Chav: the semantic broadening of abuse

An article in today's Guardian by Polly Toynbee takes aim at the word chav, describing it as a term of "acceptable class abuse by people asserting superiority over those they despise" and a word that is happily used by those who "would presumably never say the n-word or P*ki". She goes on to say that "wrapped inside this little word is the quintessence of Britain's great social fracture". It's strong stuff, and she argues the case passionately that there's much wrong with the word and of course the prejudices it might be seen to reflect.

It's not the first time that chav has been attacked. In this article, Zoe Williams argues that it's an unpleasant word but that attempts to ban it are silly. Meanwhile, Paul Flynn argues a case very similar to Polly Toynbee's that the use of the word reflects a sneering snobbery towards people with less money and fewer job prospects.

What's a little odd is that Toynbee is writing about this word in 2011, when chav really hit the mainstream around 6-7 years ago. But looking at the example she uses in her article it's fairly clear that  for some people the word has now broadened from its fairly specific field of reference - young men and women sporting prison whites, fake burberry, sovereign rings and number 1's (or for the women, a Croydon facelift) - into a much wider reference to the wider working class. To some people, working class = chav, and vice versa.

In fact, that's part of Toynbee's argument: by conflating the entire working class (the majority of the country, in fact) with a small subset of it, it's easy for right wingers to write off a whole section of the population as lazy, feckless and feral, further dividing already fragmented communities.

The wider language point here is, I think, that if we aren't careful, some words drift from their original moorings and if we don't see this taking place we can't challenge it. It's the same with hoodies being used interchangeably for most teenagers or urban for black.

Language change is inevitable, but we can have some say in how far we feel it's appropriate for words to shift and we can exercise some control over challenging their meanings. If language is at least partly a reflection of social attitudes then there has to be some place for arguing about what these words mean to us and why they might be dangerous, and Toynbee's article is a good contribution to that debate.

ENGA1 June 2011

With lots of students looking for revision tips about ENGA1, I thought I'd add a few bits and pieces over the next week or so. The exam isn't until June 6th so there'll be at least 2 or 3 more posts on this before then.

First off, here's a new and exciting graphic of the mode continuum:

Secondly, here's a list of past text pairings for Language and Mode:

Previous ENGA1 texts

Jan 2009:

Online advert/webpage for dating tips

Phone conversation transcript between two secret lovers

May 2009:

Written version of Green Party speech

Printed guidance about avoiding wasteful use of photocopiers

Jan 2010:

Message board posts about graffiti

Online Guardian article about Banksy

May 2010

Transcript of radio interview at Glastonbury

Article from The Observer’s television listings section

Jan 2011

Transcript of part of a conversation about children’s behaviour

Webpage giving advice about bringing up children.

Future exam papers? Some suggestions:

•   written mode letters with blended mode emails/text messages/MSN “conversation” (like the sample stuff in the AQA A text book) 
• spoken conversation between 3+ participants and online conversation
• spoken commentary versus written match report  (or blended mode web commentary)
• monologue of person telling anecdote and narrative in written form
• written text that uses features of spoken mode to create “relationship” with reader

Fry and kinetic typography versus the prescriptivists

Stephen Fry - writer, actor, author and lover of language - takes on language pedants in this neat little animation. It uses "kinetic typography" (animated words and stuff) and has been put together by Matt Rogers.

There's also some discussion of Fry's views here from Russell Smith in Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail..

Worth a look if you're revising Language Discourses on ENGA3.

Hit the pause button

There's nothing I like for breakfast more than a big banana.
Can you pass me the bag of nuts?
I think I'll have the sausage, please.

What connects all of these seemingly innocuous food-related comments? Well, if you're an NBA basketball player, you'd probably want to insert (oo-er) the word pause after each. Why? To avoid sounding like you're gay, obviously. So, "I'm right behind you", "I've got your back" and "That driver was right up my arse" would all qualify as potentially smutty innuendoes requiring the pause treatment. Because to be gay in the macho world of professional sports is to be bad. Hell, it's even worse than being a girl!

