Racial abuse

It may be a bit rich coming from The Sun, a newspaper which has been at the forefront of anti-asylum seeker campaigns, but it certainly makes for a striking front page. Yesterday's Sun featured a group of children, from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, holding up signs showing terms of racist abuse that might be applied to them. Asking what they have in common, The Sun then reveals another picture a few pages on, which shows the same children holding up signs saying "British".

The editorial can be found here, and the children featured go on to tell how they've been called various racist terms in their lives. There's some brief background to each term of abuse and an editorial that bangs the drum for a shared sense of British identity among all of this country's ethnic groups. I'll leave you to decide what you make of the political message, but the article gives some good material for discussion of language and representation, not just in its coverage of racist terminology but in the wider debate about a label like "British" and its use in political discourse.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

When's it OK to call someone a "c*nt"?

...when you're not calling them a "p*ki", apparently. Racist language is all over the front pages of the papers today as the Celebrity Big Brother row over Shilpa Shetty’s treatment by other housemates goes supernova.

Having bleeped out Jade Goody’s unfortunate boyfriend, Jack Tweed calling Shilpa a nasty four letter word, newspapers in India (Shilpa’s home country) started claiming that the bleeped out word was “p*ki”; Big Brother producers claimed it was actually only “c*nt”. So that’s alright then…

But the racism allegedly exhibited by the three main culprits (I say “alleged” as I don’t watch it) seems to be more than just a question of words. No one seems to be claiming that the three women at the centre of this – Goody, Lloyd and O’Meara – have actually used the p-word themselves, but that their ignorant and racist attitudes towards Shetty have been reflected in some of their unpleasant comments. Snide remarks about her touching their food, not cooking her food properly and having a strange accent, all seem to suggest that they view her as weird and alien, and probably a bit foreign and dirty. So what’s worse, using an offensive four letter word, or treating someone like scum?

If Judge Paul Darlow had anything to do with it, we’d all just get over racist language and see it as a bit of banter, or something like that. In a separate story about the dreaded p-word, The Guardian reports how Judge Paul Darlow, sitting at Exeter crown court, said he had found it "rather odd" a racism charge was brought against a man who called a police surgeon a "f*cking Paki" and had said Imraan Jhetam should have "let the matter roll off his back". He also had advised the defendant, Matthew Stiddard, to moderate his language. Next time, said the judge, "call him a fat bastard, and do not say anything about his colour".

According to the paper, the judge has since apologised, saying "My comments were not intended to make light of racist remarks. I fully accept that, in a circumstance and time, they can be both offensive and distressing to those to whom they are addressed."

But all of this raises some interesting issues about language and representation and the harmful effects of words. Are the words themselves “bad” and so poisoned with racist attitudes that they can’t be used without causing distress? I have problems with this notion, because in the process of discussing this topic we have to use words like “p*ki” and by doing that we’re not being racist but attempting to be analytical.

Then you have the notion of reclamation: many contentious and previously problematic words such as bitch, the n-word and queer have been reclaimed by some of the previous targets of the words themselves, but by no means all. Even the word “p*ki” has - it has been argued – been reclaimed by some Asian people, its racist power removed in their mouths. I’m not convinced. And does a debate over racist language actually divert us from the “real” racism which is exhibited not through language necessarily, but through our actions and behaviour around other people of different ethnicities?

The latest developments appear to be a comment made by Shetty that she is experiencing racism at the hands of the three white women (see here) and the issue leading to demonstrations and effigy burnings in India on Gordon Brown's first trip there.

Useful for: ENA1 Language & Representation

p.s. I'm bleeping out swear words and not racist words, not because I think they're worse (I don't) but because most filters block these words first and I'd like you to be able to read this.

