Rhyming slang: they haven't got a Scooby

There have been some interesting responses to last week's story about Cockney Rhyming Slang's supposed death. In The Independent the linguist, Tony Thorne questions whether it actually constituted a genuine dialect and looks at the new slang that's taken its place:

The cliques who occupy the high ground of cool these days, at least in their own minds, are the hipsters of Shoreditch and Hoxton, the patois-speaking street gangs and their imitators, Lady Gaga and Nicky Minaj-fixated teens, and their gloomy emo counterparts. These groups all have one thing in common: they completely lack humour, and rhyming slang is above all a joke, a feature of a mind-set for which cheerful irony, back-and-forth banter and self-mockery are mainstays.

He goes on to describe  the language of these "patois-speaking street gangs" as "pseudo-Afro-Caribbean 'Jafaican'", which I'd argue isn't really a good way of describing it, but he has a point about the constant reinvention of slang, and as an author and expert in the field, he knows his onions.

Elsewhere, Jenny McCartney in The Daily Telegraph laments the passing of Cockney Rhyming Slang describing it as "obscure and expansive, relishing the playful drawing-out of speech" (scroll down to last item here). This is worth considering from a Language Change (ENGA3 and ENGB3) perspective, as there are many reasons why people use language and they're not always related to making things quicker and simpler, often being connected to wordplay and acts of identity.

The death of Cockney (part 175)

a cockney geezer, yesterday

Today's Daily Mail provides a feast for those of you who like a bit of doom and gloom in the shape of "English being destroyed by text language" headlines. This time round, texting is not making us stupider (d'oh) or turning us into a nation of chavs, but destroying that loveable old variety, Cockney Rhyming Slang.

The article looks at a recent survey of 2000 people by the Museum of London which suggests that most of them don't encounter much Cockney rhyming slang and would be baffled by terms such as apples and pears for stairs or brown bread for dead (although genuine Cockneys would never use the rhyming part of the term and stick to apples or brown, to confuse the casual listener yet further). It's not really that much of a surprise because, after all, Cockney speakers are and have probably always been a small group, although admittedly one whose influence was greater than their number.

What helps the Mail turn this into a sad tale of prescriptivist woe is not that the dialect is dying a natural death, with its users shuffling off to Romford or drinking too many Britneys and keeling over, but that the good old Cockney dialect is being destroyed by textisms like LOL and OMG. This is the Cockney variety which, if you look back through the decades, has often been damned - by the selfsame mainstream media that now bemoans its loss - for its coarseness, vulgarity and general untrustworthiness. They're having a bubble. A couple of years ago, texting wasn't the threat to Cockney: Multicultural London English was, apparently.

For Language Change students this makes for a great example of a declinism discourse, with some of the "bottom half" - the comments below the story from Daily Mail readers - adding to the sense that this is yet another symptom of a language, a nation, a proud island race in decline. There's not much that doesn't upset some of these commenters: one day it's pasties, the next it's patois. But it's fantastically fertile ground for a bit of Language Discourses analysis...Look there's a Crumbling Castle! And there's an Infectious Disease! OMG, I can even see a Damp Spoon!

Thankfully, the Daily Telegraph takes a slightly more restrained view, quoting the world's favourite linguist, David Crystal who says "Cockney slang was never very widely known as it started as a secret way for people to talk to each other. As soon as the slang became known the Cockney’s stopped using it".

The elevation of Cockney to its place in a theme park of English identity is an odd one. In 1909, S.K.Ratcliffe of the English Association described it as a "debased dialect, which is spreading from our schools and training colleges all over the country", and he added, "in ten years' time the English language will not be worth speaking". Its origins lie in East End criminals developing a language of inclusion among their own (in-group language) and exclusion of outsiders (the out-group), so it was always meant to fox and confuse outsiders and keep the business of the insiders to themselves.

So, why celebrate such a dubious dialect? Will the Daily Mail in thirty years' time be running a headline "Innit dies. Arks is on its last legs. A nation mourns."? I doubt it...