Pause - according to Urban Dictionary - is used "to negate the sexual connotation of a comment" and has been recently appearing in spoken language and social networking (often Twitter) comments, perhaps following the patterns of usage of its slightly older brother no homo, which has been around since (apparently) the early 90s in hip hop slang and beyond.

The attempts by some men to police their own language use and avoid the potential embarrassment of letting slip a comment that might be perceived as gay are both interesting and slightly pathetic. Sociolinguists often look in detail at the language markers that help us define our identity and note - like Deborah Cameron does in her Myth of Mars and Venus - that we often use language as  much to define who we are not as who we are. So, in other words, the use of pause or no homo, could be a deliberate attempt to distance some men from gay men (or the stereotypical language styles associated with gay men). But why not just avoid saying things that are... like "gay"...in the first place? Well, that would be missing the point, because the whole point of using pause seems to be to draw attention to your words and encourage salacious connotations to be drawn from them before distancing yourself from the implications of the interpretation. Or something like that...

What's pathetic about it shouldn't be too hard to see. Do gay men really mince around discussing the relative merits of big bananas or succulent sausages? Probably not (unless you're Julian Clary). The whole use of pause might be seen as harmless fun, self-conscious mockery even, but at the same time it's peddling a view that gay men talk in a certain way which is easily identified and ridiculed, and that they are sex-obsessed, double-entendre-fixated "others". Some may be - surely that's up to them - but it's a lazy stereotype to assume it applies to all gay men.

So, is pause homophobic? Possibly. Is it dangerous? I'm not sure. There have got to be worse forms of linguistic homophobia than this - name-calling, abuse - but it probably says more about the speaker's attitudes to homosexuality than it does about gay men themselves.

Jay Smooth's brilliant video clip says it all so much better than me except he argues that pause came before no homo and is now (in his words) "played out", old, boring. 

Edited on 18.05.11 to add some more smutty innuendoes and a genius bit of hip hop linguistics

Birthers of new words

Morphology - the study of the form of words - is an element of grammar that sometimes gets overlooked at A level in the rush to analyse word classes and sentences, but it's an interesting and productive area. It's productive in that it helps us produce lots of new words and word forms, and productive in that it can help you produce good material in exams.

It's a particularly interesting language framework/method in two areas, child language and new word formation, and it's the latter we'll have a quick look at here. First of all, to refresh your memories about morphology, it's the study of how words themselves are made up of smaller units. Not all of this is essential reading for A level, but I think it's quite interesting to know (and A level should be more than just about doing what the spec tells you to do, shouldn't it?).

There are basically two types of morphology: derivational morphology is about creating (deriving) new words out of other units, while inflectional morphology is more to do with the ways in which words change depending on grammatical functions and forms. For example, to illustrate the latter, verbs inflect depending on the tense and aspect they're in (I walk - I walked - I am walking), the grammatical person they agree with (I walk - she walks) and nouns on whether they're singular or plural (dog - dogs), and there are plenty more too (An Introduction to English Morphology by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy is a good read if you want to find out more.).

Derivational morphology is to do with putting morphemes (small units that make up words) together to create new words, so respect can become disrespect, terror become terrorise, and so on. A great deal of word formation in recent years has been the product of blending and compounding (bromance, staycation, podcast all being blends, and laptop, muffin top and bunny boiler all being compounds), but a tweet from MacMillan Dictionaries linking to this site offers some interesting examples of new words formed by derivational morphology.

They look at the use of the -er suffix in recent American neologisms. So, the people involved movement that claimed Barack Obama wasn't actually an American and demanded to see his birth certificate, became known as birthers. The US's satirical magazine The Onion even created a spoof movement that denied the providence of Obama's birth certificate after he had produced it, who were called Afterbirthers (demanding to see the placenta).

The Fritinanacy blog also mentions that those who refused to accept the official version of events for 9/11 were called truthers. Now we even have deathers, who refuse to accept that Osama Bin Laden is actually dead, an dthink that his burial at sea was all part of a cunning plan. There are older ones too. They point to right wingers, nutters and we even have some of our own, homegrown British ones such as lifers (prisoners on a life sentence) and ravers (people who like a particular club-based lifestyle).

