details about what lexicographers actually do.

But Walsh is not entirely negative about different approaches to dictionary compilation. He speaks more approvingly of Urban Dictionary, which collects different meanings from its contributors and is well known for its up to date slang definitions (and its rude words and thinly veiled personal insults e.g. "definition of gay = my stupid English teacher").

And if you think that's sad, have a read about this chap who has just read the OED from cover to cover.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Cripes! It's another article about new words

It's the 74th article this year about new words. Are you bored yet?

"No!" I hear you cry. "New words are a fascinating barometer of social change and I long to discover more about the formation processes behind them," you go on to say.

And yes, I agree with you. So, here's a piece from today's Daily Mail which features such gems as those in the image here and many others such as momnesia and nomophobia. And for this week's Haribo prize, what do these two words mean?

There is still 1 unclaimed prize from last week, so have a look at this post to get your prize and join Leanne in the happy land of Haribo.

Useful for: ENA5 - Language Change ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Cool accents

A recent survey featured in The Sun (and other sources) rates the Birmingham accent as the least "cool", and R.P. (Received Pronunciation) as the most "cool". I don't know if "cool" has recently been redefined, because RP is clearly not cool in any world I've visited recently. But ho hum...

Adrian Chiles - semi-professional Brummie - defends his accent here, while more serious news outlets give the story a different slant here, here and here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Variation
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Investigation ideas 1 - Team GB

This is the first of a series of short posts on Language Investigations to kick start some thinking on recent language issues in the news that might be worthy of investigation for the A2 coursework project, or possibly the ENGA2 Investigating Representations unit on the new spec.

Yesterday's Labour Party conference has had blanket coverage in the media, maybe because lots of media pundits expected Gordon Brown to fall flat on his face and be booed from the stage, but the coverage has been largely positive. His wife, Sarah Brown is also reported on quite favourably in many papers, while Brown's erstwhile leadership rival, David Milliband suffers a few digs.

So what could be done with this for an investigation? On one level, the different representations of the Browns and Milliband could make for a solid investigation, where lexical, semantic, grammatical and pragmatic frameworks could be applied to pull apart how they are presented to us. On another level, a corpus analysis could be carried out on some of the speeches. The frequency of terms like Labour, Tony, I, Britain, Cameron might be explored by feeding a digital copy of one of the speeches into something like Teachit's word cruncher software and then examining how many times the words appear and what they are appearing with.

The Guardian already has a running total of how many times certain words were used, so this could be a start:

I/I'm/My = 121
Britain = 25
Fair = 20
Labour = 20
NHS = 15
Conservatives = 10
Tough = 10
Together = 9
Markets = 5
Serious = 4
New Labour = 3
Harry Potter = 1
Tony = 1
Iraq = 1
Afghanistan = 1
Sorry = 0

The speech itself is here.

Out with the old, in with the new

When we look at Language Change we often get interested in new uses of words, or even new words which crop up. So, today we looked at semantic change in one class and thought about words like bitch, gay, moist, sick, grimy and beef which have changed meaning over time and the processes behind these semantic shifts. Last week we looked at new words and word formation processes: blending (moobs = man + boobs, autocutie = autocue + cutie); compounds (studmuffin = stud + muffin, muffintop = muffin + top); initialisms (FBI, BBC); acronyms (HEIDI = Highly Educated Independent Degree-carrying Individual, BOBFOC = Body Off Baywatch, Face Off Crimewatch, BOGOF = Buy One Get One Free).

But what about old words? In two articles in Monday's Times, old words get discussed and their inclusion in the dictionary debated. In this excellent article, David Crystal - all round language God and one of the speakers at next year's teacher workshops at SFX - talks about what happens when words stop being used or go out of fashion. In this article, The Times ask readers to vote for words they wish to keep in the dictionary and why.

Textual healing

Texting is destroying our language. Young people are using text language in their exam papers. English is being dumbed down thanks to Satan's little helper, SMS. These are all regular complaints about the vile disease that is texting (apart from the last one which I made up).

But it's all a load of cobblers, according to one of the world's top linguists, David Crystal. In an interview on the Visual Thesaurus website linked from an article on the excellent Language Log blog, he puts these "myths" to the sword:

Now, in the case of the text messaging scenario, none of that has happened. It's people imagining the situation. They say, "Text messages are full of abbreviations." These are people who may never have texted in their lives, and who have certainly never done any research to find out. They believe that this is the case. And of course one of the first planks of research that I did was to look at large quantities of text messages, as well as the research that other people have done, to find that typically less than 10 percent of the words in text messages are actually abbreviated in any way.

We've looked at texting before on this blog - use the search toolbar to find out where - and some of our students (hello A2 classes!) have been involved in Tim Shortis's latest research into text usage, which we hope to be able to bring you news of in the next few months . (His earlier observations on texting and the various assumptions about them can be found summarised here.) Crispin Thurlow's paper on the sociolinguistics of text messaging can also be found here.

NEway (Ha ha, do you see what I did there?), what are your views on texting? Does it influence your written language? Does it make you spell badly? Can you no longer write you and have to write u? Text your responses to 22554 (texts will cost no less than £75).

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

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