Cockney has become part of a heritage industry, a set of linguistic markers of a passing (or in some cases, passed on to the other side) English identity which some still cling on to. In times of uncertainty over identity - globalisation, mass immigration, economic downturn, social change -  people often hang on to those things that signal tradition. And while RP might be a more prestigious marker of Englishness, Cockney has also developed a place in this theme park because it's associated with more innocent, more certain times.

But, as anyone who has looked at language change knows, these certainties, these notions of a shared and communal language identity are a myth. Language has always had different varieties which have pretty much universally been looked down upon by the ruling classes and their media: Cockney is no exception. Working class varieties like Cockney might well signal higher solidarity than more overtly prestigious forms like RP, and therefore trigger feelings of warmth and nostalgia, but when Cockney was in its prime, the users of it probably wouldn't have been looked on as cuddly old-fashioned figures, but unpleasant and antisocial criminals.

So, perhaps Cockney is on its way out - maybe it's been on its way out for a long time already - but if we look at why it's being mourned we can see that so many other strands of concern about change - not just language change - are apparent.

Edited on 30.03.12 to add this link: Take the Cockney Rhyming Slang quiz here.

Literally the last word on "literally"

For literally gazillions of years pedants have complained that people use language "incorrectly". That is to say they don't use it in quite the same way as the pedants like to use it. And that's fine, because if we didn't have pedants we wouldn't have the tension between progress and conservatism that characterises so much of the history of English language, and our language would literally spiral out of control and become a garbled mishmash of slang, ghetto-speak and missing apostrophes. Or something...

Literally is one of those words that pedants have complained about. Critics argue that the word means "to the letter", so shouldn't be used as a figure of speech. It's a kind of anti-metaphor, if you like. When someone says "When she left me, she literally took a piece of my heart with her" a pedant might jump out of the bushes wagging a finger, responding "But she didn't literally remove part of your heart did she? She didn't actually take a bleeding chunk from your left ventricle and take it away". And you might respond, "Who are you and where did you come from? Put that wagging finger away; it's not even yours".

This piece on the BBC News Magazine's pages offers an enlightening insight into how literally has been used over the years and how it fits into a pattern of semantic shift that we see with many other words. If reading the article itself is too hard and literally going to ruin your day, then have a listen to the interview from Radio 4's Today programme, which is here.

Edited on 19.03.12 to add: Good link here to Polly Curtis in The Guardian discussing this.

Click here

We've recently been covering children's acquisition of the sounds of English in AS classes, and I made a passing reference to how very young children can make any sound in any language (like the clicks of Xhosa in South Africa) but gradually tune in to their mother tongue as they grow older.

This fascinating post by Julie Sedivy in Discover magazine tells us a lot more about Xhosa and its clicks but also makes a number of interesting points about how we perceive sounds. Sedivy points out that to an outsider, the clicks of Xhosa sound "a bit like highly-skilled beatboxing, mixing recognizeable speech with what sounds like the clacking of objects striking each other". Of course, to a Xhosa speaker, the sounds are as familiar as t,s, and d are to English speakers.


In terms of children's acquisition of sounds, the article raises some good points to consider. We often treat the phonological part of a child's language development as mostly to do with the production of sounds and patterns of "errors" in those sounds (deletion, consonant cluster reduction, deletion of unstressed syllables, for example), at least I know I do when I teach it. But what about how we hear sounds as children and how we process those sounds and create a mental representation of what they mean?

Sedivy tells us that "your brain cares as much about how sounds function in a language than about their actual physical properties, so the same acoustic input can be interpreted very differently by the brain depending on its role in a language", so when toddlers are listening to speech all around them, they're not just parroting or imitating it, but making sense of how sounds are used, where they appear and what they might mean. It's as much to do with fathoming out meanings as it is to do with trying to replicate the production of the sound.

Toddler talk

Yesterday's Telegraph featured an article about recent research by Leslie Rescorla into children's acquisition of vocabulary in the early years. Rescorla may be familiar to some A level English Language students for her work on acquisition of lexis and semantics and the different categories of over-extension that some children make.

The article takes a look at some of the recent ideas about a child's language environment and how the language used around a child might influence their vocabulary and understanding. It also includes a checklist of some simple words that most children would be using by the time they're 2 years of age.