So, if you're looking for some good examples of word formation processes to impress your ENGA3/ENGB3 examiners this summer, have a think about including morphology and the processes of prefixation (adding morphemes at the start of a root word), suffixation (adding morphemes at the end of a root word), or even infixing (adding morphemes in the middle of a root word...like hoo-f***ing-ray). It will help you avoid being a failer.

Gangsta rabble add their thang to Scrabble

According to an article in today's Daily Telegraph, Scrabble players are about to experience a massive shake-up from the slang massive. Hundreds of words from slang usage including thang and innit (and to be fair, Indian cookery and some technical jargon too) are set to appear in the new Collins Official Scrabble Words book.

On The Guardian's website, Sarah Churchwell talks about the new words and places them in the context of wider debates about new words entering mainstream use. For A2 students looking at language change and attitudes to change, it's a good article to read. As ever, the comments generated by the piece range from the deranged to the completely reasonable, so are worth a skim too.

Do the SlutWalk

The slutwalk: a bit like the cripwalk but with fewer clothes

SlutWalks are coming to a town (and dictionary) near you, but if you're a hormone-charged teenage boy don't get too excited: these slutwalks are feminist in nature and all about the ways in which women are viewed and treated by some men.

The SlutWalk is a response to a speech given by a police officer in Toronto, Canada who ill-advisedly told his student audience that if women wanted to avoid being raped they should stop "dressing like sluts". In this article in yesterday's Evening Standard, Rosamund Irwin makes the excellent point that rape is not necessarily something that happens to only scantily-clad young women, but pensioners, children and nearly all types of women in whatever type of clothing. Years ago, feminist friends made it clear to me that while sex is the means of inflicting the attack, rape is more about power and dominance than it is about sexual attraction. As Irwin points out, blaming the victim is "still a frighteningly common response to sexual assault", but it's a mindset that some people can't get out of. The SlutWalks are an imaginative and witty response to this.

This article on the BBC News magazine site takes a linguistic tack and explores the history of the word slut, making the point that very much like the n-word and queer, the word has been reclaimed... or at least, has been claimed to have been reclaimed: these things are never as simple as saying "This word used to mean x, but from now on, this word means y!".

Like other forms of reclamation, there are problems. Unreconstructed racists might still use the n-word in its pejorative and racist sense, while a black teenager from Peckham (or Tim Westwood-lookalikes) might use it in its reclaimed sense. Likewise, supporters of the gay rights movement might use queer in its reclaimed sense while homophobes and other bigots might still use it as a term of abuse. Each word exists in a state of duel identity: it's OK to use it in one context but not another. And tied in with reclamation is the idea that something in the original sense of the word is being celebrated. In the case of queer it's maybe a celebration of deviance as a positive force, with the n-word it's perhaps an embrace of the threatening, brutal aspects of the original word as a way of defiantly chucking an insult back into the faces of racists. With slut it's all about celebrating female independence and a woman's control over her own body and sexual desires.

Slut - like so many other words used to describe women's sexual behaviour and/or attractiveness - is still a loaded word, partly because of its connotations of dirt and "low morals" - but also because it is used by some men (and some women) to cast judgements on the behaviour of others. So what, you might say: lots of words do that.

The difference here, perhaps is that double-standards are at work. Just have a look at adjectives like dirty and filthy. Often these are used as terms of approval by men to describe sexually independent or adventurous women, but equally they can be used by the same men to abuse a woman they consider to be too independent or too adventurous (often because they're not having sex with them, but with someone else...).

Back in the early 1970s, Julia Stanley looked at the proportion of negative words used to label men and women and found a massive disparity, almost always in favour of men. Since then, things have changed - or so we're told. While the terms of abuse used to belittle boys and men tend to revolve around homosexuality - faggot, gay, batty man etc. - the ones used to denigrate girls and women are often related to their availability (or not) for sex with males: sket, slag, whore, junge, tight, frigid and slut.

To put it simply, lots of women - perhaps young women more than others - have to negotiate a world where to lots of boys if you're not tight, you're slack. It's not a level playing field for women, and the language used to describe them is often riddled with double-standards, so I'm all in favour of slutwalks and the rationale for holding them in the first place.