New words of 2006

Apart from the words to be found in Susie Dent's 'The Like Language Report for Real' published in autumn 2006 (Amazon link http://www.amazon.co.uk/Language-Report-Susie-Dent/dp/0199207666/sr=1-1/qid=1167842614/ref=sr_1_1/202-9246196-7675051?ie=UTF8&s=books), some of which were discussed on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning (and alternatives with Michael Rosen on the Word of Mouth programme repeated yesterday at 4pm; you can listen again to both on the BBC R4 website, http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/ is the homepage address, then use the A-Z listing to reach the programmes wanted, and follow the prompts to listen again), here are some not particularly serious/legitimate coinages of the year, reported in the Observer just before Christmas, taken from Newsweek magazine in the first section:


Brokeback Marriage n. Thanks to Heath Ledger, Jake Gyllenhaal and their celebrated screen tragedy, this describes a union between a gay man and a straight woman or a gay married man having an affair.
Celebutard n. A celebrity widely perceived as unintelligent. We're not naming any names, Paris Hilton.
Civil War n. Not a new term, but Iraq's 'sectarian violence' - to use George W Bush's preferred phrase - had people asking, is it or isn't it?
Fed-Ex n. So long, K-Fed. The tabloids found a new name for Kevin Federline after his break-up with Britney Spears.
Liquid Terror n. Coined after terrorists plotted to board planes in London with liquid explosives.
Season Creep n. Spring came early and summer lasted longer. What's to blame? Most say global warming.
Wikiality n. based on consensus rather than fact. The popularity of the online encyclopedia, which the public writes and edits, gave rise to the term.
Taken from the Observer, 24.12.06; here’s the link: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,329670651-102280,00.html

Another piece from the same edition's magazine; you’ll notice some overlap:
Five other new words for 2006
Truthiness: Supposed truth felt 'in the gut'; the quality of preferring 'facts' wished to be true rather than those supported by reality. Truthiness was recently chosen as word of the year by the American Dialect Society (and, as noted on Word of Mouth, by the American Merrill-Webster dictionary)
Jagshemash!: A welcoming enquiry made by Sacha Baron-Cohen in the guise of Borat Sagdiyev. It appears to derive from how-are-yous said in several East European countries. One might say 'Jagshemash! I like you. Do you like me? We make a sexy time?'
Celebutard: A celebrity who is, or is thought to be, unintelligent. Thought to have derived from the NY Times in an article about Paris Hilton, 'celebutard' coupled celebrity (or the later celebutante) and retard, and has since come to be used in reference to any person finding fame without having a high IQ. One might say 'Dunst, of course, portrayed Marie Antoinette as an 18th-century celebutard'. (Oh dear, they don't like Paris H. at the Observer, do they?!)
No noising: 'Quiet please!' Considered the top Chinglish (Chinese-English) words of 2006, 'No noising' originally appeared on signs in Chinese libraries
Polska zywnosc: 'Polish food'. A simple message, often misspelt, which is attached to shop windows to note that there are Polish products on sale inside
John Hind contributed this second section. Happy new year from Cornwall!

Raising an index finger to PC?

"Borat raises an index finger to political correctness and all its exponents," claims Mail on Sunday reader Colin Veitch online, who obviously feels that were Borat to raise his middle finger, the finger traditionally used for giving offence, he may have been overstating his case.

Regular readers of this blog will be aware of the various rants that have appeared here over the last couple of years about attacks on PC (Political Correctness) and the motives behind such ludicrous non-stories as “Christmas” being banned, Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep replacing Baa Baa Black Sheep, and the splenetic outrage of various tabloid newpspers at the word “housewife” being reassessed by the Women’s Institute. So, it’s with great joy that I can link to a piece by my favourite comedian, Stewart Lee, who looks at what PC has given us and how it’s absurd to claim that comedy shows & films like Borat, Little Britain and The Office are anti-PC.

