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.

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.

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.

Apostrophe disappears: world ends

Apostrophe-lovers are up in arms over Waterstones' ...Waterstone's's...the decision of Waterstone's bookshop to remove the apostrophe from its name. In a move that some punctuation purists have likened to the end of the world, Waterstone's (named so because it used to be the firm of one Tim Waterstone, therefore - like Sainsbury's and McDonald's - a possessive apostrophe) have decided to ditch the dinky little punctaution mark.

This article in the Daily Mail gives you more information and offers some hilariously unintentional punctuation errors in its readers' comments after the piece. One interesting angle is that the apostrophe is a useful shibboleth, allowing the (ahem) better-educated to look down upon their inferiors with wry disdain. But what use is the apostrophe? It's a relatively new invention, punctuation-wise, and doesn't conform to its own rules (it's ...its...see I'm confused now), but perhaps still serves a helpful disambiguating role in contractions like I'm and she'll, where the pronunciation of a word might be affected if there were no apostrophe.

We've looked at apostrophes before on this blog (here and here, for a start) and I'm increasingly of the view that they're dying and we should probably just get rid of them once and for all to save confusion. It's a good topic for ENGA3 Language Discourses questions (probably as part of Language Change) and would make a suitable topic for a Language Intervention on ENGA4 too.

Performing mouth to mouth on grammar

If you're looking for more language discourses topics in readiness for tomorrow's ENGA3 exam, this might be a good link to have a look at. One of the debates that's been knocking around for a long time (probably forever) is that around the seemingly inevitable decline in standards of English grammar among the general population and whether or not we should care. In this article, the author, Barbara Gunn, suggests we need to "resuscitate" grammar.

As an English teacher, I think grammar is important, but perhaps not for the same reasons that Barbara Gunn puts forward in her article. I can't help but shudder when I read someone using  your instead of you're, or there instead of their, but perhaps that's my inner prescriptivist crying out and I should learn to ignore it, a bit like I ignore the cat as it mewls for food seconds after being fed. Prescriptivists have complained about the general public's inability to use grammar properly ever since English came into existence, but is it actually getting any worse?

Henry Hitchings - whose book, The Language Wars I've plugged endlessly on here - makes the point that people have been confusing should have and should of and you were and you was since the 17th Century. Perhaps it's because more of us write now than ever before (tweeting, emailing, texting and even blogging all being new forms of "writing") that these grammatical errors/non-standard forms are being noticed more. Maybe we are becoming less literate. I dont no.

If you have a look through this blog for posts about grammar usage (usually tagged prescriptivism or descriptivism) you'll find a number of articles about Simon Heffer's (appalling) Strictly English, and the Queen's English Society's most recent musings on our language going to the dogs, along with some descriptivist critiques of their arguments. As you're having a look at these, you'll probably notice the familiar models that Jean Aitchison pointed out in her classic Language Web lectures: the crumbling castle, the damp spoon and the infectious disease.

Neither Hippy nor Hitler but intelligent descriptivism

While the title of this blog post is strange and obscure (unless you're a fan of 1980s anti-fascist skinhead socialist band, The Redskins and get the album title it refers to) it's kind of appropriate, because it's about extremes and finding a middle ground. The Redskins borrowed the "Neither Washington Nor Moscow but International Socialism" slogan from the Socialist Workers Party and I always thought that it was something to do with finding a position between the rampant capitalism espoused by the USA and the totalitarian state-socialism of the old Soviet Union. To be fair, the SWP were (and remain) much closer to Moscow than Washington, whichever way you look at them. And I try not to look at them for too long or they try to sell me a paper.

But what has this got to with language? This 2005 post on Language Log which I was alerted to by a tweet from Stan Carey of this excellent blog, makes a number of telling points about the debate between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what is "correct" English.

The normal model seems to be to say that a person is either one or the other. If you're a prescriptivist, you're telling other people how they should write and speak and telling them what's correct. If you're a descriptivist, you're happy to let it all hang out and just go with the flow...all change is good...whatever man...just allow it.

But that's a bit of a lazy caricature and it's probably better to see views distributed along a continuum line, where different shades of prescriptivism or descriptivism can be seen. For example, you might have very strong views on the use of the apostrophe in academic writing but be happy not to use it in your text messages or Facebook updates. That doesn't make you either a crazy hippy or a grammar nazi.

Geoff Pullum puts it more precisely than me - as he always does - when he talks about correctness conditions: the norms for your own language usage in your own variety of English:

If you typically say I ain't got no hammer to explain that you don't have a hammer, then the correctness conditions for your dialect probably include a condition classifying ain't as a negative auxiliary, and a condition specifying that indefinite noun phrases in negated clauses take negative determiners, and a condition specifying that the subject precedes the predicate, and so on.