Sick timing, blud

And as if by magic, or the internet even, this tweet from Oxford Dictionaries appeared on my screen, explaining that the words wicked and sick  have had positive meanings for longer than you might think. Read all about it here.

Don't test me, fam

The directorial debut of Joe Cornish (one half of the mighty Adam and Joe), Attack the Block, looks like it will be a masterpiece of hoodies, tower blocks, grimy beats and... err... space aliens. But in this short ITN clip, it's not the plot, the genre or the aliens that get the focus, but the film's use of south London slang.

It's a neat little clip because it shows the slippery nature of slang's meanings. When we ran a poll on this blog a few months ago about the word "peak", it was given a range of different meanings. I understand it as meaning something similar to "hectic", which could be good or bad, depending on the context: a party might be hectic (exciting and a little bit cer-azy - perhaps with people chugging Top Deck shandy and robot dancing in the kitchen ), while a job interview might be hectic (scary and overwhelming, just too much, man).

One of the actors explains it as "getting overwhelming, getting too much, there's danger, it's getting peak", but as Joe Cornish explains, with mock-English teacher seriousness at the end, sometimes these words "can be flipped...their meanings can change overnight without any warning at all".

There's a good interview with Cornish here and the Adam and Joe 6Music site is here.

Calm down, dear

David Cameron's put-down of Labour MP Angela Eagles in the House of Commons last week by telling her to "calm down, dear" has been attacked by many commentators for its sexist and patronising language and tone. One of the best responses appeared in last week's Guardian from Libby Brooks who quoted feminist linguist Dale Spender in her argument, and made the point that to dismiss it as just a joke was to misunderstand the power of language and its relationship to social context:

Because language really, really matters. It is fundamental to how we construct and convey meaning. And when that meaning is: "I am expressing paternalistic concern at your inability [as a woman] to rein in your emotion" then yes, that is sexist and yes, it is a big deal. To undermine her anger as hysteria, to reference her femaleness, is a particularly male way of putting a woman down.

Going on to link Cameron's comment to the Sky Sports sexism furore a couple of months ago, Brooks makes the point that sexist banter exists in a world where these notions aren't challenged and how we shouldn't let people (usually) men get away with this dismissive and demeaning language.

A wider point here is that taken out of context, the word dear probably isn't that bad - it's certainly not on the same level as many of the frequent, offensive terms used daily - bitch, cow, slag and the like - but it's the context that imbues it with its offence. It's the way its use represents a stance on the part of the speaker ("I am in a superior position to you and can address you in whatever way I choose") and ties in to a broader picture of social inequality - Cameron and his chums are largely the product of single-sex boarding schools, who treat gender equality as a hilarious wheeze, rather than an issue to be taken seriously - that make it such an inflammatory language act.

Edited to add comma in title - apologies for punctuation fail

Media Texts and Language Interventions: helpful article

It's probably too late for this year's A2 students to get much out of this link, because you really should have handed in your coursework by now, but this article (which I've nabbed from a suggestion by Julie Blake on the Teachit Language Sputnik) offers a very readable explanation of what's needed in good science journalism.

As Julie points out over on her site, a Media Text (B spec) or Language Intervention (A spec) is often concerned with making a difficult, quite specialist idea accessible for a mainstream, non-specialist audience, very much like science journalism has to do. The article gives some helpful pointers as to what you can do.

I'll explain everything to the geeks

If there has been a theme to recent postings (and there doesn't have to be, of course)  it's probably something to do with new words, language change and lexicography, so here's a quick link to an OED article by John List about words that don't make it into the dictionary and how they're still words.

Elsewhere on the Oxford Dictionaries site (which is becoming a useful A level Language resource these days) are some good pages on recent lexical and semantic changes, with some interesting discussion of geek, viral and meme, all good examples of how technology and social networking are affecting the language we use and the lifestyles we live.

From punk'd to skunked...

...and following on from the earlier post about Urban Dictionary and the role of dictionaries in charting language change, here's a link to a really good Ben Zimmer post on Visual Thesaurus about the "skunking" of words. He talks about it in relation to shifts in meaning for the words nonplussed and bemused.

As Ben points out In the case of nonplussed, the old meaning is "bewildered," while the new meaning is "unfazed". And with bemused, it's perhaps a more significant shift:

As the Visual Thesaurus wordmap for bemused indicates, the two primary meanings of bemused are "deeply absorbed in thought" or "perplexed by many conflicting situations or statements." The way that political reporters have used it about Obama, however, is "above it all, with a trace of amusement," in the words of New York Times deputy news editor Philip B. Corbett. Corbett adds, "but that's not what bemused means." Well, it's not what the word has historically meant, but the newer sense, influenced by amused, has become mainstream enough to enter some dictionaries, including Merriam-Webster's Collegiate.

"Skunked" seems like a good way of describing words that have two slightly different meanings for different groups of people at the same time. Perhaps they are words that are in the process of shifting from meaning 1 to meaning 2 but now just cause confusion because of this ongoing shift, and therefore should be avoided...like a skunk.

Of course, to loads of teenagers in the UK, the word "skunk" has totally different connotations (think "herbal" cigarettes and glazed expressions), so is that a "skunked" meaning itself?

Seeing language change actually happen in front of us is a fascinating thing and should be a reminder to us that language isn't about black and white but gradience. If you're an A level student revising for your Language Change exam, bear in mind that while we often teach you about periods of change (Early Modern English, Middle English etc.) the divides between these periods and the consistency of usage of a particular form at a particular time have never been that smooth. Above all, language is used by real - and often very different - people who don't all act or speak in the same way.

Keeping it real or just making it up?

This article from last week's Guardian takes a good look at the rise of Urban Dictionary and its approach to gathering new words compared to that of more established dictionaries like the OED and Collins. This brief extract puts it nicely:

Now, you are unlikely ever to confuse the OED with Urban Dictionary – one is the definitive record of the English language, the other is a rambling free-for-all largely compiled by teenagers making stuff up – but the comparison remains. Until relatively recently a word wasn't recognised as such until it was recorded in a proper dictionary. Now neologisms are pouring into the language like never before; our vocabulary is being reshaped by texters, tweeters, bloggers, marketeers and have-a-go contributors. Slang used to take decades to cross the Atlantic; now it takes minutes.

The article offers some debate (good for ENGA3 Language Discourses) about the importance and authority of Urban Dictionary, with slang specialist and lexicographer Jonathon Green arguing that it's quite a fun resource, but not one which we should rely on for authenticity and accuracy, while the dictionary's founder, Aaron Peckham, argues that it's an evolving and multifaceted document of our times. There are other arguments too about the rights and wrongs of putting what might be ephemeral, vogue words into a dictionary of the OED's standing, with some arguing that muffin-top and OMG have no real place in such an authoritative tome.

The best line in the whole feature has to belong to Green though, who states: "My response to people saying slang destroys the language is: bollocks.You always see the same themes: drugs, drink, sex, parts of the body and what people do with them, being nasty to each other, racist stuff. It doesn't do compassion very well. But slang is lively, exciting and very creative". Amen to that.

Linguist, writer and creator of the excellent Visual Thesaurus site, Ben Zimmer, reviews Jonathon Green's Slang Dictionary here, with a really insightful look at how Green traces the shifting meanings of the word punk. Evidence, if any were really needed, that analysing slang tells us a huge amount about the language we've used on the past and the ways in which language is shaped by social change and in turn contributes to our own social attitudes.

So, whether you prefer the OED's slow but steady approach or the quick fix of instant gratification that Urban Dictionary gives you, slang definitely needs a closer look as it's tied up with who we are, where we are from and where we are going. And slang is ace. Word to your mother, bro.

Edited on 3.05.11 to add link to Guardian article (durrrrrr)

The geeks shall inherit the earth

online standardisation or online gaming?

While the OED adds OMG and FYI to its (digital) pages and argument rages over where LOL was first used (was it among geeks on usenet, mobile phone text messagers or old ladies thinking it meant lots of love on messages to their grandchildren?) a whole area of abbreviation seems to have been overlooked.

This article on gamer slang which appears on Nerd Trek summarises some of the abbreviations used by online gamers who play World of Warcraft, Everquest and Lord of the Rings Online, among others. Like lots of these things, the abbreviations are a generally accepted shorthand (mostly initialisms and the odd acronym) designed to speed up communication between players when they're chatting to other players or cooperating at moments of high drama, like when you're you're about to take down Gamgee, the mystical dwarf of Nimbus 5 and haven't powered up your level 45 inferno spell.

We covered some gamer slang on this blog a while ago (here and here), but since I have regained control of my life by  stopping playing such games (all hail the Xbox 360 and two slipped discs for helping rid me of my crippling MMORPG addiction!) I've not really followed it as closely as I used to, but it looks like nothing much has changed in the language of online games in a little while. With the rise of VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and programmes like Ventrilo, which allow you to talk to other gamers, perhaps the days of language innovation in online gamer chat are over?

LOL For The Win

The OED's decision to add LOL, OMG and the verb to heart to its latest update has already been covered here on this blog, but this BBC News Magazine piece about LOL is a really good read, not just for its content but also its form and style, which make it a neat example of how a Language Intervention (ENGA4) or Media Text (ENGB4) might work. It's also a good example of the sort of short article that can appear on the ENGA3 paper for Language Change, offering plenty of scope for discussion about attitudes to change, reasons for change and processes that help changes spread.

Listen up y'all

This post by Ben Trawick-Smith on Dialect Blog is a really concise and fascinating insight into the migration of a phrase from Scotland to Ireland and then to the south of the USA and up to the northern states, spreading out from its original usage base of poor white farmers to African American slaves and then into wider multiethnic usage.

The expression is y'all and it's a second person plural pronoun (as distinguished from you which acts as both 2nd person singular and plural in Standard British English). For a neat little case study into how language spreads, which could be perfect for A level, go no further.

ENGA3: some tips for success (part two)

Here's the second instalment of a series of posts designed to help you cope with the A2 exam in June (June 24th to be precise). Last time we looked at the Assessment Objectives on the paper and some ideas about approaches to AO2, and this time we'll have a fairly quick look at how to deal with AO3.

What is AO3? Well, on the mark scheme for ENGA3 it's described as follows:  "Analyse and evaluate the influence of contextual factors on the production and reception of spoken and written language". That's quite broad, so what are examiners really looking for when they award AO3 marks?

Looking in a bit more detail at the mark scheme, we can see the following descriptors in the top 2 bands (10-12 and 13-15):

13-15

• Demonstrates analytical grasp of how language works across different levels.
• Places analysis in wider contexts.
• Shows perceptive/conceptualised/illuminating/ open-minded approach.
• Uses interesting and judicious examples and quotation.
• Evaluates appropriateness/success. 

10-12

• Analyses language features, their explanatory context and their communicative impact confidently
• Makes a subtle interpretation integrating various levels of description.
• Explores texts' meaning, purpose and effects.
• Makes evaluative comments which are well supported.

So, in essence, if AO1 is all about identifying and labelling significant language features, AO3 is more to do with working out what those language features do, what they mean and how they are used to represent what the writers/speakers think about their subject matter. Tied in with these is also a need to use appropriate examples to show where these things are happening, and also an awareness of the contexts the texts are from - whether they're spoken or written, produced for a specific or general audience, how the writers position themselves in relation to their audiences.

One of the big problems for lots of candidates taking this paper is that there is a lot to do and explaining the effects of language can be harder for some people than just labelling a noun or a simple sentence. But then again, that's why it's an A level paper that you take in your second year rather than as AS one: it's supposed to be a challenge.

A key point to remember is that for AO3 you must have some idea about what the subject matter is and how the writer feels about it. For example, in the paper from June 2010, there were two language change texts - one a diary entry from a mother in World War 2 and the other a blog entry on a journalists' website - but it was quite rare to find candidates saying very much about how each writer felt towards the events and experiences they were describing. Plenty of people were good on talking about how the technological advances of the Twenty First Century allow bloggers to communicate with a global audience and keep audiences up to date with world events, or how the diary used an elliptical style, but there wasn't much on the emotions of the mother writing the diary entry or the way in which war reporting was being represented as fun and fashionable in the blog.

So, how do you write about this sort of thing? First of all, I'd suggest that you get a clear idea of what it is the writers are actually talking about. Read the texts carefully. Lots of students last year took a quick look at the blog and assumed it was about war: it wasn't; it was about the lifestyles of foreign correspondents and war reporters and the ways in which journalists view themselves and the work they do.

Secondly, once you're clear on what's really being addressed, try to identify the angle/s the writer is taking. In text A we could see that the mother felt restricted and unable to say much of importance in her letters to her prisoner-of-war son: "For one thing, news is scarce when one cuts out the war, and one may not say anything to give any information to the enemy. So things have to be carefully sifted till there is very little said.".

In the second text, the rather relaxed attitude of the blogger is revealed by his casual use of military metaphors "And we won’t just be blasting you blog style. Oh no, no, no... We’re coming at you with each and every social media gun blazing.".

So, in these two texts you could have picked up some solid AO3 marks if you compared the anxious, concerned stance of text A's writer with the laid-back approach of blogger B.

For Language Discourses - the second section of the paper - AO3 is actually a bit easier, I think. Because the whole point of section B is to make you look at arguments about language, the texts chosen will have identifiable viewpoints. Often, these viewpoints will be very clear to see and you'll be able to find plenty of evidence to back up your interpretation of (say) writer D as a strong prescriptivist or writer E as a more open-minded descriptivist. But it's not always that easy...

The writers may not be particularly consistent - they may shift between positions on different issues. The paper in January 2011 featured two articles about texting, one by Will Self and one by Lynne Truss. Both were quite anti-textspeak but were actually quite positive about technology and text messaging itself. In last June's paper, several of John Humphrys' points could be identified as being very prescriptive, but others are harder to place.

In these cases, this is where the "open-minded" descriptor of AO3 comes in. If you want to do well on the paper, show that you're not just making a blanket judgement about a writer's views, but point to where you think you see certain views and even how those views might shift as the text goes on or contradict each other.

Another key thing to remember with AO3 is how the author is positioning him/herself in relation to the reader. Are they trying to speak as one of "us" (whoever we are are...) or as an expert with specialist knowledge to impart? In John Humphrys' attack on descriptivist linguists in the June 2010 paper, he was cunning in his approach of distancing himself from linguists with their fancy ideas and academic viewpoints, and keen to represent himself as a "normal" person who speaks "common sense". But remember, "common sense" is only that which appears normal at a given time and it can be plain wrong. A hundred years ago it was "common sense" to smoke cigarettes because they were good for your lungs, apparently. Fifty years ago it was "common sense" to not give Black Americans equal rights...

That's it for now on this particular post, but we'll pick up Language Discourses in another post soon and also have a look at how to integrate theory and research into answers on language change and variation.

Twintastic

As the proud father of twins (although not so proud now one has started claiming he's an Arsenal supporter), I really liked the clip of babbling twins that circulated on the web last week. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's here.

There's also a nice bit of analysis of what's going on, provided by a child speech expert.

100 word vocabulary

Fabio Capello's claim that he only needs 100 words of English to communicate with his England footballers has sparked lots of silly (but fun) discussions about what those words might be. The BBC covered it here, The Guardian reckoned that beaten excuse quarter final, Germany, jagerbomb, lager and WAGs might be in there, while today's G2 extends the 100 words to other occupations including taxi drivers (Where left right lights immigration stop roadworks traffic not being funny but come over here free council houses bloody liberty politicians all same)  and teachers (You sit quiet please everyone now enough gum tie shirt homework yes today excuses no book open page talking stop discipline noise courtesy while others trying learn). But why stop there? George Osborne would only need 3 words (cut, gloat and slime) so that would be easy, but what about other jobs and professions?

Thinking of those 100 words that are used most frequently, is there a way in which patterns in their grammar could be discerned? Katherine Nelson's study of children's first words back in 1973 showed that one year-olds tended to favour nouns heavily among their first 50 words, but what would the pattern be for you?

Wikipedia uses data from Oxford Dictionaries to assemble the 100 most frequently used words in English, but this data is drawn from written texts primarily, making it very different from what a person would say in a normal day of speaking.

Perhaps an interesting language investigation at A2 would be to record a few minutes of conversation every hour and log the words used, their frequency and word class, to establish the patterns in your own speech and that of others.