The 15-year project followed 40 children from privileged backgrounds who were diagnosed as late talkers but were otherwise developing normally.
While most of the children had caught up and developed an average range of vocabulary by four or five they remained slightly behind peers from the same background in vocabulary, grammar and reading throughout their school years, suggesting that their late development of speech had put them at a disadvantage.
The word test devised by Prof Rescorla can be completed in ten minutes and doctors can tell at a glance whether a child's speaking ability is poor for their age.

Personally, I think it discriminates against yokels from Norfolk who would not know many of these, but would probably be able to label several types of tractor.

"Sheffieldish" and more on slang bans

Here's a link to a Sheffield Telegraph article on the recent "slang ban". I would have added it to the last post, but my access to the blog is a bit limited from college.

Playground prescriptivism?

A story doing the rounds yesterday suggested that a school in Sheffield was attempting to prevent its students from using slang. It was covered in the local Sheffield Star here, with a reference to one of Sheffield's most famous exports, Sean Bean (aka Boromir , Ned Stark and Sharpe) and in yesterday's Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail and Guardian.

Like many other arguments about language use, this one has become a bit muddied. In this case, the original story about the school - Sheffield Springs Academy - seemed to focus on slang (which might de defined as a type of extremely informal language used by specific groups of people) and a desire on behalf of the school to show its students that different styles of language suit different situations (what linguists often call the notion of appropriacy). However, the reporting of the story also refers to dialect being banned and regional pronunciations being frowned upon, and that's before you chuck in text speak too.

So what is actually happening here and can schools really control what their students say? The story is very similar to one we featured on this blog a few years ago about a school in Manchester which had banned street slang from its classrooms (covered here and in the Radio 4 programme Mind Your Slanguage which featured interviews with some SFX students) so it's perhaps not a big surprise to find that the head of the academy sponsors behind the Sheffield Springs Academy is the woman who was head teacher at the Manchester Academy when it introduced its ban, none other than Kathy August.

Her argument makes some sort of sense and goes something like this, according to the Telegraph report:

What we want to make sure of is that they are confident in using standard English. Slang doesn't really give the right impression of the person.

Youngsters going to interviews for their first job need to make a good impression so that employers have confidence in them. It's not difficult to get youngster out of the habit of using slang.

Mrs August said it was preferable for pupils to say "thank you" instead of the more colloquial "ta", and "goodbye" rather than "see ya".

The trust said its policy on slang was part of its "street stops at the gate" ethos.

It also asks sixth formers to dress in suits rather than school uniform to encourage professionalism.

Mrs August added: "It is about knowing what language is acceptable between friends and what is required in more formal situations.

We want to give each of our students the best start possible; understanding when it is and is not acceptable to use slang or colloquial language is just one part of this. 

So, according to August, it's all about reinforcing the students' grasp of Standard English and code-switching. The problem is - as several of the reports show - who defines what slang and regional dialect are? The references from parents in the Sheffield Star to teachers disliking regional accents and local dialect terms, and the strange notion brought up by August in the Mail's version of the story that "...when youngsters are talking together they use text speak..."(like B4,H8 and BTW? I doubt it...) suggest that there's much confusion over what actually constitutes slang.

This isn't a new confusion, and it's one that the linguist, Paul Kerswill noted in his response to a report on non-standard English in schools.The problem is that if all non-standard forms of English are lumped together there's a risk that the debate itself loses its focus. Are we talking about text speak in spoken conversations? Really? Or are we talking about the ways in which people from Sheffield might say about and right differently to those in the south? If it's slang then there might be a good argument for explaining how it is viewed or understood (or not) outside particular social groups, but there's also a decent argument put forward by Christopher Howse in today's Telegraph (albeit in his usual verbose style) that language play should be encouraged at school and that slang can be part of that.

No one is really going to argue that students don't need Standard English, but is their grasp of it so shaky that they should be encouraged not to use any other varieties of English that might interfere with the standard form? Is it really that bad? Obviously, the Daily Mail might want us to think it is, because that supports their reactionary, declinist agenda - English is in tatters thanks to immigrants, teachers who don't wear ties and Brussels bureaucrats - a classic "crumbling castle" argument. But are young people so vulnerable to the pernicious influence of non-standard forms that they should be protected from them at school?