He goes on to explain:

Descriptive linguists try to lay out a statement of what the conditions are for particular languages. And it is very important to note that the linguist can go wrong. A linguist can make a mistake in formulating correctness conditions. How would anyone know? Through a back and forth comparison between what the condition statements entail and what patterns are regularly observed in the use of the language by qualified speakers under conditions when they can be taken to be using their language without many errors (e.g., when they are sober, not too tired, not suffering from brain damage, have had a chance to review and edit what they said or wrote, etc.).

So, what linguists are not doing is just saying that whatever anyone says is right because they said it and therefore that's the way we talk. They're looking at specific situations and patterns and describing them grammatically. As Pullum goes on to say, sometimes people just make mistakes that, if they were to look back over, they'd probably choose to put in a clearer way. These could be features of grammar, punctuation, spelling or lexical choice. I'm sure many of us have looked back at things we've written and gone "Urgh". Linguists themselves might make mistakes by incorporating these errors into their sense of what the correctness conditions for a particular variety might be, so in turn build up an unrepresentative picture of that variety. So, as Pullum is at pains to point out, linguists can be wrong.

But equally, prescriptivists are often wrong (and more wrong!) when they claim that such-and-such a structure (a conjunction at the start of a sentence, preposition at the end, double negative etc.) is always wrong just because them's the rules.

So, to cut a long story short, the debate between what's correct or incorrect is actually much more to with context than it is to do with hard and fast rules. And for A level English Language, which is what this comes back to, finding a more nuanced position between the extremes of labelling a language commentator as either prescriptive or descriptive, is likely to get you a lot of credit in the ENGA3 exam. While it's not for everybody, this sort of discussion could be the difference between a top B and an A grade, or even that elusive A*.

Keeping it old school

Most of the links I put up here are to fairly recent news stories about language, but this one is nearly 16 years old. That means it's possibly older than some of you who use this blog for your AS levels. Wow.

Anyway, I stumbled across this Miles Kington article from The Independent of December 1993 while doing some research on attitudes to grammatical errors (which more often than not, aren't really "errors" at all) and it's a good read.

It's about people's language peeves and how they are often not really very well rooted in linguistic reality. My favourite bit concerns the guidance that we're often given about the adjective unique. In Strictly English, Simon Heffer pompously tells us that phrases like almost unique or nearly unique are "vacuous" because "something is either unique or it is not". Kington sees it differently:

Now, this to me is the kind of pedantic rule-of-iron that a third- rate schoolteacher falls back on. Not only that, but it is demonstrably untrue. For example, if there were two unicorns left in the world, and one was very ill, then the other one would be nearly unique . . .

A prescriptivist pot-pourri

Conservative governments - even ones that barely scraped into power and find themselves propped up by Lib Dem MPs - tend to like their pronouncements about "tradition", especially when it comes to cultural touchstones like the English language itself and the traditions of the language. So, it's not much of a surprise to find that Michael Gove, the Tory Education Minister, has started to talk tough about spelling and grammar in school students' work. According to Friday's Daily Telegraph, students will lose up to 5% of their marks at GCSE (in any subject) if their spelling, punctuation and grammar aren't up to scratch.

Now, you'd be hard-pressed to find an English teacher who doesn't think that clear communication is vital to the education of a student, and I think most students would probably agree too. But dig a little deeper into what Gove and his supporters say and you get a much more muddled picture of what "clear communication" means. Take the comments on this page of the Daily Telegraph's site, where posters bring up many of their own pet hates about language usage - "sloppy speech", innit, we was, slang of all colours (but mostly black and/or American), anyone who doesn't speak RP -  and you can see that to the Conservative Party's natural support base, the perception is that the English language has been wrested away from them and placed in the hands of the infidels and chavvy proletarians, but now they can claim it back as their own.

The horrible prescriptivist pot-pourri that appears on pages like this shows us what confusion there is about grammar and how we should be studying it in more detail: not studying it to be prescriptive and claim that one should never dangle a participle or split an infinitive, but to learn more about the language in all its fantastic variety. The approach I'd support is the one outlined here on the UCL project blog and here in an article for the TES that Professor Dick Hudson and I wrote the other week.

More grammar - yes please, but not the kind of "grammar" that should remain in the Victorian schoolbook or in the snug of some Surrey village pub where the bar is propped up by retired wing-commanders and investment bankers whose grammar is basically prejudice dressed up to look like knowledge.

Learn to code-switch or "look like a knob"

...so says Emma Thompson, actor and ex-pupil of Camden School For Girls. Despite sounding like it should be an exclusive private school for the daughters of city bankers and royal equerries, CSFG is actually a north London comprehensive and therefore reflects - to some extent (exorbitant local house prices aside) - the social and ethnic make-up of that part of London. So when Emma Thompson went back there to a charity evening, she was struck by the slang being used by the pupils (says The Independent).

"I went to give a talk at my old school and the girls were all doing 'likes' and 'innits?' and 'it aint's', which drives me insane," she told the Radio Times. "I told them, 'Don't do it because it makes you sound stupid and you're not stupid.' There is the necessity to have two languages – one you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity. Or you're going to sound like a knob."

Thompson's point about having two languages is a fair one, but to write off a few slang terms as  making you sound "stupid" seems to me to be a step or two too far. Fair enough, if you don't like those expressions, then you've got a right to say so, but to equate slang with stupidity is just narrow-minded. To make matters worse, Thompson then slips into her own generation's slang when she says that saying "like" and "innit" makes you "sound like a knob".

Why is it OK for Emma Thompson to mix her codes in the pages of a national publication, while it's apparently not OK for teenagers at her old school to switch codes? Sounds to me like the old prescriptivist stance that younger people's use of language is a degraded form: a crumbling castle idea, that Jean Aitchison effectively nails in her famous Reith Lectures.

The Independent has a good leader article on the story, which you can find here.

More effin' Heffer

Just in case you've not had enough of this man's bumptious prescriptivism, here's a link to the fourth extract from his book and another link to a piece on Radio 4's site. And better still, here's a link to Bad Linguistics where the linguist, Pauline Foster, lays out her criticisms of Heffer's brand of dubious pedantry.

The grumbling appendix of prescriptivism

"The teaching of English has left most pupils with nothing but a random and often erroneous understanding of the components of language." So began John Humphrys on this morning's Today programme on Radio 4* as he introduced an item about a man he clearly admires, Simon Heffer.

The opening quotation comes from Heffer's new book, Strictly English, published by Random House (I'm sure Heffer would be appalled at the fairly recent semantic change random has undergone.) and which Heffer's very own Daily Telegraph has been serialising over the last three weeks (part one, part two, part three).

In his book, and in the Radio 4 interview, Heffer SLAMS the teaching of grammar, RAGES against a generation of linguistic illiterates and BLASTS the exaggerated language of tabloids. He's quite angry, it's fair to say.

But he's also very big on "correctness", asserting on a number of occasions that we are judged by how we speak and write. This is no doubt true, but who is doing the judging? Heffer mostly. He comes from a long line of prescriptivists (one of whom is John Humphrys himself, whose books have recently appeared in extract in A level exam questions on Language Change) who see a general decline in literacy standards wherever they look. If it's not the tabloid press, then it's teachers wot carnt spell. And if it's not gangster rap, then it's those people who use literally when they don't really mean literally. He's literally frothing at the mouth over that one.

Clearly, some people do have problems switching between registers, while others aren't really that clear on word etymologies, and it's probably fair to say that, for a minority of young people, formal written English is not a very familiar or comfortable variety to use, but it's always been that way. This generation (or the last, or even mine) is not any worse than the others.

One point raised by Heffer in the Radio 4 interview is about the distinction between shall and will. He says, "To say I will do something is a statement of resolution: you're saying I am absolutely determined to do it. To say I shall do something is a statement of simple futurity: that it's going to happen. It's I will, you shall, he shall". Frankly, who cares?

Recent research by linguists suggests that this shall/will distinction is becoming increasingly redundant, with usage of shall falling between 40-50% over the last 30 years. Perhaps we now have other ways of expressing "resolution" and "futurity", and the rather antiquated "rule" - dreamt up by "experts" who based their rules on their own usage, funnily enough - is dying out. It's like the appendix: no one really knows what it does and it sometimes grumbles and causes us pain. A bit like Heffer and his ilk?

*Listen to it on i-Player here (from 2:36.44 - 2:41.38)
and thanks to Julia H for tipping me off about this great interview.

L'Academie Anglaise

The Queen's English Society - an organisation that prides itself on its prescriptivist stance over language change - has set up what it calls an "Academy" in order to regulate our language, and it's hoping to gain some form of official status if this report is anything to go by. Their belief is that English is going to the dogs, and even worse, to the damn yankees. Martin Estinel of the QES is quoted in The Times as saying “At the moment, anything goes. Let’s set down a clear standard of what is good, correct, proper English. Let’s have a body to sit in judgment”.

Oh dear. It's clear that they don't really know much about language or language change if they seriously think they can regulate English. More arguments are put forward in this Times article, and the issue was also debated on yesterday's Radio 4 PM programme, which you can find 53 minutes into this link (or if you're an SFX A2 student, it'll be in a link on Moodle) and my (ahem, namedrop alert) esteemed UCL colleague Professor John Mullan has penned a suitably descriptive response in today's Guardian, which you can find here.

Elsewhere, Gerald Warner of the Telegraph blames "trendy educationalists" and "illiterate teachers" (wot's he chattin abaht, bruv?) for promoting a laissez-faire attitude towards "spelling, grammar and syntax".

D'oh! Not only does Warner lapse into French to discuss English, but even this illiterate teacher knows that syntax is part of grammar. Nil points to you, Gerald for your silly error. With a spectacular and possibly frothing-at-the-mouth flourish, Warner then concludes by telling us this:

In this climate of anti-aestheticism it is unsurprising that even an attempt to preserve the beauty and coherence of the English language should meet with opposition by those who claim that it needs to “evolve” unimpeded. There is nothing wrong with a language evolving – English has always done so; but what is happening now is not evolution but nihilism. It must be resisted and the Queen’s English Society is to be congratulated on its initiative. All champions of literacy will wish the society success in establishing a much-needed Academy of English.

Luckily, not all Daily Telegraph readers are as narrow-minded as Mr Warner, and if you scroll down to the comments below his article, you'll see some interesting defences of language change.

The good thing for all A2 English Language students is that whatever your views on this issue, it's all excellent material for your Language Discourses section on the ENGA3 paper. This is exactly the kind of debate that will be appearing on the exam paper, so get reading and analysing!

Promiscuous polysemy

There's a very good article on Language Log about how meaning change in language is a natural and positive thing. Using the word post as an example ("Fence posts, army posts, the New York Post, blog posts, ambassadorial posts, post offices..."), Geoff Pullum argues that the prescriptive point of view -  change is a bad thing that must be prevented or controlled at all costs - is cobblers, and that words change meanings all the time. As he says: 

Human languages do not strive to avoid ambiguity. They do not try to align words with meanings one to one. They are not in danger of anarchy when a new word sense evolves. People don't just tolerate languages with multiply polysemous words, they seem to love them; people thrive on multiplicity of meaning. There are thousands of examples that show this. It is only the prescriptivist thickheads who cannot see what it means.

So, he argues, polysemy - multiple meanings of the same word - is not inherently confusing. One major argument used by prescriptivists against semantic change is that it leads to misunderstanding and confusion (How can sick mean good when it also means ill, or wicked mean excellent when it also means evil?) but Pullum's take on this is a strong counterblast to all of this.

Apostrophe bullies

This is probably very old, but if you look at this link from You Tube you'll find a heartfelt attack on Lynne Truss and her prescriptivism from comedian Marcus Brigstocke.

When is a word not a word?

When is a word not a word? Well, if you believe some people, the answer is when it's meh.

We covered meh a while ago on this blog post, picking up on an article in The Guardian and a discussion on the ace linguistics blog Language Log, but it's been made a new entry in the latest edition of the Collins English Dictionary. The story is reported here in The Times and discussed in the subsequent comments from readers.

What is meh? According to the The Times article the story goes like this:

“Meh” started out in the US and Canada as an interjection signifying mediocrity or indifference and has evolved, via the internet and an episode of The Simpsons, into a common adjective meaning boring, apathetic or unimpressive in British English.

So, you might describe something as meh in an adjectival way ("That was just so meh".) or as an interjection (Your mum*: "We're going to Aunty Betty's for lunch" You: "Meh".), but is it really a word? And should it be in the dictionary?

Ben Zimmer follows the discussion here on his Visual Thesaurus site, and it's worth a read as he tracks the development of the word and the debate about what "words" actually are.

And for a taste of a prescriptive versus descriptive take on language change, try these two Times comments for size:

1.No wonder we have such a slip in standards in this country, this word and the others being cited to appear in the Collins Dictionary, are slang and i don't think that slang has any place in a dictionary of our English words, why don't they just put them in a Slang Dictionary,

marina, Hemel Hempstead, Herts

2.Language is fluid and constantly evolving. Many of the words we use today would have been considered slang in the past but we don't know the difference as we have always used them. The way we adopt new words and how they shape & reflect our understanding of the world fascinates me, i'm all for it!

Stephanie Barnett, Sheffield, UK

Go, Stephanie, go Stephanie, go Stephanie....

Useful for:

ENA5 - Contemporary Language Change

ENGA3 - Language Explorations

*Yes, I said "your mum" and I'm proud of it.

Apostrophe's must go!

Today's Telegraph and last night's Newsnight have features on that old friend of ours (why not our's?): the apostrophe.

Why does this punctuation mark exist? How come about 50% of the population can't use it properly? Should we just say "pah" and get rid of it? The Newsnight link is very good as it's got a 4 minute of Jeremy Paxman and David Crystal discussing its (why not it's?) history and use. And, it has to be said, it's a slightly more enlightening interview than Paxman's one with Dizzee Rascal last week.

There's more about this debate here on The Register and here on the linguist, John Wells' excellent blog (scroll down to Friday 3rd for this). It's John Wells, of course, who kicked off this particular round of apostrophe uproar with his call to get rid of the apostrophe as part of a more straightforward system of spelling and punctuation (covered here and here).

It's all part of the prescriptivist versus descriptivist debate which features in ENA5 Language Change.