In the rush to attack PC, most commentators seem to have forgotten that its original raison d’etre was to prevent language causing offence to, and discrimination against, different groups in society: a noble aim in many respects. And they also forget how poisonous public discourse was in the 1970s about issues like race, mixed marriages and homosexuality. As Lee explains:

I'm 38, and old enough to remember comedy, and life in general, before political correctness. At secondary school in the Midlands in the early 80s, our maths teacher, who was a genuinely nice man, would routinely refer to the one Asian boy in our class as "the Black Spot", fondly imagining that this was in some way inclusive, like some pocket calculator-wielding version of David Brent™. And the idea of a comic performer like Little Britain's Matt Lucas being openly gay - let alone having photographs of his civil ceremony splashed across the tabloids - would have been unimaginable, however camp his on-stage persona.

Tabloids such as The Sun were quite happy to use a headline “Pooftas on Parade” in the 1980s when gay men were permitted to join the army, while popular culture was full of references to darkies, sooties and p*kis – all words that PC helped clean up, well, maybe outside of certain pubs in Chingford anyway…

Lee goes on to discuss the language of PC, linking it to linguistic determinism & relativism adding:

There's a vast difference between the casual, inadvertent offence prevalent in my childhood and the choices made today by performers and writers of my generation, operating in a post-PC world, where they are aware of the power and meaning of the taboos they choose to break. Linguistic theorists who define the terminology of political correctness suggest that grammatical choices made in language influence both the speaker's and the listener's ideas and actions. This would seem to be common sense, so it would be churlish to argue against the idea of attempting to ensure basic levels of politeness and consideration in official, public discourse.

So, a reasoned and impassioned defence of PC, instead of my usual frothy-mouthed rantings about the cursed Daily Mail. For more info on the mighty Stewart Lee and his work, have a look at his website here.

Useful for:

ENA1 - Language & Representation ENA5 – Language Change

Democratising the dictionary

The return of BBC2's Balderdash & Piffle later this year is featured in many newspapers today, with much of the focus being on the ways in which the programme is seeking the public's information on the first appearance of particular words and phrases such as “dogging”, “kinky”, “the dog’s bollocks” and “tosser”.

While, most of us are fully aware of what these words mean – and use the last one on an almost daily basis when faced with missed homework deadlines from English Language classes – the OED is keen to find out if the public can supply earlier citations of the words in print than those they already have. So, according to the OED, the earliest appearance in print of the word “hoodie” was in Roddie Doyle’s The Snapper in 1990, but if you know that you saw it in an edition of the NME, Smash Hits or The Source two years before that, you can help them out.

And it’s important that such work is opened up to the public in this way, I think, as it democratises our language use and gets us away from any ideas that language change is a bad thing or a trickle-down from those experts and authorities above us on the social ladder. As John Simpson of the OED points out in todays’ Independent, this approach has been used since the 1800s: “"It's great that the long-established democratic traditions of the dictionary are continuing. Our first public appeal went out in 1859 and we've been busy collecting information every since. We've selected 40 words that are puzzling the OED's editors for the new wordhunt and we're hoping for some more great results."

The story is also covered in The Times and Daily Mirror, with the Balderdash & Piffle site here, and the OED’s Wordhunt site here.

Useful for:
ENA5 – Language Change

OMG it's the new OED

The Oxford English Dictionary is having a major overhaul and the full story is covered here in a Guardian article from last week which features an interview with one of its top bods, John Simpson. Dictionaries may not seem the most exciting things in the world, but for English Language students they should be mines of fascinating detail, and barometers of social change.

The whole process of putting new words into the OED is discussed in this article, including the growing range of sources from which they acquire citations for new words - blogs, websites, rap lyrics - and the new ways of searching it online to find histories to individual words, but wider patterns as well. The college has a subscription to the OED online, so make it your New Year's resolution to look up a word a week and refer to it whenever you get set a homework on Language Change.

Useful for:
all units but especially ENA5

Christmas is cancelled...