What do you think? Comments (in Standard English, please - no text speak or ghetto grammar) are welcome.

New approaches to child language acquisition

http://www.instablogsimages.com

This probably isn't a link to follow if you're still struggling with the basics of child language on your A level course, but it's a really fascinating way of looking at how languages are acquired that offers a challenge to the Chomskyan model of a language acquisition device that's specifically designed to process the rules of grammar.

Construction grammar is a relatively new field of linguistics to me and one I can't claim to fully grasp as yet, but in this blog post, the expert grammarian and ELT specialist, Scott Thornbury takes a look at how construction grammar might be applied to language acquisition.

Instead of looking at language as words and rules (lexis and grammar) as we often do when looking at stages of acquisition and how children move from one word to two words to telegraphic talk, and the rest of it, construction grammar offers a model in which children pick up chunks of language from those they hear around them. It's not a simple parroting of input, as per Skinner's behaviourist model, but a more subtle processing of meaningful units of language that they hear around them.

As Thornbury explains here, language learners are not just picking up words from around them like leaves and sticking them back onto a pre-programmed grammar tree:

Rather than mapping individual words on to a pre-specified grammatical ‘architecture’ (as in a Chomskyan, generative grammar view), speakers construct utterances out of these routinised sequences – the operative word being construct.

It's therefore an active process, one which involves putting together chunks of meaning rather than piecing together individual units and linking them by grammar rules to other bits.  Where this differs markedly from Chomsky's model is that he sees a child's language environment as linguistically impoverished: this is the poverty of the stimulus argument in which a child can't be simply taking in language data from around them and regurgitating it because what they hear is so fragmented and often apparently ungrammatical. Construction grammar offers a different approach which seems to be arguing that a child can make much more sense of this language input and that by hearing enough language they tune in to the patterns that emerge and can start to spot the most frequent structures, using them in their own language soon after.

Thornbury points to the fact that so many of English's phrase and clause structures are repeated patterns, where if you know the first part you can have an educated guess at what the second part will consist of. He points to structures such as:

• take the [noun] for a [noun] (e.g. take the dog for a walk, take the cure for an illness, etc.)
• [prep] the [sing N] of the [sing N] (e.g. on the top of the mountain, in the middle of the night, in the tip of the tongue)

So, perhaps what young children acquiring language hear around them isn't quite the jumbled mess of  random noises and unfinished structures that the poverty of the stimulus argument posits, but a rather regular system that can be picked up more quickly than previously thought.

People first and PC

This link on the excellent Linguistics Research Digest blog takes a look at the "people first" movement in Politically Correct (PC) language reform, which (as Jenny Amos explains) involved a switch in the type of noun phrase being used to label social groups, from pre-modified noun phrases to post-modified noun phrases. Pre-to-the-what-now?

It's quite a simple idea. If you look at a noun phrase such as disabled people, the adjective disabled premodifies the noun people. The people first approach would be to shift the noun to the front and add the modification afterwards in the form of a prepositional phrase, so it becomes people with disabilities. The argument here was that the former version placed emphasis on the condition - and by extension defined the people by their disability - while the latter foregrounded the people themselves, with the disability coming after.Jenny Amos's blog post then looks at some interesting research by Helena Halmari into the use of such terms in news reporting.

PC is clearly about more than just rearranging words; it's primarily about rearranging ways of thinking about different groups in society, and specifically it's about removing offensive and derogatory words from the language. The arguments about PC were recently surveyed in an interesting Observer article by Miranda Sawyer, where she looked at some of the background to the PC movement and its more modern manifestations: Twitter spats, rape "jokes" and the bandying around of terms like mong and sket "for a laugh". If you're looking for material to bolster your ENGA3 Language Discourses understanding, go no further.

Child Language research updates and summaries

We've started Language Development in my AS classes and - snow permitting - will carry on with it this week and up to Easter.

Here are some useful links to clips of TV programmes, You Tube presentations and research  papers that should complement your class work on the topic.

One of the most handy links is this You Tube presentation (powerpoint plus handy voiceover) outlining the key arguments about child language.

