Textual healing

Texting is destroying our language. Young people are using text language in their exam papers. English is being dumbed down thanks to Satan's little helper, SMS. These are all regular complaints about the vile disease that is texting (apart from the last one which I made up).

But it's all a load of cobblers, according to one of the world's top linguists, David Crystal. In an interview on the Visual Thesaurus website linked from an article on the excellent Language Log blog, he puts these "myths" to the sword:

Now, in the case of the text messaging scenario, none of that has happened. It's people imagining the situation. They say, "Text messages are full of abbreviations." These are people who may never have texted in their lives, and who have certainly never done any research to find out. They believe that this is the case. And of course one of the first planks of research that I did was to look at large quantities of text messages, as well as the research that other people have done, to find that typically less than 10 percent of the words in text messages are actually abbreviated in any way.

We've looked at texting before on this blog - use the search toolbar to find out where - and some of our students (hello A2 classes!) have been involved in Tim Shortis's latest research into text usage, which we hope to be able to bring you news of in the next few months . (His earlier observations on texting and the various assumptions about them can be found summarised here.) Crispin Thurlow's paper on the sociolinguistics of text messaging can also be found here.

NEway (Ha ha, do you see what I did there?), what are your views on texting? Does it influence your written language? Does it make you spell badly? Can you no longer write you and have to write u? Text your responses to 22554 (texts will cost no less than £75).

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change

Phwoar, get a load of these

...these new entries into the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, that is. Sorry for the gratuitous picture of Barbara Windsor from the Carry On films (and more recently Eastenders) but phwoar was usually uttered when she was around.

The term phwoar was made famous in the 1960s and 70s by the legendary Sid James and has now made it, along with stud muffin and arm candy into this latest version of the slang dictionary . The story (all 4 paragraphs of it) is here on the Daily Mirror's website or covered in more detail in The Daily Mail here, and you can find out more about the new entries in the dictionary here.

And for this term's first Haribo competition, what word formation process is responsible for stud muffin, Glasgow kiss, happy slapping and arm candy? A bag of Haribo to the first 2 answers posted as comments here.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

The A to Bee of spelling

Spelling and spelling reform have hit the news recently, with arguments over the English spelling system in several newspapers. If you believe popular opinion, we're all getting much worse at spelling and this is probably down to rubbish teachers, teenage fecklessness, utter indolence and text messaging. But as with much "popular opinion" or "it's obvious innit" schools of "common sense", it's not that simple.

The English spelling system is a strange beast and one that reflects a lot about the history of our language - its origins in other languages, its changes over time, and the influences of technology and social change - and a lot about the ways we pronounce words, or used to. And it's this mish mash of different influences that makes it such a difficult system for many people to master. Not only that, but to say it's a system implies there's a logical structure to it, and that's not always the case.

John Sutherland, in this article in The Independent, looks at the issue of spelling reform - changing the way we spell words - and the debates over it. Elsewhere, the views of John Wells, the President of the Spelling Society (there is indeed such a thing), the man who kick started this current debate about spelling by arguing that we should relax spelling rules, are covered in this Times piece, this Daily Mail article and this Guardian article which is good if you're looking for the historical background to some of our spelling patterns.

In a slightly different way, this article in yesterday's Guardian - a profile of the top linguist David Crystal - makes the point that texting isn't really the true villain in all this, as some commentators are claiming, but just the latest technological advance to carry the can for making us communicate more inaccurately.

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Change
ENGA3 - Language Explorations

Readpeace.com Very Vocabulary Podcast

Back to the big Sky Pilot trip

Working the mammoth traverse of Sky Pilot back in July. Pics: Stone Country

After a few days working away from home I’m back in the routine of working and training/climbing in Glen Nevis. Training by going climbing on real projects is often much preferable to training indoors, so long as you discipline yourself to work hard and subordinate perfect rested attempts for getting a good workout. Those of you who read this page regularly will know I worked on a massive traverse of Sky Pilot as my endurance training for Echo Wall during June and July.

I was starting to feel pretty close to this in late July but then work trips and Echo Wall itself demanded different focus. The big trip has always stayed firmly in my mind as a solid V13 project (at least) and eating away that I could never make it through the crux and nail it.

The climb starts off with 10 metres of V5, then 10 metres of V6, then 10 metres of V9 then another ten of V9, followed a final ten of V8. Nothing even remotely hard in individual sections, but add all that together you need a lot of stamina and excellent pacing and timing to save your strength for the right moment at the end. It reminds me of running 1500 metre events actually. Hold back, holding back until you hit the crux at the end and pulling down through melting arms.

Last week’s training binge followed by two days of rest, good food and some more sleep had a rather positive effect on me, it seems. Over the past two nights I have made two small improvements on my backlinks through the crux. Tonight’s backlink was from before the start of the hard climbing, and in less than useful conditions with several wet holds and a chasing pack of midges.

I only have a 10 metre V5 to add onto the start now. It’s possible that a good few days of conditions and a few heaps of broccoli could be all that separates me from the end of this amazing upside down rock climbing trip. More updates later this week…

I’m looking forward to the attempt when I grab that bloody pinch after 40 metres of climbing and have juice left to squeeze it.

CSI Nokia

Forensic linguistics is a growing field and one that directly applies skills of textual analysis to a range of everyday communications - letters, texts, internet discussions, recordings of speech - in a bid to accurately trace the user's identity.

Science Daily reports on one particular case in which a man was convicted for the murder of his ex-partner largely through the evidence of messages sent on her mobile phone. Dr Tim Grant of Aston University explains:

‘Jenny Nicholl disappeared on 30th June 2005. A linguistic analysis showed that text messages sent from her phone were unlikely to have been written by her but, rather, were more likely to have been written by her ex-lover, David Hodgson. A number of stylistic points identified within texts known to have been written by Jenny Nicholl were not present in the suspect messages. Instead, these were stylistically close to the undisputed messages of David Hodgson.
Hodgson was convicted partly because, in text messages he sent on her phone after she disappeared, he spelled "myself" as "meself". In her own text messages, Nicholl had spelled the word "myself".

‘The kind of features we were interested in were the shortening of “im” in the texts from Nicholl contrasting with “I am” in the suspect messages and the lack of space after the digit substitution in items such as “go2shop” contrasting with “ave 2 go”’.

So, while your skills of textual analysis and understanding of new modes of technology will obviously help you do well in your A Levels, they might also help you become a crime-fighting super sleuth.

Useful for:
ENGA1 - Language and Mode
ENGA3 - Language Explorations
ENA5 (old spec) - Language Change

The rents won't get it

A story in today's Daily Mail tells us all about a new guide to teen slang available from here on the Parentplus website. The guide is supposed to be a "jargon buster" for parents who can't understand the language their kids are using. The article uses the usual trick of journalists (and sad English teachers like me) of trying to insert slang terms into "normal" speech for comedy effect, but fails by trying too hard (like a sad English teacher). Have a look at some examples here for a taste of what's on offer.

Language students might argue about the use of the word jargon here - it's not really jargon as such (technical language associated with a given job or activity) but slang that they're really talking about. But it's an interesting snapshot of what's going on with slang at the moment and the influence of American English, London English and especially Black British English on mainstream language.

As with any guide to slang it's got a short shelflife, with new words rapidly appearing, to take the place of old ones. Words like ace and magic which were used as terms of approval when I was a kid (the 1970s if you must know...) got replaced by sick and wicked, and now words like nang, off the hook and gully (although they're probably out of date already).

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