...except it isn't. The tabloid press (especially The Sun) has been running a campaign against the politically correct nutters who want to ban the term "Christmas" for fear of offending Muslims, Hindus, Pagans and err...turkeys. The Sun even ran a front page "Kick Them in the Baubles!" urging on the Great British public in their attempts to stop this politically correct madness. But it's all a load of rubbish! No one has tried to ban Christmas, just like no one has seriously tried to ban Baa Baa Black Sheep. And, in a more serious incident last year, a judge in Manchester bleated about political correctness gone mad when a white boy was brought to court for calling a class mate a "p*ki". Except it wasn't just the one-off name calling event that led to his prosecution, but what appeared to have been a long campaign of abuse and intimidation. So, it wasn't really political correctness gone mad at all. And what's this got to do with language? Well, lots really: various myths abound about the ways in which the Political Correctness movement has forced ludicrous language changes upon us, but so many of them just aren't true, and reflect a staggeringly conservative - and often reactionary & racist - worldview. So, be careful when you write your language & representation answers. And if you want to go on to do journalism as a career, be prepared to do some research. Unlike the lazy b*stards on The Sun. Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation

Teenage twits

It's the news that all parents of 15 year olds already know: teenagers have poor language skills and need to stop mumbling. According to a report on the BBC website, based on research done for Tesco Mobile Phones by Lancaster University linguist Professor Tony McEnery, "teenagers used half the words of average 25 to 34-year-olds".

His analysis of a database of teenage speech suggested teenagers had a vocabulary of just over 12,600 words compared with the nearly 21,400 words that the average person aged 25 to 34 uses. Prof McEnery said in his report: "Of note when examining the word 'no' is the frequency with which the word is accompanied by the word 'but'. These words occur in the sequence 'but no' or 'no but' almost twice as frequently in teenage speech as it does in young adult or middle aged speech."

Employers often complained that new employees were unable to answer the telephone in the formal way required of them for work and that they were also intimidated by speaking formally in meetings, the professor added. He put this down to a lack of training and the overuse of technologies such as computer games and MP3 players. "This trend, known as technology isolation syndrome, could lead to problems in the classroom and then later in life. Employers are already complaining that first jobbers are lacking basic verbal communication and it seems things could be set to get worse. Kids need to get talking and develop their vocabulary."

Fair points or gross generalisation? Is it fair to lump all teenagers together, in the same way that some peopel generalise about all men and all women and their speech styles? And what about different communities of practice? Maybe Emo teens and goths have a wider and more sophisticated vocabulary (misery, suffering, pain) than hip hoppers and ravers (choong, merked, tune)... or maybe not.

What do you think? Can you even string a sentence together to comment? And can we honestly believe a report sponsored by a mobile phone company whose aim is to make us talk more so they can make money from our chat?

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties and Change
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language

Talk to me, baby

As AS students are well into their study of Child Language Acquisition and A2ers will be revising it in the Spring term for ENA6 preparation, I thought it might be handy to flag up some useful links to child language resources.

First off, Chas Blacker from City of Bristol College has put some new resources up on his website here and you'll find them handy for revision and a few extra ideas.

Also, the National Literacy Trust's Talk To Your Baby project has some nice links to projects on child language, with a good section on theories of CLA here.

Then, Beth Kemp's website here has plenty of revision material for all sorts of English Language topics, including CLA.

Finally, teachit's resource site has plenty of material on CLA, primarily aimed at teachers but containing plenty of child language data for those of you seeking out examples to explore.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Child Language Acquisition, obviously...

The cockney sparrow?

Following on from last week's post about the changes in the Queen's accent (apparently downwardly converging to the likes of us), Simon Jenkins in The Guardian links the story to another one about how birds' songs are changing (No, not Girls Aloud, sadly.) because of the noise in their urban environments. Just like birds have to change their songs to communicate in an ever-noisier world, so the royals have to change their tune to mingle with us.

Tenuous connection? Maybe, but it's an interesting thought, and makes me wonder how much our accents and dialects change due to physical factors such as noisy city streets, cramped working conditions, the urbansied environment we're increasingly living in. We all know that mobiles and computers are changing the way we communicate, but are these other factors affecting us too? Is language evolving to suit our environment?