Then you'll find the impressively-mustachioed Robert Winston presenting this short extract from his series, The Human Body a good intro to the main developmental stages of child language acquisition. 

The Horizon documentary Why Do We Talk which we watched in class a week or two back is split into five separate You Tube clips which can be found here.

Did you shed a little tear at the plight of the lickle baby Zebra Finches? I did, but I weep when I hear Black Eyed Peas lyrics, so ignore me. If you want to find out more about the impressively-consonanted OferTchernichovski and his work on the fluffy birds, have a look here. Or here.

If you're ready for some hard stuff, then go to these clips from the big daddy of language acquisition, the living man-god that is Noam Chomsky. In this clip he talks about his theories of language acqusition (Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device) while in this one (only for the hardcore ravers, it has to be said) he talks in more detail about how his ideas on UG have changed.

I've just found this Patricia Kuhl lecture about the critical period hypothesis on TED, which is a very clear explanation about what goes on in the first year of a child's language development.

If all of that is too much for you (or you are from Ipswich and struggle with anything beyond grunts) then check out this clip of cute twins talking to each other.

Edited to add Kuhl lecture link on 09.02.12

Knowing your leet from your pwned

This link has a look at some internet jargon and helps explain the origins of some of the language on the net. If you're studying Language Change or Language and Technology it should be handy.

Prescriptivists' piffle versus descriptivists' data

With Language Discourses at the heart of the ENGA3 paper, it's always useful to scour the media to find examples of writers getting themselves worked up about language change or what they see as declining standards. If you've done any work on this topic so far, you'll already know that prescriptivists have always bemoaned changes to the English language but have rarely been successful in stopping its evolution.

And you'll probably already know that most linguists - those who study language - are rarely of a prescriptive mindset. They tend to see their role as describing language, pointing out how it's used and by whom, rather than judging its use as good or bad. That's why we - your English Language teachers - generally tell you to talk about standard and non-standard instead of good or bad. Hark at us telling you what to do: how prescriptive...

This week there are two or three different pieces about changing language and attitudes towards it. Simon Kelner of The Independent writes not one but two articles about things he doesn't like in language: grocer's apostrophes (potatoe's, for example), split infinitives (to prissily prescriptivise, perhaps), Waterstone's dropping its possessive apostrophe, Americanisms, and all the usual suspects. It's a load of old gubbins really and reheats some frankly rather overcooked quibbles about language, most of which get dismissed by proper linguists.

A quick read of Henry Hitchings' The Language Wars or Robert Lane Greene's chapter A Brief History of Sticklers in You Are What You Speak (or better still, a long read of both) will tell you that nearly every prescriptive argument about declining standards can be successfully debunked. There's nothing wrong with splitting infinitives (it's a an old canard based on the misapplication of Latin grammar to English), most of the supposed "Americanisms" moaned about here (for example) are not really from America at all and apostrophes are a recent and rather inconsistent form of punctuation (as David Crystal explains here).

Elsewhere, Sali Tagliamonte, who is a leading light in the field of technology and language, talks some sense about how technologies such as texting create a repertoire for young people to draw upon, rather than necessarily restricting them or dumbing them down. In her interview with the St Catharine Standard, she talks about how young language users switch between language styles depending on their understanding of what's appropriate in a given situation, making the point that "They don't just adapt haphazardly. They adapt systemically".

This is clearly a much more descriptive standpoint and one that is supported by her detailed research in the field, more of which can be found here.You can also watch a clip of Sali Tagliamonte talking about her new book (complete with tinkly electric piano music) here.

The whole prescriptive versus descriptive debate is one that we have covered many times on this blog and one that always has some relevance to the A2 year of the English Language course (be it ENGA3 or ENGB3). If you click on the labels for language discourses and language debates after this post, you can find many of the relevant articles.

Edited on 20.01.12 to correct embarrassing apostrophe error. I blame my teecherz.

#WOTY

2011 is over and 2012 has already been going for a couple of weeks, so I'm a bit slow in adding these links to 2011's Words of the Year.

The American Dialect Society hosts the biggest, and probably most linguistically-informed, end of year poll for new words, and they opted for Occupy as their Word of the Year. As Ben Zimmer explains in the ADS press release, “It’s a very old word, but over the course of just a few months it took on another life
and moved in new and unexpected directions, thanks to a national and global movement.The movement itself was powered by the word”.

