Election 2010

There's bound to be some good material for language and representation in the papers over the next few weeks with the General Election coverage, so keep an eye out for extracts you can use in class. One of the best places to go for a bit of entertainment is the excellent mydavidcameron site which has spoofed the Conservative Party's recent media campaigns with some genius parodies. If you want to be a language nerd about it (and that is a good thing to be...not like being a Tory) you could have a look at the language techniques employed in the parodies - grammatical cohesion, semantic wordplay, pragmatics, the whole lot - and think about which ones work best.

But, more importantly than all this language stuff, make sure that if you're 18 now or by the 6th of May you're registered to vote. Find out more here.

And remember: if you vote Tory, I can't help you with your exams. It's the law.

Weasel words

Today's Independent features an article by columnist Johann Hari on the euphemisms he would expunge from the English Language. As he puts it, "The English language needs periodically to be given a spring-clean, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee".

Among the expressions are "fair trade", of which he says:

This phrase suggests that paying desperately poor people a decent wage is a nice
ethical add-on, and a gratifying departure from the norm. In fact, it should be
taken for granted – the default position of civilised human beings. If we
believed that, the labelling would be reversed: it's all the other food that
should be labelled as "Unfair Trade", "Rapacious Trade", or
"Let's-Pay-a-Pittance Trade." The terrific comedian Andy Zaltzman suggests a sign
that could be on the packets: it is a silhouette of an obese businessman pissing
on an African child.

Fair enough. But several comments in response to the article accuse Hari of doing exactly the same thing that he's complaining about: giving a political spin to the language he uses and the meanings he creates. So, is any language genuinely neutral? Can we open our mouths and speak without allowing our language choices to inadvertently reflect our views and political/ philosophical outlooks?

Again, this is an interesting article not only for the language issues addressed but for its potential use as a style model for the text you'll be writing about a language issue in your ENGA4 coursework and the Language Discourses part of the ENGA3 exam paper.

For more on euphemisms - what they are, how they're often used and why they annoy people - try this 2007 post on the blog.

Words of warcraft

Today's New York Times runs an article on the changing language of the Whitehouse under Barack Obama's administration. It's not "a war on terror" anymore; it's overseas contingency operations, and it's no longer "terrorist attacks" but man-caused disasters.

Why should we care? They're just words, aren't they? And words don't kill people: weapons do. Well, kind of, but words are part of war and the groundwork that goes into softening up a population for war, or in Obama's case (we hope) a step away from the deranged war his nutty predecessor decided to wage.

Peter Baker explains in his article:

Every White House picks its words carefully, using poll-tested, focus-grouped language to frame issues and ideas to advance its goals. Mr. Bush's team did that assertively. The initial legislation expanding government power after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was called the USA Patriot Act. The eavesdropping without warrants that became so controversial was rebranded the Terrorist Surveillance Program. The enemy was, for a time, dubbed ''Islamofascism,'' until that was deemed insensitive to Muslims.

And he goes on to argue that while Obama is keen to change perceptions about his policies, in Baker's view, the substance of Bush's policies actually remains in place:

He has made no move to revise the Patriot Act or the eavesdropping program. He has ordered the Guantánamo prison to be closed in a year but has not settled on an alternative way to house inmates deemed to be truly dangerous.

Are the Obama administration's words a whitewash then? Is the emphasis on a change of language just a way of hiding the fact that the policies remain the same, or does the shift in tone signal a profound shift in direction to come? The jury's out...

And how is this useful to you at A level? The contemporary language change question on ENA5 often asks you to consider how new words and phrases come into existence or how existing words change, and politics has been explicitly mentioned on a couple of occasions as an are to look at (along with technology, communication, youth culture, immigration and war), so it's worth trying to have a few examples from contemporary news stories at your fingertips.

You might also want to look at how the recent global economic crisis (a nice new noun phrase) has led to new expressions, or how technology has co-opted older expressions and recycled them. How about these examples:

• credit crunch
• financial liquidity
• quantitative easing
  
• fiscal stimulus package
• avatar
• icon
• virus
• bankster
• menu
• zombie
• downturn