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change & Varieties

The power of powerless speech

A piece of research carried out by psychologists at the University of North Carolina has identified that some people respond more positively to leaders and managers who express doubt and hesitation in their language, than to those who sound confident and certain.

The research is reported in the BPS's weekly digest (subscribe here) and on their blog here. The researchers set up an experiment in which two transcripts of an employee making a phonecall were read by 54 partcipants, who had previously been shown one of two different versions of what the company valued: the need to work independently or the need to work co-operatively. The participants were then asked to rate the telephone transcripts in terms of the feelings they had towards each speakern. The crucial difference between the transcripts was that one version had been read in a hesitant way, with pauses, hedges and indirect structures, while the other had been read in a more confident and succinct fashion. The BPS story explains:

As you might expect, participants who read that the company valued people’s ability to work alone, were more likely to recommend Richard for a high status promotion if they’d read the telephone transcript in which he had spoken assertively and without hesitation. More surprisingly, among the participants who read that the company cherished cooperation among staff, those who read the transcript in which Richard spoke with doubt and hesitation were more likely to recommend him for promotion than were the participants who read the transcript in which he was assertive and confident. The explanation for this probably lies in the fact the participants who read the ‘hesitant’ transcript rated Richard as more likeable and tolerant than the participants who read the ‘confident’ transcript.

It was O'Barr and Atkins who first looked at the idea of "powerless language", making the point that hesitation and tentativeness were not exclusively features of female language,as Robin Lakoff had proposed, but were common to all people in situations where a power differential was apparent: defendants in court, police suspects, students being admonished by teachers etc.

This research seems to suggest that our responses to hesitation aren't quite as clear cut as some might say, and that good leadership & management skills can be inclusive and tentative, as well as assertive.

Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language

'Er Royal 'Ighness goes all Cockernee

Or "Gor Blimey, Guvnor, Betty Gets on her Plates of Meat and does the Lambeth Walk"...

A report in The Independent on Sunday claims that the Queen's accent has taken a slide from its clipped RP tones in the 1950s to something much closer to the Estuary-influenced accents found in the London area. According to research by Jonathan Harrington in the latest Journal of Phonetics:

The Queen's accent has not become cockneyfied but it has shifted subtly towards an accent that is more typically spoken in the wider community. The changes also reflect the changing class structure over the last 50 years. In the 1950s, there was a much sharper distinction between the classes as well as accents that typified them. Since then, the class boundaries have become more blurred, and so have the accents. Fifty years ago, the idea that Queen's English could be influenced by cockney would have been unthinkable.

So, how do they know and why should we care? The research has been conducted by analysing changes in the Queen's voice on her annual Christmas broadcasts, so perhaps factors like performing to the camera and nervousness might be involved in the young Queen reverting to her upper class type and using the "cut glass" of marked RP; alternatively, it could all be a PR move by the royal family, a re-branding exercise to cast themselves as plain-speaking, normal people, rather than the overindulged, antiquated relics they so clearly are. It wouldn't be the first time, as this post on this blog in September 2005 relates.

But if you want to get a real taste for how upset some people are about this shift in accent, just take a look at this link to The Daily Telegraph's website (average age of reader: 121) where the palpitation-inducing horror at the desecration of HRH's RP is a true sight to behold.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties

Myths of Mars and Venus

Last week's Guardian featured a brilliant 8 page article on the perceived differences between how men and women talk. Focusing on a claim in a new book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine, that women talk more, using on average 20,000 words to an average man's 7,000, the Guardian wires up two reporters - one male, one female - to see if it's all true.

And the result? Well, you can look for yourselves. But along the way, top linguist Deborah Cameron gets a look in with some incisive comments:

The degree to which this biological and linguistic battle is also a cultural and political one is striking. Deborah Cameron, Rupert Murdoch professor of language and communication at Oxford University, is sceptical about the claim that men and women are inherently different in the way they use language, and thinks such arguments find a receptive audience because people are scared of the growing similarities between the sexes.