The event was live-tweeted throughout with the WOTY hashtag, and for me # has been the word of the year, even if it isn't really a word. So much of last year's political activism was fuelled by or commented upon as it happened by social media - the occupy movement, the summer riots in the UK, the Arab Spring - that it seems natural to have words and symbols from these fields creeping into our everyday language. It was an uncanny feeling to be sitting in the sunny south of France on holiday reading tweets about some of my favourite bits of London getting destroyed, so Twitter words loomed large in my new words of the year, even though I'm a bit late to catch onto it.

The ADS Word of the Year poll also included some less serious entries, such as assholocracy (rule by obnoxious millionaires, or for those of us in the UK, Tories), humblebrag (an expression of false humility) and amazeballs (a slang term for amazing which appears to be totally unnecessary).

Elsewhere,the ever excellent MacMillan Dictionary blog pulled together other contenders, the Evening Standard ran its own list of new or pimped up words and the OED had squeezed middle as its word of the year (despite it being two words).

And if you're looking to keep up to date with the new words of 2012 you can do no better than Kerry Maxwell's excellent Buzzwords column for MacMillan Dictionary, which is always full of proper linguistic analysis and up to date examples.

Language Police

Just a quick link to a good piece in yesterday's Guardian Weekend by Oliver Burkeman about attitudes to language mistakes, grammatical errors and other abuses.

Unfriended for grammar fails

There's a good article here on ZDNet by Charlie Osborne about grammar, spelling and punctuation on social networking sites. She takes a look at how technology has been blamed for grammar failures, but how the fault might lie with how we teach English in schools.

While it's clearly important to teach grammar as part of secondary English, the problem lies in how we teach it. If it's just a dry naming of parts with little sense of what the effects of grammar choices are then we're probably doomed to the nightmare back to the future scenario that Simon Heffer (and his chum, Michael Gove) longs for.

One problem is that many of the gripes about grammar that are often brought up are either matters of taste, rather than "rules" which affect how we actually understand one another, so one person's error is another person's normal usage. That's not to excuse basic errors like you're/your, their/there (which bug me, even though I'm what Heffer would probably call a trendy-lefty linguist).

One explanation for such errors is that in a time of much higher basic literacy rates than ever before, we're seeing more and more people using forms of communication like Facebook, Twitter and texting than we would ever have known before, and while basic literacy is higher, not everyone is as highly educated as those who wrote for public consumption in the past.

So while the footballer, Joey Barton tweets about his interest in Noam Chomsky and Euroscepticism to about one million followers, you'd have needed decades of formal education and a university degree to communicate with that many people in 1870 or 1950.

Not surprising really, because a footballer like Joey Barton generally talks with an educated right foot (and in Barton's case, the occasional headbutt) rather than an educated lexicon. And as a follower of Barton on Twitter and admirer of his genuine interest in exploring the world of knowledge - not something footballers are well known for - I don't mean to criticise or patronise him in any way, but when you look at the history of language, working class men like Barton have rarely had such a public platform for their words.

It's an argument that also links with Joshua Foer's piece in the New York Times in which he looks at how our reading habits have changed from "intensive" knowledge of a limited range of books to "extensive" reading of many texts, including books, newspapers and text messages. And as more and more people write and text in English around the world, perhaps the centrifugal force that has previously bound English usage to the core values of Standard English begins to lose its power, with more and more mis-spellings and grammatical errors circulating, growing in influence and perhaps changing the language beyond recognition. A doomsday scenario for Standard English, or the natural evolution of a growing language?

Big and clever, but not insulting

Swearing is bad, right? We're always told it's not big or clever to swear,  but I can't be the only person to find a well-chosen swearword hilariously funny.

Swearing has had a long and rich history in English, partly because of the changing social attitudes we've had to certain taboo terms and the ways in which swear words often reflect a changing world. Mark Lawson in today's Guardian* offers a look at this in the light of recent media worries over Strictly Come Dancing and the X Factor, but he raises other points about the history of swearing too.

