Two postscripts

Just two quick follow-ups to yesterday's posts.

Firstly, Kira Cochrane in The Guardian has picked up the David Haye "as one-sided as a gang-rape" story and put together a more wide-reaching piece on the word "rape" itself and its changing uses. It's an interesting read which touches on many issues to do with language reflecting and shaping social attitudes, while also making some good points about how the casual use of the word can both emphasise the horror of the act itself and also diminish its significance. The etymology of the word itself though is worth a look. According to Etymology online, the original (late 14th Century) meaning of "to rape" was to "seize" or "take by force" and it had no clear sexual connotation. It was only later (late 16th Century) that sexual meanings became applied to the word, and then in the sense that the woman was treated as any other "object" that had been taken by force, perhaps revealing the attitude that women were the property of men and the violation of a woman was actually a crime against the man who "owned" her.

Secondly, in response to the Simon Heffer piece on Radio 4's Today yesterday, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at UCL, Dick Hudson, points out that the example Heffer gives of "I will, you shall, he shall" is not actually right if he is talking about the rule of "simple futurity" that he has referred to seconds before. Was this dodgy editing by Radio 4, or should Mr Heffer go back to school? Where this stuff isn't actually taught anyway...

What now?

Good fun work

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.

A simile too far

Boxers speak with their fists, but occasionally one comes out with something poetic and deep from his mouth - float like a butterfly & sting like a bee, maybe. David Haye is not one of those people. His recent comment that his fight with Audley Harrison would be "as one-sided as a gang rape" has been met with outrage. His defence via Twitter? "If I apologised for every stupid/ignorant thing i said, I wouldn't have time for anything else during the day!"

So that's OK then...

NY speak

There's a nifty article in last week's BBC News magazine about changing accents in New York which is well worth a look. While the AQA A spec hasn't tended to cover American varieties in the past, there is now a World Englishes topic on ENGA3 where this might come in handy. From a different perspective you can also see more general patterns of language change in the ways that the NYC accent is reported to have changed over time. Anyway, the story is here and there is some video to go with it.

Twitter helps regions reign while twitz drop their slang

It's not every day that I get to write something that links Twitter, regional slang and N'Dubz, but here goes...

Research from Dr Eric Schleef at the University of Manchester, reported in the Telegraph and Guardian last week, suggests that regional dialects are not dying out quite as quickly as linguists thought they might a couple of decades ago. The argument - called dialect levelling - was that as society became more mobile and people shifted away from smaller communities to larger urban sprawls, their local varieties of language would fade away and in their place would rise regional varieties, and perhaps even ultimately just one homogenous national variety. To some extent, this has already happened, and the story here about regional "super-accents" seems to support it.

But Schleef argues that social networking and mass media have actually helped spread many regional terms - dialect words and slang - among the wider population. In The Daily Telegraph report he is quoted as saying the following:

Twitter, Facebook and texting all encourage speed and immediacy of understanding, meaning users type as they speak, using slang, dialect respellings and colloquialisms.The result is we are all becoming exposed to words we may not have otherwise encountered, while absorbing them into everyday speech."

He added that it was not now uncommon to hear a northerner utter words such as “tidy” or “lush” – Welsh terms for attractive - or to catch southerners describing something good as “mint”, a term coined in Manchester. 

Fair enough, but does this actually mean that local varieties are here to stay or that we're adopting a buffet-style approach to our language choices, picking words we like from the table (like nice, tasty, breaded prawns) and ignoring ones we find odd or unpleasant (bits of limp cheese flan)?

Meanwhile, in news that will upset 12 year old girls all over limited parts of north London, the poor man's answer to the Black-Eyed Peas, N'Dubz, have decided to drop some of their trademark slang in order to appeal to the American market. In this article from The Sun, you can find out more...admittedly not much more, as it's a very short article, but presumably the reporter couldn't understand much of what they were saying as Dappy only seems to communicate through an elaborate series of hand gestures these days.

Whatever you think of E3's finest export, Dizzee Rascal, and his rise to pop fame at the expense of some of his musical credibility, at least he's kept his linguistic identity. So what are N'Dubz playing at? Will they gain a bigger audience in the USA because they don't say "bruv" and "innit" in their lyrics, or will the American audience take one listen to their lyrics and turn to each other saying, "These lyrics are as characterless as the rather anodyne music that accompanies them. I shall no longer listen to the so-called N'Dubz and instead invest my hard-earned dollars in some Kano and Wiley, artists who remain true to their linguistic roots. And whose music is better. Bruv."? On a slightly more serious level, doesn't it suggest that even while we're quite happy to pick-n-mix our vocabulary in casual chats between friends or on social networking sites, when it comes to a wider audience, we accommodate to a more neutral register?
 

Of course, you have to be careful if you're being rude about N'Dubz or Dappy will send you a poorly-spelled threatening text message, but I say bring it on*.



*Not really