"People want to believe there are clear-cut differences between men and women," she says, "because they are men and women. They don't want to think about the similarities, which outweigh the differences. The other thing they don't want to think about - which for a linguist like me is the most interesting thing - is the extent of variation within each gender group, which statistically is as great, or greater than, the variation between the two. Women are as different from each other as they are from men, and gender is about those differences, too. The way you think about yourself as a woman is not only about comparing yourself to the available men; it's about thinking about the kinds of women you are not."

So, it's no great surprise to find that Brizendine's claims are explored with critical reference to a whole range of popular stereotypes about how men can't talk about emotions, women like to gossip and all the rest of those sweeping generalisations that we try to (gently!) knock out of you when we study ENA3 in the Spring term.

But the article is not only great for challenging stereotypes; it's also excellent on investigation methodology and ways you can collect valid data.

Read it!

Useful for:
ENA3 - Interacting Through Language

Globish takes over the world

A new language termed Globish is taking over the world, and it looks remarkably like English. In an article in this week's Observer, Robert McCrum takes a look at this stripped down version of English and how it's being used to lubricate the wheels of business around the world. According to McCrum, "By some calculations, indeed, as many as a billion people, nearly a sixth of mankind, now use English as either a first or, more prevalently, second language. This used to be known as 'offshore English'. Globish, 'the international dialect of the third millennium', is a more apt description."

But, just because we speak English it doesn't mean we have an advantage. The idiomatic, figuarative ways in which many native-speakers of English communicate makes us harder to understand than the more literal-mineded speakers of Globish who strip the metaphors and jargon away to use English in a more streamlined way.

Useful for:
ENA5 Language Varieties

When is a war not a war?

Much media interest recently in the American media's language change in their reporting of the situation in Iraq. Is it an insurgency against a peace-keeping force? A legitimate imposition of democracy on a tryannical regime? The American national broadcasting network, NBC, announced a couple of days ago that its reporting of events in Iraq in future will refer to the violent events in Iraq as a 'civil war'. Here's an extract from the BBC story on this:

The New York Times is the latest publication to take the decision following the NBC network's highly-publicised move on Monday. The paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, said it is hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war. The Bush administration maintains the term civil war is inappropriate.

'War of semantics'

In Washington, a war of semantics has broken out over whether the conflict in Iraq can be called a civil war. Just what is the definition of a civil war, of course, has been the subject of much debate since NBC's decision to defy White House objections and use the phrase.
President George Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, has said the Iraqi government does not see it in those terms, while the president himself described the latest attacks as part of an ongoing campaign by al-Qaeda militants.

One person's freedom fighter is another person's terrorist; as Norman Fairclough has demonstrated in his work on language and power, the terms we use are not neutral when it comes to social, cultural and political events and concepts. Language is power, and its use is not benign.

This is language change in action. Here's the link to the whole story from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6194646.stm

There's a nip in the air

Radio One DJ Edith Bowman has landed herself in trouble for reading out an apparently racist email on air, according to The Independent . In a discussion about modern slang, Bowman is reported to have read out the email which stated "When the weather is a little cold, we say that it's a bit Pearl Harbor, meaning that there's a nasty Nip in the air". Why the fuss? Well, "nip" has long been a pejorative term for Japanese people in much the same way as "P*ki" has been for Asian people. And a little bit of History GCSE or a few Hollywood films will probably have informed you that Pearl Harbor was the scene of Japan's infamous air attack on the US Navy in the Second World War, hence "nip in the air". But does using a word like "nip" automatically make you a racist? Maybe not, particularly if you're not even clear it's racist in the first place, which is something that can't be said for the American actor, Michael Richards who has apologised for launching into a racist tirade on stage which included describing members of his unsympathetic audience as n-words, as reported in The Guardian. And not so long ago, it was Mel Gibson doing a Hitler impersonation by drunkenly rambling about Jews being sinister... So, why should we care? In this interesting series of essays on the BBC Voices website, Dr Emma Moore of Sheffield University looks at the significance of the labels we give to each other and why they make a difference. As she puts it in her second essay, Who Has the Power?:

What does the existence of terms like 'coloured', 'queer' and 'people with disabilities' tell us about the distribution of power? Basically it suggests that the people with the power to get their version of the world 'out there' are busy defining themselves as normal and marking out everyone else as different. We all define our world in relation to what's familiar to us. If something falls outside what we consider to be 'like us' (i.e. normal) - more likely than not - we'll find a way to define it as marked. So, if being black or Asian or gay or disabled is labelled as marked, we can be pretty sure that these groups represent individuals who haven't traditionally had the power to get their version of the world 'out there'.

So, coupled with linguistic theories that link the language we use to the attitudes we express (ideas like linguistic reflectionism and determinism) labels like nip, the n- and p-words, queer and white trash define these groups as outside the norm, somehow different, and may in fact influence our perception of the actual people. So no more nips in the air; let's stick to brass monkeys. Useful for: ENA1 - Language & Representation

Mind your language

Attitudes to language change have often been negative, with concerns about slipping standards and laziness not just limited to commentators in this century but ranging all the way back to the 14th Century and perhaps even further. As we've been looking at in A2 classes this week, one generation tends to look down its nose at that below it and their use of language. As one student said a couple of years ago, "Those Year 10s on the bus use bare slang."

Among the perennial concerns are that language is getting sloppy, lazy and unclear, that it's being too heavily influenced by American, Black or working class varieties, that it's basically going down the dumper. Julie Blake, in her lecture at the last SFX Language Conference, looked at exactly this strand of prescriptivism through time and reached the conclusion that people have always complained about language change, while more recently even those who ostensibly embrace it, tend to only like its novelty value.

But if these concerns are justified, and the English language has been going down the toilet since 1357 (or whenever), why aren't we grunting like cavemen? It's pretty simple really; most changes to the language are made to ease communication and make it quicker, more concise and efficient. Take new words (neologisms) for example; when we invent new words or create blends and compounds, we don't add archaic inflections such as -en plural endings or -dst 2nd person suffixes, we just add a simple -s to show plurality and -ed to indicate past tense. We've regularised and simplified the suffix system. Guy Deutscher in his excellent book, The Unfolding of Language, also points to this gradual erosion of unnecessary language features but also looks at how language change is also a creative process at the same time: in other words two processes of destruction and creation working side by side.

But, as we've seen, most negative attitudes to language change are only superficially about language itself, and often much more to do with the commentators' dislike of modern manners (or lack of them) , the education system (Why don't we cane these little ragamuffins any more?) and immigration (Those black people with their hippety hoppety language are destroying our beloved language!). So when Norman Tebbitt made his infamous remark in 1985 that bad grammar leads inevitably to a life of crime, you could see the real underlying concern was not language per se, but morality and standards of behaviour.

Which brings me on to John Humphrys. In an article in The Telegraph a week or two back, he launches into a broadside against language change and its impact on British culture. Parts of it sound like the bitter ramblings of an eccentric Wing Commander in a country pub, while others are couched in more rational and reasonable terms, but it's well worth a read to see what linguistic bugbears get his goat (to mix my metaphors). Take these for a start:

Word by word, we are at risk of dragging our language down to the lowest common denominator and we do so at the cost of its most precious qualities: subtlety and precision. If we're happy to let our common public language be used in this way, communication will be reduced to a narrow range of basic meanings...

...The supermarkets are masters of the art – always trying to persuade us how thrilling it will be if we share our shopping experience with them. Note "experience". We don't shop any longer. We have an "experience".

At the heart of this hype process, in which the "experience" is all, individual words are given an even sharper 180 degree change of direction. Take "enjoy". You're sitting in a restaurant, the waitress brings your meal and, with a sweet smile, says, "Enjoy!" I want to say: "Don't you know that 'enjoy' is a transitive not an intransitive verb? You should say, 'Enjoy it!' not 'Enjoy!'."