Many words have, he points out with the help of Language God, David Crystal, changed from perfectly innocent usage to taboo terms over time (the c-word - the one that isn't Cameron - being a good example of this) but others have gone the other way and lessened in their impact (sod and bugger, for instance).

And it's changing social attitudes that are of interest to the High Court judge, Mister Justice Bean who has rules that police officers being told to "f**k off" are hardly likely to be insulted because they're so used to it, it's water of a f**k's back, sorry, duck's back.

This doesn't appeal to Janet Daley in the Daily Telegraph who sees swearing as a form of abuse and disrespect that our public servants shouldn't be subjected to. For her it's the tip of the iceberg: today swearing  tomorrow anarchy. And it's an argument that Mark Lawson alludes to in his piece as well. If swearing is so widespread that it's no longer insulting, or so ubiquitous that we don't even know we're doing it, what value does it actually have?

We've covered swearing on this blog many times previously, so just click on the label to see all the relevant posts about it.

* thanks to Jon D for the link

edited on  24.11.11 to add: 
My legal adviser (the Mrs) tells me that the issue over Mister Justice Bean's pronouncement is not really that new and is less connected to "insult" than it is to the "alarm, harassment and distress" in the wording of public order charges. 

She tells me that there is a big difference between swearing and swearing at someone in the eyes of the law, so if a suspect were to say "I've never seen that f**king flatscreen!", that would not generally considered to be something that would cause distress to an arresting officer (or imaginary bystander), while "F**k off you idiot; I've never seen that flatscreen before" might be perceived as causing distress as it is directed towards the officer.

This makes an interesting distinction between swearing in general and swearing at someone.

Technology and language change

There's an good article from Natasha Lomas of Silicon.com here which takes a look at how technology has influenced recent language change. It includes contributions from God of language, David Crystal and the OED's John Simpson, so it's got proper linguistics stuff there, plus it gives us some good techy insight into different fields such as text messaging, social networking and Lolcats.

Discussing disgusting

There's a good piece here on the BBC News magazine site about the word disgust and its changing meanings and usage in English. As well as being a good case study of semantic change, it offers an interesting angle on how new analytical methods can be used to track language change, in this case Google n-grams and digital corpus searches.

Twitterology

don't kill the spares

Just a quick link here to an article in The New York Times by Ben Zimmer of Language Log on the possibilities and pitfalls that Twitter offers for linguistic research. Given that there's been some grumbling and general grumpiness of late (from the man who plays Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter films) about how Twitter is eroding English (and some neat counterarguments), it's really fascinating to see what potential this reactively new technology can offer us.

"Twitter generation loses love of lexis"

...or so this story in today's Daily Mail would have you believe. According to the article, words like cripes, shenanigans and cad are all dying out because younger generations simply don't know what they bally mean (And it's perhaps not just the fault of the younger generation but technology as well because my spell-checker has just red-lined both cripes and bally.).

The story seems to be linked to the publication of a survey for the book Planet Word (presumably a tie-in to Stephen Fry's BBC series of the same name) and to be fair, the expert they quote, the author of the book JP Davidson, doesn't bemoan the alleged decline, but has this to say:

This could be viewed as regrettable, as there are some great descriptive words that are being lost and these words would make our everyday language much more colourful and fun if wewere to use them.

'But it's only natural that with people trying to fit as much information in 140 characters that words are getting shortened and are even becoming redundant as a result.

'The folly is to try and stem the tide ofthe new whether they emerge from rap, technology, teenspeak, or the multitude of jargons that we invent to make shortcuts and communication more efficient between groups. 

This sounds like good sense and isn't in any way as prescriptive as the rest of the Mail's tone (managing of course to tie in some aspect of British identity being eroded as it always does), but the comments from Mail readers start to pour scorn on such descriptive views, arguing (among other things) that the once proud language of Shakespeare is now degenerating into a series of txt-grunts (a kind of Crumbling Castle model for the text generation) and that young people are doing it because they "are even allowed to use text speech in exams now", conveniently (or stupidly) misunderstanding the difference between studying and using. D'oh!

Swift Key screen

Ultimately, will this lead us into a reduced set of lexical and grammatical choices, fulfilling the Mail's to hell in a handcart predictions in the article above?