So, he has a range of targets in his sights; some of them I'd agree with too, especially when he remarks that language should make communication as clear as possible, but do we really care that "enjoy" is a transitive verb and shold take an object? Does it matter? It doesn't actually impede meaning, does it?

David Crystal attacks such nitpicking attitudes in his excellent book, The Fight For English and makes the point that many of the so-called rules of English are actually little more than the personal prejudices of a small group of 18th Century grammarians who tried to impose the rules of Latin upon the English Language. Other linguists and commentators have produced convincing arguments against the prescriptivist approach that Humphrys favours, and you can find a selection of them here and here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENA6 - Language Debates

"Coloured", the other c-word

A Conservative MP has got himself into trouble for using the word "coloured" to refer to people who aren't white. The BBC Magazine covers it here and it's got some interesting background on the word too. We've covered it here on this blog before so just do a quick search using the word in the search bar at the top.

So, what's wrong with it? Here are two points of view from the site:

The term was common parlance in the 1960s, but its origins are the problem, says Mr Agbetu. It comes from the ideology of racism, that white people are white, and everyone else is somehow other coloured. It fails to recognise that everyone has an ethnicity and is an inadequate "one-size-fits all" description.

When I was growing up in the 70s, "coloured" was considered by my white, middle-class demographic as the polite word for dark-skinned persons. To call someone "black", which is preferred by many people now, was extremely rude. In adulthood I see that we had this backwards, but it was well-intentioned. I sympathise a little with Mr Jenkin, as this minefield is being constantly re-laid. For Labour to take such gleeful advantage is shabby. But he does need to keep up. I understand why "coloured" is seen as offensive now and certainly wouldn't use it myself.

Useful for:
ENA1 - Language & Representation

Crackberry

Before this item, a correction to my previous post: I inadvertently left in a floating line at the end, suggesting a link followed. Sorry, that was a typo. Bit late at night for thinking straight.
Here's an item I just posted on my college virtual noticeboard in Cornwall:
This is a link to an item about the Word of the Year in Webster's Dictionary: 'crackberry', used of those enthusiastic people who are addicted to their Blackberries or PDAs (note the absence of apostrophe there: see the Cambridge English Usage guide for info on when apostrophes are recommended in initialised terms like CDs, MPs, and when not, like 'dotting the i's'). Other contenders are mentioned there. Always an interesting activity, this, choosing the item most characteristic of a year, though linguistic purists and mavens might look askance. Take a look too at Susie Dent's 'Language Reports', where she examines whole ranges of such items each year. This year's came out recently; also great fun and wide-ranging are Kate Burridge's surveys of usage, named along horticultural-metaphorical lines - 'Blooming English' and 'Weeds in the Garden of Words' (all titles can be found by searching Amazon with the two authors' names).
Here's the link to the crackberry story:
http://www.sootoday.com/content/news/full_story.asp?StoryNumber=20625

Red sky thinking and herding dinosaurs: jargon again

These stories about office jargon and business speak just keep coming. After the post yesterday from Dan about getting your ducks in a row (which, weirdly, my wife used at the weekend before she went in to a meeting; she also used 'heads up', and I'm still not sure what that one means...), the BBC News Magazine invited suggestions and comments on its website. For example:
Promotion beyond your means is a fruitful bug bear for jargon. A polidiot is someone promoted beyond their abilities thanks to their political skills...Full-blown sarcasm and workplace resentment are a heady cocktail for some evidently long-suffering employees.
Nick W, dryly suggests new jargon definitions for his bosses: decision - the art of choosing between options without asking someone; responsibility - used with the above - and listening - if someone says it can't be done, there's a reason.
But spare a thought for Valerie; hard at work, but baffled. At her office, the mission is to herd the dinosaurs to the right end of the cricket green.
What does it mean? She has no idea.
Here's the link to the full item:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6124438.stm

Here's the link to what came up: