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‘Goblin mode’: new Oxford word of the year speaks to the times

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Term resonates with people feeling ‘overwhelmed’ with having to present their best selves

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Brexit, Covid, war, climate disasters, a tanking economy, political instability, global insecurity, a sense of impending doom. There's a single word for this, and it has just become Collins Dictionary's word of the year: permacrisis.

The word is defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity", which some may argue is an accurate summary of the past few years. Collins said it chose the word as it "sums up quite succinctly how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people".

Permacrisis tops a list of 10 words, six of them new entries in the dictionary, which represent 2022, Collins said.

"Partygate" refers to the scandal of social gatherings in Downing Street during the pandemic, contravening public health rules and contrasting markedly with most people's sense of isolation and loss.

"Kyiv" made the list after the name of the Ukrainian capital came to symbolise the country's stand against Russian aggression.

"Warm bank" describes a building such as a public library or place of worship that is opening its doors over the winter months to provide a welcoming space for people struggling to heat their homes due to spiralling energy costs.

The growing practice of "quiet quitting" - doing basic duties at work but no more, in rejection of competitive careerism and out-of-hours emails - made the cut, as did "vibe shift", meaning a "significant change in the prevailing atmosphere or culture".

"Carolean" refers to the new monarchical era after the end of the second Elizabethan age this year and the accession of King Charles. "Lawfare" is the strategic use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder an opponent.

Humankind's four-legged friends contributed the term "splooting" - the act of lying flat on the stomach on a cool surface with legs stretched out as a way of countering unusually high temperatures. Cats, dogs, cows, polar bears and squirrels have been spotted splooting on social media throughout 2022.

The final word is "sportswashing", a term for organisations and countries that use sports activities to enhance their reputations or distract from unacceptable policies. Qatar, the host of the 2022 football World Cup starting this month, has been accused of sportswashing after concerns over the mistreatment of migrant labour, homophobia and freedom of expression.

The list reflected "the state of the world right now", said Alex Beecroft, the managing director of Collins Learning.

Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you through the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning
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"Language can be a mirror to what is going on in society and the wider world and this year has thrown up challenge after challenge.

"It is understandable that people may feel, after living through upheaval caused by Brexit, the pandemic, severe weather, the war in Ukraine, political instability, the energy squeeze and the cost-of-living crisis, that we are living in an ongoing state of uncertainty and worry."

Collins Dictionary monitors its 18bn-word database and a range of media sources, including social media, to create an annual list of new and notable words.

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'Sums up 2022': Permacrisis chosen as Collins word of the year

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Brexit, Covid, war, climate disasters, a tanking economy, political instability, global insecurity, a sense of impending doom. There's a single word for this, and it has just become Collins Dictionary's word of the year: permacrisis. The word is defined as "an extended period of instability and insecurity", which some may argue is an accurate summary of the past few years.

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How could an obscure, elderly linguist have anything relevant to contribute to the debate now - belatedly - taking place on knife crime in the UK? It is many many years since I hung out, ineffectually feigning menace, with a gang of suburban mods (in the days when 'bovver boots' were the only dangerous item of subcultural paraphernalia), many years since I taught in an inner city London school and watched as younger teens gradually became disaffected and detached from family life and adult society. Much later I investigated and wrote about the successive waves of tribal youth culture - hippies, neo-teddy boys, punks, new romantics, rave aficionados, hiphop enthusiasts and the rest - who occupied the space reserved for 'folk devil' in the periodic 'moral panics' that the grownup public, with the help of the media, has always indulged in.

I was always interested in the outward signs and symbols, the accessories and the poses that these groups used to design and to project their identities, simultaneously signalling their belonging and their rejection of outsiders. I was more than anything interested in the special language that they used, generally characterised as 'slang', to communicate with one another and to baffle and dismay their perceived enemies - parents, teachers, the forces of social conformity in general.

It's only by deciphering and understanding this sort of language - or rather these languages - that we can hope to enter the world of peer-groups, in-groups and gangs, to come to make sense of their rituals and obsessions, their thoughts and feelings. I have collected the slangs of adults and of younger speakers operating in all sorts of contexts, publishing a succession of dictionaries and articles over the years and teaching and broadcasting about these and other 'nonstandard' and controversial areas of language such as business jargon, fashion and lifestyle buzzwords and the 'weasel words' of politicians.

I wrote last year about the distressing, frightening language used by members of street gangs who identify with the Drill music genre, and on this site you can find my updated dictionary of the terms they and their followers and imitators use, terms which many other quite innocent and uninvolved young people will be familiar with, but which are alien and incomprehensible to most adults. There are links to news articles accompanying the Drill Dictionary, and other articles on youth slang and so-called MLE on this site too.

https://language-and-innovation.com/2018/04/19/a-drill-dictionary/

The phenomenon of Drill, to a lesser extent of Grime music and the gangs who use their style of rap and hiphop songwriting and recording, is so closely linked to the knife crime 'epidemic' that is being discussed as I write, that the connection can't be downplayed or ignored. Today's gangs, with their territorial disputes, drug-based economies and hypermasculine culture of bragging and 'dissing' differ from earlier incarnations in that they declare their allegiances and flaunt their activities semi-publicly online, using messaging, social media platforms and video recording.

I'm not of course suggesting that all the disturbing messages being exchanged by the gangs are accurate or sincere, or that the knifings and shootings they boast about have all really taken place. But I would propose very forcefully that anybody who is trying to analyse or engage with their behaviour must analyse and engage with what they themselves are saying and the language they use.

My own take on this is not just that of an interested outsider. For a decade now, and increasingly over the last five years I have been helping the police forces who are trying to control street crime and the lawyers who are defending those accused (nearly all of them teenagers). My task as a language analyst and an expert witness is to translate and comment on the slang terminology found on confiscated mobile phones, obtained by surveillance and electronic intercepts, or used in the course of live interviews. I've found that the officers in question and the legal representatives are dedicated, unprejudiced, painstaking and privately appalled at what they witness day-to-day. They may become familiar with the exotic, distressing language they are exposed to, but they require an expert objectively to interpret and assess the written or recorded evidence they work with, if necessary, too, to stand in court and testify on their or their clients' behalf.

There are now a number of experts on the 'multiethnolects', the new urban speech patterns prevalent among younger speakers that mix elements of native and minority languages. Professor Paul Kerswill and Professor Jenny Cheshire were the first to name the phenomenon as MLE - multicultural London English - and have written extensively on it. There are also expert forensic linguists, such as Professor Tim Grant of Aston University, who employ linguistic methods in the analysis of criminal language, enabling them for instance to identify authorship and authenticity of anonymous messages and online communications by paedophiles and others. My own claim to expertise is that I am one of very few who focuses on up-to-date slang and on items of criminal vocabulary (the deliberately secret languages known as 'cryptolects'), rather than the scientific analysis of longer sequences of speech or text.

In looking at recordings of gang member's conversations, for example, it's crucial to know that a burner is a handgun; dotty means shotgun, Rambo, ramsey, shank or nank is knife. When looking at jottings in a teenager's notebook or listening to a hardcore Drill track recorded by a gang associate it's essential to identify trap as a term for selling drugs or the location where it takes place, plug as a drug source, dip as stab, op as enemy, duppy as kill, dasheen as run away. The same words, catchphrases and slogans are shared across London and into other UK centres: the same mindset with its obsession with respect, its reverence for violence and its cruel bravado seems to apply everywhere.

"Every generation pretends gang crime is a new problem."

Rapper and author Akala says the social indicators of violence have "remained identical for almost 200 years". pic.twitter.com/aJO1raMFnn

- Channel 4 News (@Channel4News) March 4, 2019

Among the voices raised in the latest debate, Akala's stands out as representing real experience of, and sympathy for the victims and perpetrators. I only feel that he underestimates the levels of violence tolerated and celebrated, the extent of the ill-gotten wealth and the technical sophistication of the gangs of today. Rappers routinely claim that their lyrics are a fictional reflection of an imagined street life, a poetic evocation of rage and intensity rather than a call to arms, but the words written by young knife-carriers that I have had to translate are exactly the same words used by the rappers. In some cases the rapper is the perpetrator - the killer himself. The young people living in the postcodes most affected by knife crime are of course dealing with the new reality every day, as explained here.

"Yeah I've got a knife right now."

These 15 and 19 year old gang members say carrying a knife is a "risk you've just got to take" because the penalty is "get killed or go to prison." #dispatches pic.twitter.com/sIeEzVyVqC

- Channel 4 Dispatches (@C4Dispatches) March 5, 2019

Beyond the gangs young people are speaking and writing and broadcasting about the pressures and oppressions of urban lifestyles. A good example is the short film on the inner city life, Drawn Out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OEuq5szR7I
And in March 2020 London school students dramatised the issue on stage.
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/mar/06/this-is-our-reality-as-teenagers-students-take-gang-culture-to-the-stage
Knife crime is intimately bound up with gang slang and vice versa. To try to understand the killings and the woundings and their perpetrators and victims without understanding what they themselves are saying makes tackling the hugely complex problem much more difficult.

As a footnote, I have had a lot of very interesting and constructive feedback (suggestions, criticisms, donations of new terms) arising from this article and from my broadcast on the same subject on Voice of Islam radio. I also discussed all the issues involved with Rob Booth, Social Affairs Correspondent of the Guardian, who has published several insightful articles on innercity stress and street crime. His piece is here...
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/mar/29/ching-wap-ox-slang-interpreters-decipher-texts-for-court-evidence
From October 2019, news of a case that I was not involved with...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7538633/Drug-gang-leader-jailed-police-use-rap-translator-prove-threatened-shoot-rivals.html
An update: in August 2020 the Sun newspaper reported on the new use of TikTok to post gang videos. Despite the sensationalist format the substance of the article is accurate...
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/12535332/tiktok-gang-violence-drill-music-oj-profile-scorecards/ **Please do contact me if you can supply examples of street slang for my databases. Contact me too if you need to interpret street talk or criminal slang yourself, or if you would like me to contribute to projects in this area.**
Finally, as proof that Akala is right and that press stories on gangs are nothing new, this from 1958...

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How could an obscure, elderly linguist have anything relevant to contribute to the debate now - belatedly - taking place on knife crime in the UK? It is many many years since I hung out, ineffectually feigning menace, with a gang of suburban mods (in the days when 'bovver boots' were the only dangerous item...

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Each new generation comes with its own special language; phrases and words that only the young and hip know about and are comfortable using.

Right, Daddy-o? (1960s)

I can dig it. (1970s)

It's bodacious. (1980s)

Word. (1990s)

Don't be a newbie. (2000s)

But now, slang is spreading far and wide in the blink of an eye thanks to the instantaneous viral machine that is social media. With the insane popularity of TikTok - it celebrated one billion monthly users in 2021 - Gen Z learns the latest words and phrases immediately. This slang doesn't have to wait to spread through word of mouth, a newspaper or even a television show. Zoomers born in the late '90s and early 2000s have access through their phones and the viral videos of TikTok. A recent study by Forrester found TikTok is so popular among that age group that 63% of 12-to-17-year olds say they use it every week. That usage beats out Snapchat and Instagram, with only YouTube having stronger numbers.

While parents shouldn't necessarily try and use Gen Z's lingo, it is important to be aware of meanings. When I asked my 15-year-old and his friends whether they like parents and teachers to use their slang, I got emphatic "No's" and "Ew's" from all of them. But being informed about their language can help parents understand kids' communication and can lead to better, more in-depth conversations. It is also vital to be aware of some slang that could be warning signs for inappropriate behavior or bullying.

Here are some of the most popular Gen Z words making the rounds right now (and that I've heard coming out of teens' mouths in my own home) with definitions from dictionary.com, Urban Dictionary and USA Today.

Bet - a term of affirmation, agreement or approval. Want to grab some food? Bet!

Bussin' - really good. The new Drake song is bussin'.

Cheugy - pronounced CHOO-ghee. Something that is uncool and outdated. Facebook is so cheugy.

No Cap - confirming you aren't lying. Are you really going to ask her out? No cap?

Drip - very fashionable style. Zendaya's drip is amazing.

Simp - someone desperate to gain others' approval, often used in a sexist way to describe a man who is overly submissive to women. Ben is such a simp for buying Vanessa so much stuff.

Skrt - an onomatopoeia of the sound tires make when you leave in a hurry. An expression of excitement. I just aced that test. skrt!

Slaps - word describing something you appreciate. His new ride slaps.

Stan - amalgam of "stalker" and "fan" meaning an obsessive fan. She loves Harry Styles. She's such a stan.

Sus - short for suspicious. Why is that guy staring at us? He looks sus.

People are definitely curious about this new lingo Zoomers are using. Website I'm A Puzzle analyzed Google queries to find out the most searched Gen Z slang. Simp came out on top with no cap, sus and bussin' also in the top 1-. Woke was No. 2. I was surprised by this as it's is a term I thought most people already understood, but obviously many are searching for its meaning. Woke means to be well-informed and sensitive to cultural issues. The other most searched terms in the top 10 are either acronyms or refer to social media.

FYP - abbreviation for "For You Page" which is part of TikTok.

GOAT - acronym for "greatest of all time."

Ratio - when replies to a tweet vastly outnumber likes or retweets.

FOMO - acronym for "fear of missing out."

IYKYK - acronym for "if you know you know."

Feeling like you have a handle on these Gen Z slang terms now? You can test your knowledge with a quick quiz on dictionary.com. Or you can always try using one of the words on your teenager. But don't be surprised if they tell you how cheugy you are in reply.

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Feeling lost with Gen Z slang? OK boomer, here are the basics

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Each new generation comes with its own special language; phrases and words that only the young and hip know about and are comfortable using. Right, Daddy-o? (1960s) I can dig it. (1970s) It's bodacious. (1980s) Word. (1990s) Don't be a newbie.

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Accentism is alive and well - and it doesn't only affect the north of England

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It's not just Northern accents that face discrimination. The Essex accent is also the source of stigma. pxl.store/Shutterstock

"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him," George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to Pygmalion in 1913. Recent headlines suggest that accent prejudice (or " accentism ") is no relic of the past but continues to blight the university experience of many students. Even at northern universities, students from the north of England face commentary and ridicule for their accents.

There is a hierarchy of accents in Britain which has changed little over the years. The accents of Britain's highest classes are seen as neutral, "accentless" and correct, while others are seen as divergent or inferior and are often stigmatised. As such, those who have "non-standard" accents are seen as legitimate and admissible targets for comment and judgement. They are also saddled with an apparent responsibility to change how they sound.

Read more: British people still think some accents are smarter than others - what that means in the workplace

The higher-class standard accent - "received pronunciation" - is consistently rated the highest on scales such as prestige and perceived intelligence. Such judgments continually reproduce and reaffirm social inequalities.

The association between the ability to speak in a certain way and being intelligent is especially relevant in the university context, where this particular trait is most valued. Being able to sound intelligent in a classroom translates directly into gaining recognition and respect amongst peers and teachers. The repercussions of accentism in the job market are a further consequence for students.

Stereotyping

Five years ago, then employment minister Esther McVey made a plea for employers to look beyond an applicant's accent. This is all very well, but with MPs themselves being shamelessly mocked for their accents (including the deputy opposition leader Angela Rayner), it is difficult to reconcile the best wishes of policymakers with the realities of our prejudices. While it is illegal under UK law to discriminate against a person based on protected characteristics such as gender, race, religion or disability, accent is not recognised in this list.

Addressing these prejudices may be an uphill battle. We start to become aware of accent distinctions from a very early age, with children as young as five months demonstrating a preference for a familiar accent over an unfamiliar one. Children from three years old have shown the ability to group speakers according to regional accent distinctions.

This process of categorisation lays the building blocks for the social judgements. Once group membership is perceived based on accent, it is no longer solely a mark of regional origin but linked with broader stereotypes. Accents thus become associated with being lazy, incorrect, effeminate, friendly, standoffish and so on - and these character traits are then ascribed to anyone who speaks in that way.

Such judgements have nothing to do with linguistic characteristics - no English dialect is inherently better, more beautiful or more correct - but represent a form of classism. As such, accentism often reflects camouflaged prejudices. When we judge someone's characteristics based on their accent, we are not judging them on their own merit but making assumptions about their social class, education and ethnicity because of how they speak. Needless to say, these assumptions are often false.

The Cockney diaspora

A recent Guardian investigation rightly called out accentism faced by students from the north of England at elite universities across the country. Discrimination against northern accents is a frequent topic in the news, but in research, accentism cannot be reduced to "south good, north bad". In fact, research has consistently shown that some of the most stigmatised accents in Britain are, in fact, spoken in south-east England - particularly in Essex.

This is a fairly recent development, brought about by large-scale relocation of working-class Cockney speakers to the outskirts of London, the home counties and Essex in the so-called " Cockney diaspora" since the turn of the 20th century. In the 1980s these communities in Essex, which had predominantly been working class, began to be transformed through more widespread educational attainment, employment and home ownership. This lead to an association of the Essex accent with upstarts and the nouveau riche.

The derisive tropes of the gaudy, flashy and materialistic "Essex man" and "Essex girl" and their often mocked and mimicked accents reflect middle-class gatekeeping towards social status. For those from Essex, their home, accent and background have become at best a humorous anecdote and at worst, a burden. Indeed, based solely on accent, young people (18-33) in south-east England consistently evaluate east London and southern Essex speakers more negatively and consider them less intelligent.

University is a place and a time where people come together from all over the country and all over the world. This can have very interesting effects on students' accents as they might naturally start to change the way that they speak due to their new surroundings. This is a completely normal process known as accommodation. It is not the same thing as the enforced undermining of credibility and intelligence through the mockery and stereotyping of someone's regional accent.

There are many interesting things to learn about how someone from another part of the country has a different way of pronouncing a word or uses a different word for the same thing. For instance, have you ever seen how many different words there are for a bread roll? We need to counteract our biases by understanding and celebrating such diversity, instead of mocking those who don't conform to an ideological standard rooted in discrimination from the outset.

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Accentism is alive and well - and it doesn't only affect the north of England

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"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him," George Bernard Shaw wrote in the preface to Pygmalion in 1913. Recent headlines suggest that accent prejudice (or " accentism ") is no relic of the past but continues to blight the university experience of many students.

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Episode 8 - Northern accent special by Lexis

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Episode 8 - Northern accent special

Episode 8 - Northern accent special

Show notes for Episode 8 Here are the show notes for Episode 8 which is a special edition on Northern accents where Jacky, Dan, Lisa and Matthew (2 proper Northerners, a Welsh person and a soft, southern shandy drinker) talk about: Northern accents, dialect levelling and reports of a new 'educated middle class northern English accent' emerging. And we talk to Dr Georgina Brown from Lancaster University about the study itself. Georgina Brown's Lancaster University page: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/linguistics/about/people/georgina-brown Northern accents are becoming more similar, suggests new research A link posted by project leader Patrycja Strycharczuk about the Manchester research: Strycharczuk et al.'s Frontiers paper sparks controversy The paper itself can be found here: General Northern English. Exploring Regional Variation in the North of England With Machine Learning Patrycja Strycharczuk (@PatStrycharczuk) Kevin Watson on Scouse: Scousers are proud of their accent Cambridge University's app to measure dialect change: Do you say splinter, spool, spile or spell? English Dialects app tries to guess your regional accent Cambridge app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects Media reports on the paper Guardian: Northern English accents becoming more similar, researchers find Mail Online: Northern accents 'are becoming more similar' Daily Telegraph: Northern accents becoming more similar as middle-class 'General Northern English' emerges, study finds Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/northern-accents-more-similar-distinct-cities-manchester-leeds-sheffield-a9623071.html A great Twitter account to follow if you want to see how Twitter can be used for dialect research: https://twitter.com/tweetolectology Contact us @LexisPodcast. Subscribe: Lexis Podcast | Podcast on Spotify Contributors Matthew Butler Twitter: https://twitter.com/Matthewbutlerwy Lisa Casey blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates) Dan Clayton blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) Jacky Glancey Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey Music: Freenotes

2022 © Spotify AB

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Episode 8 - Northern accent special by Lexis

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Episode 8 - Northern accent special by Lexis

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Show notes for Episode 8 Here are the show notes for Episode 8 which is a special edition on Northern accents where Jacky, Dan, Lisa and Matthew (2 proper Northerners, a Welsh person and a soft, southern shandy drinker) talk about: Northern accents, dialect levelling and reports of a new 'educated middle class northern English accent' emerging.

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English accents are slowly becoming more southern, study finds | The Independent | The Independent

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Regional accents across England are slowly fading, and are being replaced nationwide with a more 'southern' way of speaking, according to research.

The accent data was gathered from 30,000 users of the English Dialects app, created in January by Cambridge University academics, and compared to the results of a dialect survey carried out in the 1950s.

People from across the country answered the survey through the app, which asked them to specify how they said certain words like 'scone', and how they referred to certain things, like a 'splinter'.

The app has been in use for a few months, taking in the accents of people from 4,000 cities, towns and villages across the country.

After analysing the results, the researchers have found that more people speak with accents similar to those in London or south-east England than they did 60 years ago.

"When it comes to language change in England, our results confirm that there is a clear pattern of levelling towards the English of the south-east," said Dr Adrian Leeman, a Cambridge researcher who worked on the project.

"More and more people are pronouncing words in the way that people from London and the south-east do."

The University of Bern's Professor David Britain, another researcher, said: "People in Bristol speak much more similarly to those in Colchester now than they did 50 years ago. Regional differences are disappearing, quite quickly."

A few parts of the country are holding out, however. Newcastle and Sunderland, in the North East, stood out as areas where local words and pronunciations still dominate.

Northern ways of speaking may even be spreading down the country - the pronunciation of words like 'last' with a short vowel, rather than a long one, is typically a part of northern accents. But the study found it is now common in the Midlands and the West Country, even though it wasn't traditionally a part of the accents in those areas.

As well as shedding light on the changing way we speak, the information gathered through the app will now allow current English dialects to be compared with those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, countries which were not surveyed in the 1950s study.

Tam Blaxter, a Cambridge PhD student who worked on the analysis, believes the 'levelling' of English accents may be due to increased mobility.

People move around the country for work and education a lot more than they did 60 years ago, exposing them to a much wider range of accents.

Analysis of the survey results will continue, as the researchers look at the social reasons behind the 'flattening' of accents in England.

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The English accent is dying out (unless you're from London)

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Regional accents across England are slowly fading, and are being replaced nationwide with a more 'southern' way of speaking, according to research. The accent data was gathered from 30,000 users of the English Dialects app, created in January by Cambridge University academics, and compared to the results of a dialect survey carried out in the 1950s.

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"Use your real accent," my father advised me recently, the day before an important phone call. "What do you mean real accent?" I replied, irritated. "Not the one you use with your friends and Quentin, the real one." I knew what he meant.

My parents and brothers all have British accents, belying complicated backgrounds that extend far beyond the reaches of the United Kingdom. Born in Mumbai to German Jews, my mother moved to Milan at age ten and then to England for boarding school and university, where she met my father. Though my parents' paths never crossed in childhood, my father was also born in Mumbai, into a Parsi (Indian Zoroastrian) family. Together, my parents made London their home, building a life thousands of miles from their shared birthplace. By 1994, when we traded London's gray lanes for Chicago's broad boulevards, my brothers, aged 12 and 10, had solidified their English accents. For me, it was a little more complicated.

One of my earliest memories of our new life in America is of a mispronunciation. Six years old and a natural mimic, I quickly adopted the accent I heard in my first grade class. But a few months in, the word "adult" momentarily cracked my linguistic veneer. I pronounced it with the emphasis on the first syllable-the English way-before I heard my mistake. In America, it's a-DULT. Even at that age, I knew not to say it like that again. Almost three decades later, I wonder: How conscious was I of altering the way I spoke? Why did it feel seamless? How did I develop a new accent when my brothers did not?

To explore these questions more closely, I recently spoke to Dr. Amee Shah, speech language pathologist, professor of health science, and director of the Cross-Cultural Speech, Language, and Acoustics Lab at Stockton University. "Children are hard-wired to pick up the phonology of their own language before age three and after that, they develop an idea of social communication," she told me. "This is when they can learn how to be strategic and use language and speech patterns to work for them." So, I clearly knew what I was doing, but did I know why? According to Dr. Shah, yes. "Children can recognize when something they say or how they say it makes them feel included or excluded, and use that insight to retain or alter a way of talking."

Though I had arrived from a different country, I was lucky that I already spoke the language of my new home. But I was also cognizant, apparently, that I could better assimilate if I talked like those around me did. My new voice lived in a different realm. When the car door swung open at the end of the school day, my English inflections and intonations returned. When I crossed the threshold of the classroom or, eventually, hijacked our phone line with urgent afterschool conversations, it was all American. I began to think of my accent in the way that classmates referred to speaking another language at home. The code-switching had begun.

Each summer of my childhood, we returned to London. My parents, whose careers in academia allowed them a summer away from campus, used the time to write and reconnect with friends. I spent the months bratty and bitter, longing to escape the damp city of my birth to the dense fug of my adopted hometown. But I was still eager to fit in wherever I was. At camp in the Cornish countryside, as I tried to double down on the English accent that was fast slipping away, fellow campers remarked on how American I sounded. Slang words from the previous summer always seemed to have expired when I worked them into sentences.

On a more profound level, I think I was reacting to a place that felt less and less familiar, attempting to contextualize my notion of "home." Today, I scold my younger self for complaining about the privilege of a summer in London, but I also know that for children, what is most enticing is whatever your friends are doing. A tan, the trophy of an American summer well-spent, wasn't attainable in England's July hailstorms.

Dr. Shah thinks of accents as personal hallmarks. But as I started college, having two accents became my signature. "She has this whole other British accent," friends would say after hearing me on the phone with my mother. "Come on, just do it," they'd implore, begging for my linguistic party trick. I hoped they didn't think I was faking it. Boys often wanted to hear it. The accent I'd once hid was now a boon.

Because what is an accent really? It's a declaration of regionality or an affectation, a vehicle for assimilation or even mockery. And for me, it's a cocoon of self-protection and a way of feeling at home. It's a vehicle for deflecting the questions that arise from a skin color that's hard to parse and a last name often considered unusual. It's an attempt to ignore the inevitable question "where are you from?" (which really means, "what's your ethnicity?") before it has even been asked.

My accent is often on my mind as I navigate life milestones. Walking down the aisle to be married, I was consumed not with the existential gravitas of the moment or with missing a step in front of loved ones. No, as I walked to the altar, I focused on how I'd speak. Not whether my voice would break with tears or if I'd mispronounce a word of my vows (it turned out to be 'culinarily,' which briefly sounded, to the shock of my betrothed, like 'cunnilingus'), but which accent I'd use.

When my daughter was born, I knew I'd speak to her the same way I speak to her father, in an American accent, one that she'll develop as a child growing up in this country. She's only a few months old now, but I wonder what she'll think when she hears me speak to her grandparents, how she'll ask me why my voice sounds different. "It's my real accent," I'll tell her. "They both are."

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After a Lifetime of Code-Switching, What Was My "Real" Accent?

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When I moved to America at the age of six, I was quick to adopt the inflections of my adopted home. Almost three decades later, I wonder: How conscious was I of altering the way I spoke? How did I develop a new accent when my brothers did not?

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Banned words and racism in school.  Research by Brunel University Dr Ian Cushing

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Banned words and racism in school.  Research by Brunel University Dr Ian Cushing

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Continued use of 'standard English' in schools is a key means of upholding racial inequality. In a piece published by red pepper and reproduced here with permission, Brunel education lecturer Dr Ian Cushing and University of Derby's Furzeen Ahmed, associate lecturer in English language take a look at the history...
In September 2021, a school in South London attracted media attention for its prohibitive policy on spoken language, which targeted a number of linguistic features typically associated with the speech patterns of Black Caribbean communities. The policy, entitled 'Banned Words and Phrases', instructed students (and by extension, teachers) that 'these expressions must not be used' - listing items such as 'oh my days', 'that's long', 'bare', 'cuss' and 'he cut his eyes at me'. Whilst some coverage was critical, discussions largely missed how such policies are institutionally racist.

Whilst we are critical of the school, our critique is much broader - directed toward a sociopolitical structure which has long informed linguistic racism in the UK. In the centre of this structure is so-called 'standard English' - a socially constructed version of the language based on the speech patterns of white middle class communities, which have consistently been heard and perceived as the most 'standard', 'correct', and 'aspirational'. As such, prohibitive school language policies do nothing for 'social mobility', 'levelling up', or 'integration' (all often used to justify them). Rather, they simply uphold existing systems of racial inequality in demanding that racialised speakers modify their way of using language towards standards set by white speakers and listeners.

Racist roots

'Standard English' has long been described as a tool of colonial governance and domination, critiqued by black writers such as bell hooks, Frantz Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o as an instrument of oppression which is used to maintain power structures and systems of white supremacy. Framed this way, school policies which champion 'standard English' as the language of access and opportunity (whilst 'banning' non standardised and racialised forms of English) can be seen as traces of the ongoing legacies of colonial linguistic categorisation.

Such policies sorted populations into those deemed to be 'fully human' and civilised (i.e. those that speak 'standard English') and those deemed to be 'less than human' and uncivilised (i.e. those that speak 'nonstandard English'). For instance, as multiple items in the Runaway Slaves in Britain archive at the University of Glasgow reveal, 'nonstandard English' and the general 'quality' of an individual's speech was often listed as a means of identifying runaway slaves (through phrases such as 'speaketh English very plain', from 1712, and 'speaks rather broken English' from 1770).

State-level education policy in England has a track record of whitewashing and denigrating the language of racialised speakers - such as the 1985 Swann Report commissioned to investigate the underachievement of African Caribbean children in schools. The Swann Report promoted a monolingual ideology, framing English as the 'unifying factor in "being British" [...]', and 'the key to participation on equal terms as a full member of this society'. These same discourses of citizenship, language, nationhood and academic success are found throughout education policy today. For example, in the 2014 curriculum, 'standard English' is heavily emphasised, where the criteria for becoming a competent communicator includes the ability to articulate 'fluently', 'confidently', and have a 'command' of the language. These ideologies are also represented in media coverage of ethnic minority communities, determining their 'failure' to assimilate in Western society by their perceived inability to speak English 'properly'. They are ostracised and stigmatised, deemed 'lazy' and accused of segregation if they 'fail' to meet these standards.

Such policy patterns highlight how the imposition of 'standard English', disregarding the diverse use of language in a plurilingual society as inadequate and 'incorrect', is racially motivated. Such notions of linguistic and racial deficiency in an educational context are exposed in Bernard Coard's 1971 book, How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-normal in the British School System. Coard examined the disproportionately high enrolment of African Caribbean children in schools for the 'sub-normal' and the subsequent impact on their educational and socio-economic opportunities. Coard exposed how racist perceptions of language played a key role in this segregation, with African Caribbean children often perceived as a 'problem' due to their speech being a 'handicap', 'second rate' and 'wrong'. Such policies set these children up for failure from the outset, leading to their being racially profiled as 'difficult', unteachable, and 'mentally subnormal'.

Challenging white supremacy

And the damage does not stop there. Students and teachers who have had to endure the demoralising policing of their non-standardised speech are all too familiar with the impacts of an education system built on the maintenance of white supremacy. From 'losing' a part of their multilingual identities, to feeling isolated within the school context and beyond, students have shared their experiences of suffering psychological and emotional damage as a result of this subjugation. Language policies geared around censorship and policing only contribute to this system, as a form of linguistic violence used to suppress and destruct students' multifaceted use of Englishes.

If 'standard English' is to be taught in schools, it must be taught in a way which explicitly recognises its roots as a bid to uphold white supremacy. Children and teachers need to understand the role that language plays in creating and maintaining racial hierarchies, and only a critical, socio-political understanding of 'standard English' can do that. Finally, school policies must shift attention away from the stigmatised language of racialised speakers, and towards the listening practices of teachers, urging them to question dominant attitudes to non-standard English. Rather than asking racialised students to modify the way they speak, how about we ask teachers to modify the way they listen?

Read red pepper's original piece here

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Continued use of 'standard English' in schools is a key means of upholding racial inequality. In a piece published by red pepper and reproduced here with permission, Brunel education lecturer Dr Ian Cushing and University of Derby's Furzeen Ahmed, associate lecturer in English language take a look at the history...

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Gendered Language used to describe Boris Johnson as a 'naughty boy'.

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Gendered Language used to describe Boris Johnson as a 'naughty boy'.

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Why EVERYONE is speaking with ‘half-English, half-American drawl’

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Speaking to FEMAIL, linguists and voice coaches have revealed how TikTok voice, aka ‘TikTalk’ has become a specific register commonly used to narrate storytelling videos.

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Rejection of 'Scouse' in middle-class Merseyside schools

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Rejection of 'Scouse' in middle-class Merseyside schools

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Abstract

This paper explores the use and position of Scouse in middle-class secondary schools. Despite a wide circulation of a 'variation ideology' (Cameron, 1995) that embraces and positively values regional speech in the UK, we discuss the hierarchical relationship between Scouse and standard English that is naturalised in the specific school settings. We focus on classroom talk and interviews from teachers and students in two all-girls grammar schools. We observe that student language use in the classroom, the social values indexed by Scouse and the stances towards Scouse in metapragmatic talk range from tolerance, to distance, to complete rejection of the local variety in the specific setting. We discuss how middle-class school settings can enforce and sustain homogenising language ideologies and address the power implications this practice has on non-confident speakers of standard English in relation to the wider issue of educational failure.

Introduction

'Variation ideology' (Cameron, 1995: 27-28), whereby non-standard language varieties are positively valued, emerged in the past forty years as a challenge to the ideology of linguistic homogeneity that previously normalised the prominence of standard language (see among others Cooke & Simpson, 2012). In the British context, non-standard varieties are used in several institutional domains, such as media and education (see among others Coupland, 2007). However, despite the acknowledgement of the value of language variation and the covert prestige attached to several non-standard varieties of English, a hierarchical relationship between standard English and other varieties of English still persists in the British school context (Cheshire, 2005). This established hierarchy is responsible for perpetuating the 'dialect bias' in education that strongly links non-standard language to working class speech.

We focus here on Scouse, sometimes equated with Liverpool English. Scouse is a highly recognisable variety (see Montgomery 2007, 2010) that includes many distinct language features, which are "regionally restricted and socially marked" (Clark & Watson, 2016: 32). Some of its socially marked features relate to the variety being enregistered as, among others, working class (Juskan, 2018). We explore the use of Scouse in two all-girls grammar schools located in middle class neighbourhoods of the Wirral, Merseyside. Drawing upon classroom talk and interview data from students and teachers, we examine the extent to which participants engage with Scouse in classroom interactions, the social values and social meanings Scouse indexes for them in metapragmatic talk and how this indexing shapes specific stances and, in turn, the wider positioning of our informants. Our participants consistently distance themselves from Scouse by illustrating that it indexes (Johnstone, Andrus, & Danielson, 2006; Silverstein, 2003) social values such as non-posh, annoying, and disrespectful, which places the variety in lower scale levels of indexicality (Blommaert, 2010). We argue that this positioning reflects and sustains a local grammar school ideology which interacts with a 'middle-class bias' (Grainger, 2013) pairing standard English with 'good schools' and educational attainment. This strict pairing appears as naturalised in the schools under scrutiny and leaves no room for Scouse to be used flexibly, as a resource in the school setting. We discuss the educational implications of our findings on learning and student regional language awareness.

Within this context, this article aims to address the following research questions: a) to what extent do our participants engage with Scouse in the classroom context?, b) What are the social values and social meanings Scouse indexes for our participants in metapragmatic talk, and c) How does this indexing shape specific stances and the wider positioning of participants? We will address the first research question in Section 6 where we present quantitative results of the use of a salient Scouse feature in classroom-fronted talk. The second and third questions are addressed in Section 7, where we provide a qualitative analysis of interview stances and social values indexed by Scouse. We conclude by discussing the educational implications our findings have regarding social class, regional identity and educational (dis)advantage.

Section snippets

Sociolinguistic scales, social class and the educational marketplace

Blommaert (2010) addresses the hierarchical role of (standard) language in his conceptualisation of sociolinguistic scales. Scale is used as a metaphor that denotes movements between hierarchically ordered and stratified language and semiotic practices or phenomena. The connection between scales is indexical (i.e., pointing towards socially and culturally ordered norms, traditions, expectations and positions, which are phenomena of a higher scale-level). Higher scale levels are described as

The project

The data used in this study are part of a larger project examining the social meanings of Scouse in secondary school classrooms in the wider Merseyside area. Due to the aforementioned status of Scouse as an enregistered variety, the project aimed to explore the ways in which Liverpool and Wirral speakers engage with Scouse in the school context, the social meanings of Scouse in relation to wider social practices (Coupland, 2007: 104) and how student and teacher language choices are shaped by

Scouse and fronted nurse

As outlined in Section 3, we focus on the vowels in the nurse and square lexical sets due to their salience as Scouse features. We collected tokens of these vowels from the classroom recordings only, which yielded 143 nurse words (36 in School 1, 107 in School 2) and 70 square words (26 in School 1, 44 in School 2) in the speech of the students across all classroom recordings. As lessons were neither conducted on the same topics nor following the same format, there was some disparity in the

J. Blommaert
Commentary: Multi-everything London

Language and superdiversity: A position paper

Dialect, power and politics: Standard English and adolescent identities

Sociolinguistics and mother tongue education

The daily grunt': Middle-class bias and vested interests in the 'Getting in Early' and 'Why Can't They Read?' reports

View full text

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The "grammar school pressure": From tolerance to distance, to rejection of 'Scouse' in middle-class Merseyside schools

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This paper explores the use and position of Scouse in middle-class secondary schools. Despite a wide circulation of a 'variation ideology' (Cameron, 1995) that embraces and positively values regional speech in the UK, we discuss the hierarchical relationship between Scouse and standard English that is naturalised in the specific school settings.

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Article on the meaning and use of the word ‘woke’.

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Article on the meaning and use of the word ‘woke’.

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Malaika Jabali: 'Woke has become distorted beyond recognition'

It's mostly people who don't understand the original connotation of "woke" who still say woke. They can have it. Whether we're talking about "critical race theory" from Black scholars, "identity politics" from Black feminists, or "woke" from Black slang, terms indigenous to our way of thinking or advocating get co-opted and distorted beyond recognition in mainstream society.

Just as 'woke' evolved into a call to action, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do

Woke was another way to say "conscious": having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Amid police killings in that "post-racial" society, these myths became untenable.

Slang is organic. It arrives from particular conditions. There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. And just as "woke" evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. And others will continue to co-opt and distort.

Laura Kipnis: 'Wokeness is about style, not substance'

The term "woke" wasn't around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker - the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy "wokeness" against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude.

The instinct is that something's going on with you, the rebuker, that you can't see in yourself; all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. Excessive. "Woke" is a one-word hermeneutics of suspicion, shorthand for the sort of characterology Maugham was performing, dissecting a fulminator's self-relation and self-delusions.

I believe it's more useful as applied to political style than political substance, however: I can agree with the woke on politics - I'm for social justice too! - though I may be warier about righteous vanguards and missionary zeal.

Mr Davidson says things like: "If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast in to the flames," referring to the South Sea Islanders he and his wife mean to convert. "We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions," says she, his equal in uprightness. Note the punitive rigidity underpinning the "good works", the authoritarian streak, the self-congratulatory religiosity. Compare to your Twitter feed.

Rebecca Solnit: 'Woke was kidnapped and has died'

Once upon a time, the past tense of "wake" left its life as a verb and became an adjective of sorts, a term for describing the quality of having awakened, especially to injustice and racism. Like other vernacular words in the English language, Woke's youth was among young Black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives. They were often angry at words, especially new words, most particularly words that disturbed their rest - awakened them, you could say - and Woke was such a word.

This fairy tale ends badly. Rather than kill Woke, they tried to turn him into a zombie mercenary sent out to sneer at those who were concerned about racism and other injustices. This backfired and "woke" became a marker of the not-OK Boomer, a bilious word whose meaning was more in who said it than in what it meant or mocked. In other words, Woke died. Cool young people were not sad that Woke was dead, because he was no longer their word, and mean old people were not sad because they did not know he was dead. The end.

Bhaskar Sunkara: 'Language on the left can be a problem'

To be "woke" once meant to be alert to the continued realities of oppression, particularly the oppression faced by Black Americans. But today, its meaning has shifted. To be "woke" is to lack urgency about building the coalitions that can win over working-class people and actually redistribute money and power to the oppressed.

This isn't to say that progressives have to avoid questions of social justice to win a mythically conservative working-class, but that we need to acknowledge the reality that working-class people of all races want basically the same things: good jobs, secure housing, dependable health care, and the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Framing universal concerns with identity-focused messaging or language stolen straight from academia is a huge mistake.

James Carville absolutely has a point when he talks about Democratic party messaging being too far removed from ordinary voters - including the party's base of black and brown voters. But he's quick to conflate unpopular rhetoric with popular demands like Medicare for All pushed by the figures he maligns like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders.

Our language on some parts of the Left is a problem. But that's an easier problem to fix than the fact that Carville and Clintonite Democrats have lost the trust of millions of Americans with their defense of elite interest and decades of unpopular policies. Progressive have a program that can win - we now just need the right way to communicate it and new approaches to organizing people around their most pressing economic concerns.

Thomas Chatterton Williams: 'Woke is not a viable descriptor'

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. "Woke" is not, and has not been for some time now, a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains interested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber.

The term has been co-opted and diluted of meaning by lazy ideologues and bad-faith actors on the right, which is a shame, since it's more poetic and evocative than any pithy substitute I can think of.

The challenge for anyone interested in something deeper than culture-war point scoring is to develop new language of persuasion

The challenge for anyone interested in something deeper than culture-war point scoring is to develop new language that is specific enough to persuade those who don't already agree to consider the same old questions from new angles.

Fairly or not, "woke" and "wokeness" now overwhelmingly signal that you're not fundamentally interested in that rhetorical labor, and those who need the most convincing give themselves permission to stop paying attention.

Zaid Jilani: 'You're either with us or against us'

The word woke loosely refers to a social media-fueled, leftwing political ideology that emerged in the English-speaking world in the early 2010s. The term is derived from the state of being awake to or conscious of structural inequalities in society and being hyper-aware of one's own role in those inequalities. Someone who is woke is constantly inspecting every institution in society, looking for the presence of racism, sexism, and other forms of pervasive prejudice.

What separates someone who is woke from someone who is merely progressive is not only this vigilance and awareness but a fervent belief that everyone must be enlisted into their social causes at all times and that the end justifies the means when battling injustice.

Unlike traditional liberals, woke Americans place very little stake in value-neutral norms like freedom of speech and non-discrimination. As the antiracist activist Ibram Kendi says, "The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination." Kendi also informs us that you can only be racist or anti-racist, there is no middle ground, echoing former president George W Bush's instruction that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists".

Derecka Purnell: 'You have to wake people up - then you get action'

From street corners to kitchen tables, friends and I have laughed and shouted each other down about the state of Black America. We argue about whether our people are "asleep" - unaware of, uninterested in, unconcerned with the violence that white people inflict upon us. Such violence can be found in demeaning interpersonal interactions with individual white people, and in the structural white supremacist violence in our housing, hospitals, jobs and schools.

If "sleep" prevents us from collectively resisting this savagery, then one must remember Malcolm X's message: "The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you'll get action."

Political expressions derived from Black activism, including "stay woke", "Hotep", "Black Lives Matter", have strange careers. Like our heroes, they are lauded, branded, dehistoricized, co-opted and caricatured. For example, the Democratic strategist James Carville bastardizes "wokeness" as a "stupid", inflexible commitment to ideas that seek to drastically improve society. His usage robs the term of its value to make us more politically aware and active on our terms. Why? James Baldwin explains that "to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time." This rage threatens the status quo, what Carville and other wealthy, politically powerful people fight to protect.

Ironically, Carville's condemnation is exactly why Black people continue to tell each other to stay woke: elite white actors and institutions benefit from exploiting Black votes, activism and culture while telling us to bury our grievances about their violence. It's how the Democratic party scribbles "Black Lives Matter" on banners for their conventions yet give more money to the police who kill Black people quickly.

I suspect that, like his rightwing counterparts who are antagonistic to "critical race theory" and "white privilege", Carville refuses to learn why Black people historically use wokeness to inspire our activism.

I suggest he starts with Langston Hughes: "Negroes Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind. Beware the day They change their minds!" Or Malcolm X: "... there will come a time when black people wake up and become intellectually independent enough to think for themselves ... this type of thinking also brings an end to the brutality inflicted upon black people by white people and it is the only thing that will bring an end to it. No federal court, state court, or city court will."

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It's mostly people who don't understand the original connotation of "woke" who still say woke. They can have it. Whether we're talking about "critical race theory" from Black scholars, "identity politics" from Black feminists, or "woke" from Black slang, terms indigenous to our way of thinking or advocating get co-opted and distorted beyond recognition in mainstream society.

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Michael Rosen article on prescriptive grammar in primary curriculum 

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Michael Rosen article on prescriptive grammar in primary curriculum 

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Dear Gavin Williamson, could you tell parents what a fronted adverbial is? | Curriculums | The Guardian

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ow are you getting on with fronted adverbials? I only ask because my timeline on social media is suddenly full of parents telling me that they don't know what these are and they don't know why their children need to know them. Now their children are schooling from home, the idiosyncrasies of the primary grammar curriculum are confronting them.

Perhaps, as a parent, you are in the same shoes. I've noticed that education ministers do not always do well when they are asked the same questions ministers say children should be asked. You will remember, perhaps, the everlasting Nick Gibb struggling on the radio with conjunctions and prepositions meant to be understood by an 11-year-old. They defeated him. It was painful listening. But as you will surely know, thanks to your predecessors, and after the Bew report of 2011, the primary curriculum now includes all this so-called grammar, which to many of us is a package of outdated, rigid, misleading, prescriptive, disputed terms, all based on the false assumption that "grammar" is either right or wrong.

Jeremy Williams is one of many parents now seeing the full horrors of this. "Yep, it's taken homeschool for me to become aware of this joyless obsession with the mechanics of language," he wrote on Twitter. "I write for a living and had to ask my nine-year-old what a fronted adverbial is, so I'm not convinced it's necessary."

Another parent, Dr Carolyn Jess-Cook, wrote: "Anyone struggling with homeschooling should know that, despite having a PhD in literature and having published 12 books, I only learned what a fronted adverbial was when my eight-year-old's teacher said he doesn't use enough of them in his written work."

I heard on the grapevine that the fronted adverbial was something of an afterthought on the grammar pile, and that even the linguist who suggested it now regrets the idea. If teaching this stuff to your children is bugging you as it is bugging many other parents, you could perhaps get some relief by cornering your predecessor, Michael Gove, on Zoom and asking him why he insisted that primary schoolchildren should have to spot a subjunctive - especially as linguists are not agreed that there really is a "subjunctive" in English in the way there is in French, say.

Somewhere along the line - have you noticed? - these grammatical features turned into instructions to children on how to write. So now, I gather, they have to create sentences using fronted adverbials, relative clauses and expanded noun phrases - preferably after a preposition. It is writing by numbers.

I know this complicates things for politicians who like simple answers, but there are people in society who write. We are writers. One way of working out how to help primary schoolchildren to write may have been to get writers to explain how we do it. I have interviewed quite a few writers, and I've learned that we do it in many different ways. There is a plurality and flexibility. We avoid the rigid, prescriptive, formulaic approach being demanded in the primary school curriculum.

Just last week I was privileged to record a radio programme about writing with one of the great modern writers, Hilary Mantel. We talked about the sound and rhythm of sentences, the struggle to find the right word, the shaping of a paragraph so that it sets a scene before introducing a character, and much more. We talked for nearly an hour and we did not mention a fronted adverbial once.

In fact, you must reflect occasionally on the miracle that is yourself: how you have reached the career heights without perhaps even knowing what a fronted adverbial is. (Have you, by the way, paused to wonder why no one mentions rear or middle adverbials? What is so special about being fronted?) Your main route to running education seems to have been through selling fireplaces, while the doughty schools minister, Nick Gibb, came to his position through accountancy.

Accountancy maybe, but clearly not accountability. Last summer, you and Mr Gibb toured media studios telling us that the GCSE and A-levels exam algorithm was robust ... until it wasn't. More bust than robust, I think. The same goes for schools being safe, until they were unsafe, or that everyone can learn online ... except for those who are not online.

I see a pattern: you both U-turn so often you spin on the spot. That must be why you never move on.
Yours, Michael Rosen

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Dear Gavin Williamson, could you tell parents what a fronted adverbial is? | Michael Rosen

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ow are you getting on with fronted adverbials? I only ask because my timeline on social media is suddenly full of parents telling me that they don't know what these are and they don't know why their children need to know them.

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Accent and Grammar Variation - excellent article

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Accent and Grammar Variation - excellent article

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/25/dialects-english-grammar-accuracy

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I say tomahto and you say tomayto. My wife says dahrling and I say my dear. We all speak differently, and some of us speak different. Does it really matter?

Things matter if people think they do. I remember being with a group of Manchester businessmen whose bitterest complaint was that London stole their brightest young people and carried them off south. And not just that. As the young migrated south, they dropped their regional accents to conform to what London called "standard" English. When they came home they sounded like foreigners.

Last week the Dutch/Lancastrian linguist, Willem Hollmann, gave a new meaning to levelling up. He declared that teaching standard English and "received pronunciation" or London RP in schools discriminated against the majority of English children who did not use them at home. This should stop, he argued. There should be no such thing as correct diction because "children who do not speak received pronunciation might struggle and may feel marginalised".

The great north-south divide, to which Boris Johnson has rightly directed our attention, has long had its roots in "talent skimming". As long as clever people stayed at home, the rich tapestry of provincial English was just that, a rich tapestry. One of the most damaging things successive British governments has done to that tapestry is to make it necessary for each age cohort to travel miles from home for its higher education and job opportunities, usually in a south-easterly direction. Most never return home, and the brightest and best tend to drift to London. Some retain traces of their accents of origin, but many consciously or unconsciously camouflage it with standard English, to get better jobs and to fit in.

Hollmann believes they should not be encouraged to think their home dialect is "incorrect" and somehow inferior to standard English. If they prefer the northern "I were" for "I was", that is their choice. He wants children to carry their Norse/Saxon grammars and exotic regional vowels to the metropolis with pride. If they fail to get posh jobs as a result, so be it. They should sue for unfair discrimination.

This is a classic case of an argument with a grain of truth in it. In the last century the BBC used to ban regional accents on air and there was a justified outcry. It no longer does. Standard English grammar and pronunciation are no longer upper-middle class English. Linguists have long traced the permeation of RP with "estuarial" English. Privately educated children now drop their consonants. Tony Blair would say dunno, righ-on and geh-off. Even the Queen's accent is noticeably different from the way she spoke in the strangulated voice of 40 years ago.

While a Graham Norton or a Huw Edwards voice is not that of a Stephen Fry, I cannot believe it is held against them, any more than are the voices of Paul McCartney or Geoffrey Boycott. Most people can manipulate their accents as they choose. But I think most Britons delight to hear regional accents.

Where Hollmann is on more difficult territory, I believe, is over grammar. As he has pointed out in his other writings, grammar holds the key to understanding in all forms of communication. The deployment of nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs carries with it the essence of meaning. I cannot see virtue in refusing to teach children standard English as "correct", just to protect supposed regional sensitivities. How to say tomato does not matter. What does matter are the clarities embodied in singulars and plurals, tenses and conditionals, qualifiers and determinants. Clarity of language is crucial to the presentational skills now so important to a young person's career - and so rarely taught while time is wasted on algebra and geometry. Protesting that "bad" grammar should not hold someone back will not stop it from doing so.

In the 19th century much debate in Wales and Ireland centred around whether the new school system should teach in the medium of English or in then prevalent local tongues. Nationalist intellectuals demanded that English be banned. To radicals such as Daniel O'Connell, this was antiquarian arrogance, denying poor Irish the skills by which their children might escape poverty. It was "national suicide". In Wales, Aneurin Bevan said the same of Welsh. English was the language of working-class unity and to deny it to Welsh children was debilitating.

No one wants to see the demise of English dialects. Like the landscapes and townscapes of which they form part, dialect is rooted in ancient customs and cultures. Of course, it should be honoured and studied in schools and colleges. Indeed, all children should be "bilingual in English". The accents in which these various Englishes are spoken will always be alive and changing - from RP to multicultural London English. It must be the most swiftly mutating language on the planet.

Grammar is different. English is full of irregularities handed down over centuries, and its "correctness" is a reasonable topic for argument. Its spelling is diabolical. But as long as English is the nation's language - as well as much of the world's - its communality, its grammatical accuracy is in everyone's interest. Accent we can leave to the diversity of the human marketplace. But the gods of grammar we should surely respect.

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Ever-changing dialects keep English moving - but grammar is its north star | Simon Jenkins

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I say tomahto and you say tomayto. My wife says dahrling and I say my dear. We all speak differently, and some of us speak different. Does it really matter? Things matter if people think they do. I remember being with a group of Manchester businessmen whose bitterest complaint was that London stole their brightest young people and carried them off south.

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Blog article on how we communicate with the police, interesting for gender and power

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Interesting headline

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Thinking a lot about the everyday language we use in school at the moment - this article in @tes is a great reminder.

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Thinking a lot about the everyday language we use in school at the moment - this article in @tes is a great reminder. https://t.co/M0WEjWGRJO

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Thinking a lot about the everyday language we use in school at the moment - this article in @tes is a great reminder. pic.twitter.com/M0WEjWGRJO
— Rachel Ball (@MrsBallAP) May 1, 2021

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Thinking a lot about the everyday language we use in school at the moment - this article in @tes is a great reminder. https://t.co/M0WEjWGRJO

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Thinking a lot about the everyday language we use in school at the moment - this article in @tes is a great reminder. https://t.co/M0WEjWGRJO

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Thinking a lot about the everyday language we use in school at the moment - this article in @tes is a great reminder.

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Guardian article

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Have just come across this excellent piece on Political Correctness (thanks to a Guardian podcast nudge) and it's well worth a read if you are interested in the ways that language is a battlefield (and has been for a long time).
https://t.co/WGUr8VRJxA

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Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy | Moira Weigel

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The long read: For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph

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Have just come across this excellent piece on Political Correctness (thanks to a Guardian podcast nudge) and it's well worth a read if you are interested in the ways that language is a battlefield (and has been for a long time).
https://t.co/WGUr8VRJxA

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Have just come across this excellent piece on Political Correctness (thanks to a Guardian podcast nudge) and it's well worth a read if you are interested in the ways that language is a battlefield (and has been for a long time).https://t.co/WGUr8VRJxA
— EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) November 26, 2020

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Have just come across this excellent piece on Political Correctness (thanks to a Guardian podcast nudge) and it's well worth a read if you are interested in the ways that language is a battlefield (and has been for a long time).
https://t.co/WGUr8VRJxA

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Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy | Moira Weigel

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The long read: For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Have just come across this excellent piece on Political Correctness (thanks to a Guardian podcast nudge) and it's well worth a read if you are interested in the ways that language is a battlefield (and has been for a long time).
https://t.co/WGUr8VRJxA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Have just come across this excellent piece on Political Correctness (thanks to a Guardian podcast nudge) and it's well worth a read if you are interested in the ways that language is a battlefield (and has been for a long time).
https://t.co/WGUr8VRJxA

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Political correctness: how the right invented a phantom enemy | Moira Weigel

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The long read: For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting nemesis has been a favourite tactic of the right – and Donald Trump’s victory is its greatest triumph

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Peter Trudgill article in The New Statesman

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Opinion

Published: 7:47 PM December 6, 2020 Updated: 7:48 PM December 6, 2020
Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL.
I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station. An officer enquired: "Do you have anyone there who can speak African?" It seemed that the police had arrested a man who they believed to have come from Africa, and were having trouble communicating with him.

There is no need to tell readers of The New European that there is no such language as 'African'. And our internationally-minded readership will not be much surprised to learn that there are about 2,000 different languages spoken on the African continent. This fundamental fact had clearly not made it onto the curriculum of that particular Midwestern school system.

Another report which came to me from the USA told of a woman somewhere in the American south-west who was standing in a supermarket talking on her mobile phone in a language which was not English. A white man turned to her and complained: "You're in America now - you need to speak English! If you want to speak Mexican, go back to Mexico!". The woman replied: "Sir, I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English, go back to England!"

There is, of course, no such language as 'Mexican'. But Navajo is one of around 250 Native American languages which were spoken in what is now the USA for many millennia before the arrival of any European language.

Ignorance about language is by no means confined to the USA. On January 26 some years ago, a woman called Elizabeth Close - a well-known artist - was talking on the street in Adelaide, South Australia, to her small child in her native language, Pitjantjatjara. The homeland of the Pitjantjatjara-speaking people covers a vast area of the Central Australian desert which extends across South Australia, the Northern Territory, and Western Australia. Unlike most Australian aboriginal languages, Pitjantjatjara is surviving quite well and has about 4,000 speakers. It was reported in the Australian press that a young white woman overheard Elizabeth talking to her child in their mother tongue and shouted at her: "It's Australia Day! We speak English in Australia!".

The English language arrived in Australia about 230 years ago. Pitjantjatjara and the other 250 or so Australian aboriginal languages have been spoken in Australia for tens of thousands of years. There is nothing very Australian about English, but everything about Pitjantjatjara is - it is a truly Australian language. The young white woman, as well as being guilty of crass racism, was also guilty of gross ignorance.

It would be nice to be able to claim that there is less ignorance about language here in Britain, but sadly we cannot do that. It is embarrassing to report that the polyglot Alex Rawlings, when he was being interviewed on Sky News on the occasion of this year's UNESCO International Mother Tongue Day, was asked by the presenter if Welsh was "the world's most useless language".

The PR department of the chocolate bar company Snickers once compared the Welsh language to "someone sitting on a keyboard". Rod Liddle, an associate editor of the Spectator, wrote that the Welsh language is "indecipherable, with no real vowels". And, writing in the Daily Mail, the journalist and writer Roger Lewis called Welsh an "appalling, moribund monkey language". Anyone who can write something as horribly ignorant as that about one of our national languages is in need of some linguistic education.

In fact, there is a very good case to be made for arguing that everybody should take at least one course on language and linguistics at some stage during their education. Learning about language and languages is as important as actually learning languages themselves. Ignorance about language is rarely quite as astonishing as it was in that American police station, but it can often be much more bigoted, malicious and damaging.

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Ignorance about language leaves me lost for words

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Opinion Published: 7:47 PM December 6, 2020 Updated: 7:48 PM December 6, 2020 Not knowing other languages is one thing. Not knowing about them is quite another, says PETER TRUDGILL. I once happened to be visiting the linguistics department of a well-known university in the American Midwest when a phone call came in from the local police station.

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"Gimme that yoke," I asked my American pal, Molly. Her stare seemed to say: What yolk? What actual egg? I explained - obviously - that when Irish people use the word "yoke" out of context, we just mean "thing". It was a reminder that we speak two very different versions of English. And it set in motion The Little Book of Irishisms.

The Little Book of Irishisms is for anyone who wants to understand the Irish - an ambitious goal but, as we say, God loves a trier. It's also for people who want to sound Irish even just for St Patrick's Day. Also ambitious. But God still loves a trier.

My top 20 Irishisms

1. Bockety does such a better job than wobbly or unsteady. "No wonder that table's bockety; sure, isn't one leg shorter?" You can hear the unsteadiness in the word. Bockety comes from bacach, the Irish for lame.

2. Dote A dote is much more than a sweetheart. "Isn't Una the biggest dote?" is the ultimate compliment - especially if your name is Una. It's hard to find a word that encapsulates all that "dote" does. It implies fondness, admiration and affection in just four letters. We would never call someone a dote if we didn't mean it.

3. Banjaxed is not just broken, it's beyond repair. There is no coming back from banjaxed. Unless a person is banjaxed. It that case, there's a good chance that they will recover from their hangover or state of absolute exhaustion. It just might not feel like it at the time.

4. Ruction s gets my vote over "uproar", "quarrelsome outbreak" or "noisy disturbance". Not only does it sound like what it's describing, it originated at Ireland's 1798 rebellion.

5. Holy Show Though no one wants to be told that they're making a "holy show" of themselves, it's marginally better than being told that they're a flat-out embarrassment. At least it's funny. Or to me it is. I thought that "holy show" was dying out. My Millennial daughter reassures me that it's making a comeback.

6. Foostering If there is a better way to reduce "fussing around in an agitated way and not getting anywhere" into one descriptive, onomatopoeic word I'd like to hear it.

7. Making A Bags Of It Our way of telling someone they're failing spectacularly takes the edge off. A little.

8. Notions "The notions on that one!" Or just: "Notions!" In Ireland, one of the worst things you could have is notions about yourself. Chances are, someone will feel it their duty to "take you down a peg or two" so you don't get a "swelled head."

9. Craic If there was one word to sum us up as a people, it might well be "craic". The fact that we use it so ubiquitously to mean either news or fun highlights just how important both are to us. We love our craic. There is some debate about the spelling. "Craic", it seems, was originally spelt "crack". I know which version I like. Note to non-nationals: craic never means drugs.

10. Mortaller This favourite of my granny's means "mortal sin". She used it for anything mildly offensive. I love how a word can bring a person back.

11.Smithereens If something is smashed to smithereens it's unlikely to survive. Smithereens is derived from the Irish word "smidiríní" meaning little bits.

12. Segotia "Ah, me auld segotia." Though it's often said tongue in cheek, there is genuine affection in this way of calling someone "Pal".

13. Pass-remarkable To deem someone verbally judgmental is dangerous territory given the irony of passing a remark on someone else's pass-remarkableness.

14. Begrudgery What other nation reduces to a word the concept of resenting someone their success? Begrudgery is a particularly Irish trait and, while I'm not a fan, I do love the word itself. I also love our innate fear of appearing sycophantic.

15. Mé Féiner This term for someone who is out only for themselves comes from the Irish term, "mé féin", meaning "myself". A mé féiner is not something you want to be in Ireland. We particularly frown upon those who don't "stand their round" in a pub.

16. Yoke Could this little word for "thing" cause any more confusion to non-Irish people? We say it without thinking - often that's the point - we couldn't be bothered trying to find of the name of a word so we just use "yoke". Calling someone a "mad yoke" is the ultimate compliment.

17. Yerra "Yerra, go on, so." There is no need for "yerra" at the start of a sentence, especially as it means absolutely nothing. But, yerra, why not throw it in anyway?

18. Doing a line "Paddy is doing a line with Mary." This alternative for "dating" makes me nostalgic for times gone by when it was used more. If Paddy and Mary were doing a strong line, things were getting serious.

19. Your man/Your woman When we don't know - or can't be bothered thinking of - someone's name, this is our go-to. For obvious reasons, it's another recipe for confusion.

20. Giving out. In Ireland, this is much more likely to mean complaining (or reprimanding) than distributing eg "He never stops giving out about the weather." It comes from the Irish: "tabhair amach" - to give out. Like all the above words, I love it because it's just so typically Irish.

In addition to our sayings, The Little Book of Irishisms includes tricks to Irishify sentences, like putting "fierce" in front of a noun and "altogether" after it eg "He's a fierce eejit, altogether." It outlines things that people think we say but we never actually do. "May the road rise with you," is something that's only said in the Irish language, never in English. In the book you'll find our many words for rain, drunk and mother. And much more.
The Little Book of Irishisms: Know the Irish through our Words, by Aimee Alexander, is out now. A free sample is available . Aimee Alexander is the pen-name of Irish author Denise Deegan.

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Irishisms: A beginner's guide to ructions, dotes, yokes, fierce eejits and mé féiners

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"Gimme that yoke," I asked my American pal, Molly. Her stare seemed to say: What yolk? What actual egg? I explained - obviously - that when Irish people use the word "yoke" out of context, we just mean "thing". It was a reminder that we speak two very different versions of English.

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Language is more than how we speak - it's home

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Language is more than how we speak - it's home

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See all podcast episodes. When Natalyn Daniels transferred to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2009, she felt like an outsider. "A lot of the communication approaches I was exposed to - they're not ... necessarily accepted or tolerated in a lot of professional and academic settings," she says. How we speak, says sociolinguist and Berkeley lecturer Rose Wilkerson, represents who we are - our culture, our family and our sense of place in the world. So, when a person is criticized for how they speak, she says, it cuts to the heart. Daniels, now on staff at Berkeley as a Clery liaison, looks back at her experience on campus and shares how her grandmother, who lived in a deeply segregated South in the pre-civil rights era, didn't have access to an education that many take for granted. "The very tool we suggest serves as the equalizer, or serves as a tool of empowerment, which is language and writing and literacy ... that was a tool that has been weaponized against her, as well as historically withheld from her and other underresourced Black and Indigenous people," says Daniels.
Read a transcript of Fiat Vox episode #69: "Language is more than how we speak - it's home."

Natalyn Daniels: When you come to the campus, it's not that the campus necessarily changes. The campus keeps going. So, you have to find a way to be important to the campus and be part of the campus.

I think that's probably a feeling that's shared across most folks who arrive on the campus. And I think it's exacerbated or amplified when someone comes in with identities that are not highly represented on campus, which was definitely the case for me.

[Music]
Natalyn Daniels first came to UC Berkeley in 2009 as a transfer student from a community college in Arizona.
Natalyn Daniels: A lot of the communication approaches I was exposed to - they're not communication approaches that are necessarily accepted or tolerated in a lot of professional and academic settings, perhaps because they're not the default or because folks just don't know that those communication styles exist and are valid. So, really understanding that there's a certain knowledge set that's deeply valued by the institution that then shapes the way we even communicate about our experiences.
You're listening to Fiat Vox, a Berkeley News podcast. I'm Anne Brice. Daniels spent the first few years of her life in Kayenta, Arizona. It's a small town that's part of the Navajo Nation. Her parents were educators on the reservation. She's the second youngest of four sisters.
Natalyn Daniels: And so, my first experiences of life and everything I knew about my own sense of self and culture and experience was wrapped in my family - we had our little bubble in our home there in Kayenta.

And then, we were surrounded by this deeply homogenous, ancient culture and practice that really, really raised me and helped me learn what it meant to communicate and to share and to show affection and to express needs and to know who I am.
Her mother comes from an impoverished agricultural family in the Midwest, and her father comes from Indigenous and African American lineage in Nashville, Tennessee.
Natalyn Daniels: My family is deeply mixed. We're multi-heritage, so we've got a lot of different racial identities, a lot of different spiritual identities, different ethnic identities, different national identities - especially in terms of immigration and enslavement - playing a role in our house.

[Music]

Paper trails are really hard with families that are mixed like ours, especially on my dad's side - that side of the family is descended from the Atlantic slave trade.

But the women in my family have used language, even if it's not their language, they've used language as a tool to try to keep records via photographs.

So, we have all these photos, dating back over 100 years, of family members. And on the backs of the photos, there's teeny tiny handwriting, beautiful penmanship, cursive from top to bottom. There is not a modicum of white space left on the back of the photographs because it was my family's attempt to record and reclaim our history.

We don't have paper records suggesting who we are or that we're real or exist. It's just these photographs. It's the best trail we have to know where we come from.

So, the back of these photographs, it lists names, nicknames, marriages, children, birth dates, racial percentages, which is mostly due to, like, blood quantum and enslavement policies at the time. But there's also some short, quirky stories about who they are and what their favorite food was and why they divorced their first husband or whatever.

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Like, there's that kind of stuff that really makes these people feel so human and reminds us that they are us and still in us in a lot of ways, even if history is telling us that's not true or telling us that it's not possible to know those things.

I definitely have my grandmothers to thank for that on both sides for holding that photo archive and maintaining it so well. It's an incredible resource for me that wouldn't exist without them fighting so hard to be able to learn a language that was never meant for them and use it to document these things for me in the future.
Her grandmother, Barbara, had her first child, who would become Daniels' father, when she was a teenager. She had three other kids and raised them all on her own. And she fought really hard to achieve a high school level of education.
Natalyn Daniels: My grandmother has endured deeply segregated, oppressive circumstances in the South, specifically pre-civil rights. And these circumstances have impacted every aspect of her life, including her access to education and language and other learning opportunities that a lot of people, I think, take for granted.

But the very tool we suggest serves as the equalizer, or serves as a tool of empowerment, which is language and writing and literacy and all of these other pieces, that was a tool that has been weaponized against her, as well as historically withheld from her and other underresourced Black and Indigenous people.

[Music]
Also, she has a traditional Nashville Southern accent - what Daniels describes as a "hearty, soulful twang." Daniels says because of the way her grandmother speaks, people have often dismissed what she has to say right off the bat.
Natalyn Daniels: And my grandmother - she's an incredible person with so many incredible things to say. And we would only benefit from listening, including myself. Every time that I get to see her speak or share, I am floored. There's just so much wisdom held in one person.
That's Rose Wilkerson, a sociolinguist and lecturer in the Department of African American Studies at Berkeley. She has a Ph.D. in linguistics and specializes in African American English. She taught a course a few years ago in the linguistics department at Berkeley called American Languages.
Rose Wilkerson: The concept that somehow there's a standard and a substandard language is really about power.

Rose Wilkerson: We have a saying in linguistics: The difference between a language and a dialect is whoever has an army and a navy.

In other words, who has socioeconomic and political power in the country - that will be the standard or the accepted mainstream form of English.

So, when you have any kind of perception about a person and the way that they speak - "Oh, this is a dialect or a substandard form of English or it's a broken language" - actually, the way that the brain works and the way that human beings speak, you can't break a language. That's impossible to do.

In fact, most sociolinguists don't like to use the term dialect because it's very derogatory. We call them a variety. African American English is a variety of English.

[Music]
Wilkerson explained that the reason there's a linguistic prejudice against people with Southern accents, like Daniels' grandmother has, comes from the outcome of the American Civil War.
Language functions as a way to communicate for human beings. All languages have structure. All languages have rules. Everything we speak has a pattern. Most people don't understand that, and they don't understand that because they've been taught differently, right?
If the South had won the Civil War, she says, the standard in the U.S. today would be Southern English.
Rose Wilkerson: Well, who ended up losing out of that? The South. So, their language, their culture, tends to be looked down upon: "These are more ignorant people. They are not very smart." And basically, it's because they lost that war.
When people are criticized for how they speak, says Wilkerson, like Daniels was when she got to Berkeley, and how her grandmother has been throughout her life, it's about so much more than just the speech itself.
Rose Wilkerson: Think about what the U.S. would have been like, linguistically speaking, in terms of what we would value. It would be a different story. So, the standard would be Southern English. That's how that happens.

Rose Wilkerson: Language is culture. You learn language from your parents. It is the language of love. It is the language of your home. It is the language of food. It's the language of music.

So, when you come into a situation where people say things to you or devalue who you are by the way you speak, that cuts to the heart, right? You're discriminating against a person's culture and their language. You're making assumptions about them based upon how they're speaking.

We need to have teachers that are trained, that understand about not just language, but language perceptions and discrimination. Because this, again, this is not something that we always talk about. We're not conscious of what's going on.

We still carry these prejudices in our minds. If people really understood language from the perception of linguistics, I think that would be the start of removing these perceptions about language somehow being deficient.
In 2011, Daniels graduated from Berkeley with a bachelor's degree in psychology. She went to work as a medic in Alameda County and in foster care for the city of Oakland. In 2017, she came back to Berkeley to work at the PATH to Care Center, the campus interpersonal violence center, where she focused on response and prevention to sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence and stalking. Recently, she took a job as a Clery liaison, helping to make sure the campus is in compliance with the Clery Act, a protection law that aims to provide transparency around campus crime policy and statistics. She says now that she's been entrenched in academic language for several years, she has a grasp on how academia prefers things to be said. But she doesn't want others to go through what she did - a kind of painful assimilation in which she felt her identity was deeply devalued.
[Music]

Natalyn Daniels: Looking back, what's the message I would say to my younger self? I don't know that I would encourage my younger self to speak up more. I don't think that is the case.

I think the change I would make would be to encourage my younger self to recognize that, as much as I feel like I have to learn from the institution and from the people around me, the people around me don't feel like they don't have just as much to learn from me, and that's not my fault.

And I think that would be the thing that I would share back - that the experiences and the way that I learned to navigate difficult, complex circumstances and environments in our society, that all of that still is a bed of wisdom and a bed of experience that is mine, and it's valuable.
It's a message she wants to share with all the students at Berkeley, and anyone else on campus who feels like an outsider: that they belong, and that Berkeley is better because of them.
And just because no one's asking what that experience is or asking me to write about it or asking me to talk about it, that doesn't mean that it's less valuable than the experiences that my peers and my faculty are sharing with me.
Next week, I'll be talking with Rita Lucarelli, an associate professor of Egyptology and a faculty curator of Egyptology at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology. We'll be talking about the museum's mummified crocodile collection and what crocodiles meant to ancient Egyptian culture. You can subscribe to Fiat Vox, spelled F-I-A-T V-O-X, and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts - it really helps support the work that we do. If you enjoyed this episode, consider sharing it with a friend. Also, check out our other podcast, Berkeley Talks, which shares lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. You can find all of our podcast episodes on Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts. Music in this episode was by Blue Dot Sessions: Listen to other Fiat Vox episodes:
This is Fiat Vox, a Berkeley News podcast. I'm Anne Brice, a podcast producer for the Office of Communications and Public Affairs.

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Language is more than how we speak - it's home

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See all podcast episodes. When Natalyn Daniels transferred to UC Berkeley as an undergraduate student in 2009, she felt like an outsider. "A lot of the communication approaches I was exposed to - they're not ... necessarily accepted or tolerated in a lot of professional and academic settings," she says.

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Is handwriting on the decline and does it matter?

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Is handwriting on the decline and does it matter?

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Is handwriting on the decline? If so, does it matter?
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— Nick Enfield (@njenfield) February 9, 2021

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Code-switching - Changing your voice to fit in

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Code-switching - Changing your voice to fit in

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Rob Drummond - What is MBE (Multicultural British English)?

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Rob Drummond - What is MBE (Multicultural British English)?

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What is MBE?

The term Multicultural British English (MBE) describes the idea of an over-arching variety of English that is related to, and which arguably emerged from, Multicultural London English (MLE). The concept was originally developed following research carried out in Manchester, where it was observed that young people were using MLE speech features within their otherwise typical local or supralocal varieties. MBE is, therefore, a variety of English used by people in the UK which incorporates features associated with MLE alongside features from their local accent or dialect. More work needs to be carried out to determine the extent to which MBE can be found in different areas of the UK; however, anecdotal evidence would suggest that it is widespread, particularly among young people involved in specific social practices, such as grime music. In fact, it is possible to gather reasonably robust insights as to its similarities and differences across the country through analysis of the speech and performance of grime artists from different locations. MBE is the language of grime, and grime itself is a possible mechanism by which MBE has spread across the country.

MBE or MUBE?

MBE has also been referred to as Multicultural Urban British English, which is the label I first used in 2016. Labelling language varieties is notoriously difficult, as it represents an attempt to formalise something which is, by its very nature, fluid and changeable. Personally, I have deliberately chosen to drop the 'urban' element from now on, for two reasons. Firstly, I want to distance the label from particular negative, racialized, and from a linguistic perspective, unhelpful connotations that exist around the term 'urban'. These connotations are arguably far stronger in a US context than they are in a UK context, but I feel they exist to an extent that makes the use of the term potentially problematic. Admittedly, the remaining label 'multicultural' is not without its own problems, arguably implying 'non-white' despite its efforts to be inclusive. However, for the sake of consistency, to demonstrate MBE's association with MLE, and to incorporate MBE/MLE's multiple linguistic sources, 'multicultural' remains. Secondly, while existing studies into MBE have focused on geographically urban contexts, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it is far more widespread than this. So 'urban' in its strictly geographical sense is perhaps unnecessarily limiting anyway.

MLE

The fact that MBE is characterised by its combination of features of MLE alongside features of the local variety means that it is impossible to provide a single description. In addition, a central characteristic of MLE itself is that it is generally conceptualised as a 'repertoire of features' drawn from, or influenced by, various input languages and varieties. This means that the speech of individuals and groups of individuals will vary considerably, as they navigate the linguistic and stylistic options available to them. However, it is possible to describe some of those MLE features which appear to be relatively stable within a possible MBE. These include (adapted from Cheshire et al 2011):

Monophthongisation (flattening) of the vowel sounds in words such as price, mouth, face, and

Raised position (produced with the tongue positioned slightly higher in the mouth) of the vowel sounds in face and

Lowered position (produced with the tongue positioned slightly lower in the mouth) of the vowel sounds in price and

Very fronted (produced with the tongue further forward in the mouth) pronunciation of the vowel sound in goose. Think of the pronunciation of French tu.

DH-stopping - using 'd' for 'th' in words such as them and

TH-stopping - using 't' for 'th' in words such as three or

Article simplification - using 'a' for all indefinite articles, regardless of whether the next sound is a vowel. Using 'thuh' for all definite articles rather than 'thee' before a vowel.

'Man' as pronoun, as in man (I, he) did this.

Use of pragmatic markers you get me, innit.

MBE speakers will use some or all of these features, but will also retain local or supra-local accent features. What will be interesting to explore in future research is what happens when an MLE feature is in opposition with a local feature (for example, what if a salient local feature happened to be a backed GOOSE vowel).

Local vs hyper-local

Although local and supra-local features are maintained, there is some research to suggest that MBE speakers might reject hyper-local features. For example, MBE speakers in Manchester maintain the supralocal northern English variety of the vowel sound in words like strut (to rhyme with put), or bath (to rhyme with math), but they may not use the more (stereo)typically local pronunciations of the vowel sound in letter ('lettOH') or in happy ('happEH').

Vernacular or style?

The extent to which MBE can be viewed as a vernacular (a natural, unconscious way of speaking), or as a style (consciously or subconsciously used to enact particular identities) is partly dependent on your own view of language and its relationship to other social behaviours. It is likely that both perspectives have some value. Language is always changing, and it is probable that MBE is bringing about some fundamental shifts in pronunciation. At the same time, it is undoubtedly the case that MBE features are available to be used as a stylistic resource, especially alongside particular social practices.

More details will emerge as further research is carried out. Watch this space.
Rob Drummond, Feb 2021.
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Examples of MBE in Grime
Aitch (Manchester) - Straight Rhymez 1 Lady Leshurr (Birmingham) - Queen's Speech Ep 4 Afghan Dan (Blackpool) - Story Teller Dialect (Leeds) - Leeds Cypher
Academic studies referring to MBE (or equivalent)

Drummond, Rob. 2018. Researching Urban Youth Language and Identity. Palgrave-Macmillan.

Drummond, Rob. 2018. 'Maybe it's a grime [t]ing. TH-stopping in urban British youth'. Language in Society 47(2).

Fox, Sue; Khan Arfaan, and Torgersen, Eivind. 2011. 'The emergence and diffusion of Multicultural English'. In Kern, F. and Selting, M. (eds.) Ethnic Styles of Speaking in European Metropolitan Areas. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 19-44.

Paver, Alice. 2019. 'Mashallah, bruv man': Regional variation and multiethnolects in British Pakistani Men. Unpublished MSc thesis, University of York.

For the definitive academic description of MLE, see:

Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. & Torgersen, E. (2011). Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural London English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2):151-96.
There are plenty of accessible articles and descriptions of MLE online. A great place to start is Tony Thorne's website: https://language-and-innovation.com/tag/mle/

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The term Multicultural British English (MBE) describes the idea of an over-arching variety of English that is related to, and which arguably emerged from, Multicultural London English (MLE). The concept was originally developed following research carried out in Manchester, where it was observed that young people were using MLE speech features within their otherwise typical local or supralocal varieties.

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Blog website which includes lots of research and podcasts relating to UK Attitudes to Language

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The Language Revolution - Changing UK attitudes to languages

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In March of this year, just as the pandemic was upending the way we live, a crime was committed. A young woman, whose name was Breonna Taylor, was killed, as an early local news report described, "inside a home [...] in the middle of an officer-involved shooting. [...] Police discovered Taylor inside the secured home, who was found dead from the gunfire."

Through the linguistic fog, we can just about make out what happened, and who might have been the perpetrators of this crime. The public has grown increasingly aware of the power of language to uphold the powers that be, from politicians to police. Many have pointed out how unbalanced and troubling this kind of manipulative indirect language can be. Even when the facts are as clear as day, media reporting of crimes where the police might be the instigators uses language that obscures those known facts. Why?

In the phrase "officer-involved shooting," language itself aggressively suppresses law enforcement's own aggressive actions.

Though it's a fact that Taylor was in her own home, media reports can render it more impersonally as "a home" or "a residence," subduing the horrific image of being attacked in the very place we tend to feel the safest.

And likewise, in the phrase "officer-involved shooting," language itself aggressively suppresses the police force's own aggressive actions. Since its first appearance in the 1970s, this has been a problematic euphemism, stemming from technical police jargon that many journalists have persistently repeated in their reporting, in strange headlines like " Death of man in officer-involved shooting ruled a suicide" and " Pensacola police involved in officer-involved shooting in downtown Pensacola."

We've heard of the so-called victimless crime, but can there be such a thing as a perpetrator-less crime? Who can we blame for these acts when our own language is used so often, so fearfully, to avoid naming names?

All human cultures have their secrets, taboo subjects that must not be mentioned, at least in polite society: the grubby experiences of being human, from bodily functions to how we function with each other in society. But what happens when we need to mention the unmentionable, as we so often do?

There's a certain safety in indirect language and other linguistic methods of preventing the mud of the unmentionable from sticking to clean-living folk, or what Judith T. Irvine, in her essay "Leaky Registers and Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorillas," calls a kind of " linguistic cordon sanitaire."

For myriad reasons, we can use forms of indirect and coded language such as euphemisms ( "officer-involved shooting," "collateral damage," "going to the restroom"). Euphemisms are supposed to be nice ways of saying not-so-nice things. According to one researcher, through euphemism " distasteful activities can lose their repugnancy, harmful conduct can be made respectable, and that which is socially unacceptable can be transformed into something socially approved."

Passives can be used (by whom?) (such as "she was found dead from the gunfire," "mistakes were made"), truncated to suppress the human agent until actions appear to simply happen, with no one responsible for them at all. There are other linguistic hedges, such as existential constructions ( "there was a shooting"), or turning an active verb into an impersonal and important-sounding nominalization (such as "incarceration"). These are found in quite a lot of technical jargon, downplaying the impact of the very act itself.

We might also separate ourselves from unmentionable events by shifting the footing and the framing when reporting information, by putting those noxious words we're too timid to voice into other people's mouths. Or so they say. Or, says Irvine, we could shift the register, by talking about you know what and you know who in more formal, technical, or Latinate terminology (a well-known learnèd way of archly beating around the bush about the "naughty bits").

The euphemism, one of the oldest forms of language, covers up the human condition. "Thus gentlemen dine, perspire, and expectorate while peasants eat, sweat, and spit," as Irvine puts it. But euphemisms are not just for keeping up appearances as we Tom Ripley ourselves up the class ladder.

We use this kind of language often in an effort to be tactful, polite, and to avoid confrontation and minimize negativity, which are cooperative ways to communicate with each other-usually a good thing. By not taking a more direct linguistic stance, language can appear to be more neutral and objective, disconnected from the personal.

So what harm can there really be in the humble euphemism or its linguistically indirect colleagues?

Rather than reporting that, say, a politician told a lie, publications may prefer to use more roundabout phrases.

What some studies have found is that people are actually more likely to use euphemisms to save face socially than in consideration of the feelings of others. This, coupled with the desire to sound neutral, objective, and authoritative, can lead journalists to use euphemistic language to reframe a story obliquely, even when the facts themselves are indisputable. This can obscure or omit important information. Rather than reporting that, say, a politician told a lie, publications may prefer to use more roundabout phrases like the rather archaic "falsehood" or the technical-sounding "misrepresentation," if they don't avoid addressing it at all. By reframing events to sound more socially acceptable, to avoid the disagreeable, such tentative reporting not only reveals hidden biases and value judgments, it also can fall into ethical traps that have real-world and legal repercussions.

Researchers Caitlin M. Fausey and Lera Boroditsky ask the simple question " When bad things happen, how do we decide who is to blame and how much they should be punished? " The language of police reports, legal statements, and public discussions can include active phrasing with an agent, but also passive or indirect constructions with no agent. Can the differences between these constructions influence our ideas of who is to blame, how much we blame them, and how financially liable we think they are as a result? Even if it's a well-known event we can observe with our own eyes, the answer is: probably.

"For example," Fausey and Boroditsky write, "in the 197,745 trials held between 1674 and 1913 at London's central criminal court [...], cases with the agentive phrase 'broke it' in the court records resulted in a guilty verdict more often than did cases with the nonagentive phrase 'it broke' [...]. In the most serious of cases (when the charge was 'killing'), the transitive/intransitive contrast as marked by different verbs also predicted verdicts. Saying 'killed' resulted in more guilty verdicts than did saying 'died'."

Because it's impossible to tell whether these historical cases were just due to reports tending to use more active, agentive language when the perpetrator was clearly more guilty, the researchers set out to test the impact of this kind of language framing. Hundreds of informants were asked to view certain reporting about the infamous Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" incident, in which Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson's costume a little too shockingly. The outcome was that Jackson was publicly blamed and shamed, CBS was fined half a million dollars for public indecency, and Justin Timberlake, whose actual fault it was for doing the ripping, went on to have a long and storied career. The linguistic experiment found that just changing the language had a strong impact not only on how people viewed Timberlake's culpability but also on how much they believed he should be fined. When reports of the incident used more direct language, people believed Timberlake should pay an extra $30,000 in fines. This was 53 percent higher than what people thought he should be fined when the reports used more indirect language. So, yes, language matters.

The research supports the fact that euphemisms and other indirect language can not only affect people's perceptions of blame, it can also encourage unethical acts, because people tend to view actions as legal or appropriate when described euphemistically-presenting "bribes" as a "soft commission," for example. Repetition of euphemisms can lead people to forget what ethical problems they once arose from, such as in phrases like "creative accounting" or "right-sizing," which are wholly disconnected from any corporate illegality or ruthlessness.

The morality of the euphemism can certainly be complex, particularly when it comes to violent crime. On the one hand, traumatic experiences can be difficult for survivors and even eyewitnesses to articulate directly. But on the other, the very use of indirect, euphemistic, or coded language to ensure safety can also cause observers to downplay the seriousness of the crime and obscure the perpetrator's responsibility for that crime.

In one serious case, researchers Kristen Lucas and Jeremy P. Fyke investigate how the indirect, euphemistic language used in the discourse around the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse case at Penn State University enabled a "decade-long organizational cover-up that ran concurrently with Sandusky's pattern of abuse." In order to save face and avoid embarrassment and bad publicity for the football team, Penn State leaders used the ambiguous interpretation of euphemisms, such as "horsing around," to conceal the facts of the case and downplay the severity of what was reported to them.

Though it was true that, shockingly, no one directly reported the crimes to the authorities, Lucas and Fyke point out that that doesn't mean employees weren't talking and trying to report the crimes to the university's chain of command. This is not completely surprising, as research shows that organizations may often suppress dissent, and "subordinates often are fearful of engaging in critical upward communication, with some of the most cited reasons for remaining silent being fear of being labeled as a troublemaker, concern for ruining relationships, fear of being punished, or concern about the organizational hierarchy."

When graduate assistant Michael McQueary first reported the sexual assault he witnessed involving then-assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, possibly due to the upsetting nature of the event, his language was euphemistic, but he believed the meaning was clear. This meaning was semantically diluted and bleached as it moved up the chain of command, from euphemistic language such as "in the shower with a little boy," "something was going wrong," and "It was way over the lines" to, astonishingly, "horsing around," "playful," and "kind of wrestling."

In the current debate about police brutality and racial bias, it is all the more important to be aware of what influence language can have on ordinary people's lives. As Orwell once said, "[...] if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Though euphemisms and other linguistic hedges have their place in how we communicate, the repeated use of troubling euphemistic messaging, such as "officer-involved shooting," does have an impact on whether perpetrators are ultimately held responsible for their crimes. Framing reports about crimes euphemistically, or omitting disagreeable information out of fear of offending, can certainly have an effect on how people understand the serious moral implications of a situation. It can also allow leaders to mindlessly act or to deliberately ignore ethical crimes while morally justifying their decisions based on more favorable semantics of a form of language that exists to hide the unpleasantly dark truths in human nature.
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The Ethical Life of Euphemisms | JSTOR Daily

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In March of this year, just as the pandemic was upending the way we live, a crime was committed. A young woman, whose name was Breonna Taylor, was killed, as an early local news report described, "inside a home [...] in the middle of an officer-involved shooting. [...]

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Why You Shouldn’t Judge An Accent | Ethan Kutlu | TEDxUF

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Good for exam practice

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Since starting my online campaign to #EndPeriodPlastic, there are a few questions I get asked regularly, including; 'Where can I access eco-friendly period products?' and 'What options are out there and what brands do you recommend?'.

So, here we go, all hail the eco-period brand bible in all its glory! I have put together this full list of all the eco-friendly period brands and products that are available in the UK both online and in shops! The list includes eco-friendly tampons and pads as well as reusables like menstrual cups, cloth pads, period pants and reusable tampon applicators.

​Brands are listed A-Z , plus I've included links to their online websites as well as the information on where you can access them in a UK store near you! This is not an AD or sponsored blog post, it is simply a list of all the different products you can get and where they are available in the UK, to make it easier for you to find them.

I haven't singled out the ones I prefer or use as I am brand neutral when it comes to eco-friendly brands and champion all that avoid plastic! I hope that you find this resource useful and if you decide to wave goodbye to conventional and opt for eco, use the hashtag #GoGreenOnYourFlow on social media and I'll share!

If you'd like to know more about how you can ditch plastic at that time of the month, check out my other blog here for more information.

​Tampons and Pads
DAME - Digital/non-app tampons available on their website and in Boots, Sainsbury's and Waitrose stores nationwide.
Flo - Range of tampons (avoid plant-based plastic apps!) and pads available on their website and in Boots and Morrisons stores nationwide.
Hey Girls - Range of tampons (avoid plant-based plastic apps!) and pads available on their website and in Asda, Waitrose and some Co-op stores.
Kind Organic - Range of tampons and pads available on their website and in Boots stores nationwide.
Lil-Lets - Organic Range - Range of tampons and pads available online at Ocado, and Superdrug and available in Boots and Waitrose stores nationwide.
Morrisons - Range of tampons, pads and pantyliners available in some Morrisons stores nationwide and online.
Natracare - Range of tampons and pads available on some online shops like Ethical Superstore and in Waitrose and independent health stores nationwide.
Organyc - Range of tampons (avoid plant-based plastic apps) and pads available on their website and in some independent health stores.
Superdrug - Range of pads and pantyliners available online and in Superdrug stores nationwide.
TOTM - Range of tampons and pads available on their website and in Tesco and Superdrug stores nationwide.
Yoni - Range of tampons and pads available on their website and in Sainsbury's stores nationwide.

Tampons and Pads available online only:
Grace & Green - Range of tampons and pads available on their website.
Mondays - Range of tampons and pads available on their website.
&SISTERS - Range of tampons and pads available on their website.
Freda - Delivery subscription of a range of tampons (avoid plant-based plastic apps) and pads available on their website.
OHNE - Tampon only delivery subscription available on their website.
Yoppie - Range of tampons and pads available on their website.

Cups:
Boots - Available on their website and in Boots stores nationwide.
Diva Cup - Available on their website and in some independent shops.
Hey Girls - Available on their website and in Asda, Waitrose and some Co-op stores.
Intimina - Available on their website and in Sainsbury's stores.
Kind Organic - Available on their website and in Boots stores.
Lunette - Available on their website.
Mooncup - Available on their website and in Boots stores.
Organicup - Available on their website and in Holland & Barrett and some Superdrug stores.
Ruby Cup - Available on their website and in some independent health stores.
Saalt - Available on their website.
&SISTERS - Available on their website.
TOTM - Available on their website and in Tesco and Superdrug stores.

Cloth Pads:
Bloom & Nora - Available on their website and in Holland & Barrett stores.
Cheeky Wipes - Available on their website.
Earthwise Girls - Available on their website.
Eco Femme - Available on their website and in some independent health stores.
Ethixx - Available on their website.
Hey Girls - Available on their website and in some independent health stores.
Honour Your Flow - Available on their website and in some independent health stores.
Imse Vimse - Available on their website and Ethical Superstore.

Period Pants
Cheeky Wipes - Available on their website.
Flux - Available on their website and in Holland & Barrett stores.
Hey Girls - Available on their website.
Modibodi - Available on their website - (Side note: Their main range contains wool, so if you're plant-based, vegan or just don't want it, shop their vegan range instead.)
Thinx - Available on their website and in some Boots stores.
WUKA - Available on their website and in Sainbury's.

Reusable Tampon Applicator:
DAME - Available on their website and in Boots, Sainsbury's and Waitrose stores nationwide.
​ TOTM - Available on Superdrug online and in Tesco stores nationwide.
Thinx - Available on their website.

What is your favourite product to use at that time of the month? If you know of any brands that I have missed which should be added, please send me a message! This list will be continually updated.

From meeting period industry giants like Procter & Gamble to working with supermarkets and local authorities to bring about positive change and even winning an award, what a year 2019 has been! This year has been a whirlwind and a journey, transforming me from the postal worker that started a petition in 2018 to an environmental activist.

Since there's been so much happening this year with the campaign and the work I've been doing urging governments and councils to use their period poverty funding on eco-friendly products, I thought I'd recap and share everything that's happened this year!

Whilst this is a list of certain things that have happened, there is a lot more going on behind the scenes like; persistently contacting decision makers, sending hundreds of emails, lots of meetings, coming up with campaign ideas, coordinating campaign actions, drinking lots of tea and happy dancing whenever there is a result.

The end period plastic campaign.
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In 2019 the campaign and it's thousands of supporters took action on manufacturers Lil-lets and Procter & Gamble and retailers Morrisons and Superdrug.

In January I held a demonstration alone outside Lil-lets head office in Solihull and delivered the petition to them.

I've met with six of the fourteen manufacturers and supermarkets that are decision makers on the campaign, these being Procter & Gamble (owners of Tampax and Always), Boots, Bodyform, Superdrug, Sainsbury's and Tesco. I delivered the petition, spoke to them about the unnecessary plastic in their products, the campaign and why they need to bring about change.

In August the campaigning resulted in supermarket Sainsbury's stopping the production of their own-brand plastic tampon applicators. They are the first decision maker to make this move and it will save 2.7 tonnes of plastic each year.

The campaign has been featured in a variety of publications including The Guardian, Mashable, Metro, Virgin and Ethical Consumer.

​
I'm absolutely thrilled and honoured that for my campaigning and activism efforts I've been named on the Independent's Happy List and the BBC's 100 Women list, which celebrates influential and inspirational women around the globe! The campaign has also won an amazing Surfer's Against Sewage Plastic Free Award for best campaign!

A film about the campaign and my journey, that I had the pleasure of making with The Planet Shine.

Campaigning for period poverty funding to be spent on eco-friendly period products.

A lot of the work I've been doing this year has been calling on the UK and Welsh Governments to use their period poverty funding on eco-friendly products. If you don't know what this funding is, it makes menstrual products freely available to pupils in primary and secondary schools across the UK. The conventional tampons and pads usually provided with funding contain high amounts of plastic, which is why I've been pushing for it to be spent on eco-friendly versions, so that we can tackle period poverty, the plastic crisis and protect the environment simultaneously. ​

In April, I used the campaign as a platform to urge UK Government to spend the funding sustainably. Supporters got involved by sending emails to the Department of Education.

In May, I contacted local authorities across Wales as the funding is spent on a council by council basis, with councils deciding what to use the funding on. I began to meet Welsh councils and spoke to them about how they could use the funding in a green way.

In June, I met with Green MP Caroline Lucas to discuss my concerns about how the UK Government's funding would be spent. Together we worked on an early day motion to raise this issue in parliament and gather cross party support.

I contacted all MPs asking them to sign the EDM, many campaign supporters joined in by asking their local MPs to do the same. The EDM got almost 70 signatures in total, with many more MPs pledging to sign after the 2019 session closed.

In September, Caerphilly Council whom I'd been working with since May shared the news publicly that they were committed to spending all of their funding sustainably! This positive move by the forward-thinking local authority is a UK and global first.

I've been meeting with other councils in Wales since this news and many are considering the move, which is really exciting.

What the UK Government's funding is going to be spent on remains unclear. After pushing for eco-friendly products to be bought they have added 'environmentally-friendly pads and tampons' to the list of products that will be available for schools to choose from as well as reusable cups and cloth pads.

Support.

​Something that I've been reflecting on has been the sheer amount of support that I've received for what I am doing. From individuals to charities and organisations this overwhelming support has helped lift me and constantly made me feel empowered and inspired to continue addressing this issue with decision makers and local authorities and taking action. Thank you for supporting me.

A particular highlight of 2019 for me is when my head took over the BBC newsroom.

2020.
​
I think we all want to start seeing global leaders, governments and manufacturers not just saying the right things, but also taking real action. We've seen the impacts, 2020 is the start of a new decade and it's time for conversations and discussions that lead to definitive changes being made. I don't just hope for a year of green action, but instead, a decade of green action.

I am excited for what 2020 is going to bring, change is most definitely coming. I will continue to fight and tackle this and any issue that I can to make this world a better place. I urge anyone who has something that they are passionate about or something that niggles away at them, to stand up and make their voice heard. We can all make a difference.

People are cutting plastic out of their lives left, right and center, looking for any opportunity to go that one step further to ditch unnecessary waste for a better planet, but have you ever thought about what you use on your period? In early 2018, I came to realize for the first time that the products I had been using since I started my period, contained up to 90% plastic! This realization led me to want to raise awareness about this issue and take action

Plastic Free July is here and in preparation I have put together this blog about how everyone who has a period, from individuals, to offices and workplaces can ditch plastic at that time of the month! Prepare yourself for period puns and a flow of tips as I show you how you can Go Green On Your Flow; Let's dive in!

How you can make a difference as an individual:
​
Say 'See ya later Plastic Applicator'!
Plastic tampon applicators are a big issue, they are used for a matter of seconds, yet take centuries to break down. If you use them, this is a great first step to cut down on unnecessary plastic and luckily, you'll be able to ditch them in no time with the abundance of alternatives out there:
Cardboard applicators: Simply switch from a plastic applicator to cardboard! They were the first applicators around, do the same job as plastic, without the negative environmental impacts and won't stick around for centuries!
Non-Applicators: No applicator, no problem! Non-apps are the perfect choice if you aren't fussed about applicators, you also cut down on excess waste - what's not to like? Do be aware however, that the majority of non-apps come with plastic wrapping them.
Reusable Applicator: Don't want to go applicator-free, but cardboard isn't quite right for you either? What about a reusable applicator? This new period tech is designed so that you never need another applicator again! They are fantastic, as you just keep re-using them, over and over again!

Make the switch to plastic-free tampons and pads!
At school during period education, we are given branded tampons and pads, this then starts a consumer cycle and those brands become our go-to for the foreseeable future.

The truth is mainstream period brands contain up to 90% plastic, are used for 4-8 hours, disposed of and then take over 500 years to break down. You can take direct action to ditch plastic on your period, by swapping out plastic laden tampons, pads and pantyliners in favor of eco-friendly versions that do the same job, minus the plastic!

There are countless companies out there producing plastic-free alternatives, some since the 80's! This is a great switch and one that is easily made, there are now eco-friendly ranges available in most supermarkets and health food stores nationwide, due to the campaigns action.

Even if you use eco-period products, please NEVER flush them! It is estimated that 2.5 Million Tampons, 1.4 Million Pads and 700,000 Pantyliners are flushed down UK toilets every day, collectively adding up to a horrifying 2 Billion a year! Because water companies can't capture everything that is wrongly flushed, it can then end up in waterways and eventually the ocean. Over time, they break down into smaller pieces, known as micro-plastics and fibres, which then pose a further threat to marine-life and ecosystems.

Give reusables a go!
Want to give something else a try? Reusables might be just the thing for you. There are multiple benefits to them, you not only save a huge amount of money, but you also reduce the number of products you use, meaning less waste. Let's explore the reusable choices available:
Menstrual Cups are becoming a popular choice for people looking for reusable period products. They are insertable and can be used for 4-12 hours at a time depending on your flow, it is then removed, emptied, rinsed and reinserted! Though their initial cost is slightly high, they can be used for 10 years, meaning you save a huge amount of money in the long run!
Washable pads aren't spoken about very often, as the conversation surrounding reusable menstrual products is usually dominated by cups. Not everyone likes insertable products like tampons or cups, for whatever reason, which is where reusable pads come in! They are just like disposable pads, but instead of throwing them away after each use, you wash and reuse them again and again! They are a fantastic choice and come in a variety of shapes, sizes and patterns, meaning you can find the perfect one to suit you and your flow!
Period pants are a pretty new innovation and you may not have heard of them before but are proving to be a big hit! Just like washable pads, they can be washed after each use and used repeatedly for years to come. They are a bit on the pricier side, but they are super comfy, and have you covered even on your heaviest days!

How your workplace can break the plastic cycle, period.
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Actively making changes in our lives is a great way to cut the use of plastic, but have you ever thought of the impact you could have by bringing that conversation into your workplace or business? Here is how your workplace can make a positive difference to the planet by having a green flow:
Provide plastic-free tampons and pads: If you provide or are thinking of making period products available to your employees or customers, then why not purchase eco-friendly products instead of plastic laden mainstream brands? This way you will be taking a forward thinking and incredibly positive step to provide people with what they need, whilst tackling the plastic crisis and protecting the environment simultaneously!
Spread the word: If your workplace freely stocks mainstream brands for you and your colleagues, they are more than likely unaware that they contain plastic. Start a conversation and speak to them about your thoughts and concerns, you can then use this as an opportunity to ask/suggest if they can stock an eco-friendly brand instead!
Don't flush: Put a Do-Not-Flush sticker or notification on the back of all toilet doors, so that employees can be made aware that they shouldn't be flushing anything down the toilet apart from pee, paper and poo!

In April, 20 shops scattered across the UK and Ireland teamed up with me to take positive action! Each shop got involved by putting an Eco Period Box in their store as a drop off point for eco-friendly donations. After the month of action ended, everything collected was then donated to a charity of each shop's choice! You can see a list of who got involved here.

April buzzed with conversations surrounding the issue of period poverty and the donations were well and truly flowing throughout. It was lovely watching all the communities coming together to make a positive difference to help support people in their area who are impacted by period poverty.

I also had the opportunity to take the Eco Period Box to the Pebble Fest in London, which acted as a drop off point, to collect donations from those who attended. The engagement was brilliant, and I was delighted that so many people came over to start conversations and openly discuss the issue. Everything donated at the event went to a London charity, near to where the event was held, called Hestia, who provide support to people in crisis.
Thousands of eco-friendly tampons, pads and reusables were donated, collected and distributed to charities allover the UK and Ireland, and that is down to everyone who contributed to their local box in April!
​So, thank you for donating and making a difference to the individuals in your community that are affected by period poverty! I also want to say a big thank you to the incredible shops, who enthusiastically welcomed this campaign into their space and got involved with such pride, this wouldn't have been anywhere near as special without you, and thank you to Pebble, who let me have a box at their event!
Eco Period Box News:

I'm delighted to announce that both Small Changes in Dublin and The Eco Larder in Edinburgh have decided to carry on having the Eco Period Box in-store for the foreseeable future, with Small Changes donations going to The Homeless Period Ireland and The Eco Larder's to Edinburgh Women's Aid! This is fantastic news, so thank you to them for continuing to take action!

Leeds shop The Jar Tree were inspired by charity Freedom 4 Girls, who they donated to, and started doing pad making workshops! The workshops have proven to be so popular, that they are going to continue hosting them!

​In December I addressed period poverty by taking action with my Eco Period Box campaign. The campaign encouraged everyone to join in and make a positive difference by donating eco-friendly period care to those affected by period poverty. It was a success, with individuals, groups and companies coming together to get involved and over 4,000 plastic-free period products and 40 reusables were collected, distributed and donated all over the UK!

Although the campaign was originally for December, many have asked whether it would be extended into the new year and I'm excited to announce that following its success, it is coming back in April! I wanted even more people to benefit from it this time, which is why I have been in touch with shops throughout the UK and Ireland to bring the campaign to their area!

20 shops across the UK and Ireland are taking part to help support people locally that are affected by period poverty by having an Eco Period Box, which people can donate to! This will be running from the 1st-30th and all donations collected, will be given to a local charity of their choice.

What is period poverty?
Period poverty affects thousands of individuals each year, including those at school, those that are homeless, refugees and those who simply cannot afford period care due to financial constraints. I was saddened by the thought of people missing out on their education and opportunities simply because they cannot afford the essentials they need, which is why I started the Eco Period Box.

What are eco-friendly period products?
Conventional tampons and pads contain up to 90% plastic and are constantly being produced, used for 4-8 hours, disposed of and then take over 500 years to break down. Eco-friendly period products are just like their conventional counterparts but without the unnecessary plastic content.
There are countless alternatives available including plastic-free tampons, pads and pantyliners or reusables such as menstrual cups and washable pads or pants!

Why donate 'eco'?
I set up the Eco Period Box to address period poverty in a way that I feel truly benefits all, plastic-free period products and reusables are not only better for the people using them, but they also have a minimal environmental impact, which is really important. I also believe that everyone, no matter their situation, deserves a choice in what they use.

Where do I get eco-products and how do I donate?
The shops that are taking part this month by having a box in-store stock plastic-free tampons and pads and/or reusables, so you don't need to bring a donation with you before you come to the shop. To make a donation, you can simply pop the item(s) you wish to donate into your basket, go to till, purchase them and then say to a member of staff that you wish to contribute the item(s) to their Eco Period Box, and then drop your donation in!
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Here are the shops that are getting involved, if you have one nearby it would be great if you could make a contribution to their box, and if you do it would be fantastic if you could take a picture and post it online using #EcoPeriodBox!

Bristol - Zero Green
Their address is 12 North Street, Bristol, BS3 1HT
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Their donations will be going to No More Taboo.

York - Tullivers
Their address is 1-2 Colliergate, York YO1 8BP
You can find them on Facebook and Twitter.
Their donations will be going to Kyra Womens Project.

Nottingham - Dash Vegan
Their address is Cobden Chambers, Pelham street Nottingham, NG1 2ED.
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Their donations will be going to The Red Box Project Nottingham.

Edinburgh - The Eco Larder
Their address is 200 Morrison Street, Edinburgh, EH3 8EB
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
They are giving their donations to a local charity.

Edinburgh - The New Leaf Co-op
Their address is 23 Argyle Place EH9 1JJ
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
They are giving their donations to a local charity.

Plymouth - Ethica
Their address is 155 Armada Way, Plymouth, PL1 1HY
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
​Their donations will be going to The Plymouth Red Box Project.

Dublin - Small Changes Wholefoods Store
Their address is 40 Drumcondra Rd. Lower, Drumcondra, Dublin 9
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Their donations will be going to Homeless Period Ireland.

Rugby - Wild & Free
Their address is 6 Bank Street, Rugby, CV21 2QE
You can find them on Facebook and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to Rugby Foodbank.

Manchester - The Eighth Day Co-op Ltd
Their address is 111 Oxford Road, Manchester, M1 7DU
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to Emmeline's Pantry.

Sheffield - New Roots
Their address is 347 Glossop Road, Sheffield S11 8RE
​You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to the Campaign Against Period Poverty.

Taunton - Lesser Litter
Their address is 11 Paul Street, Taunton, TA1 3PF
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
​Their donations will be going to a local charity.

Leeds - The Jar Tree
Their address is Unit BS1, Row B, Leeds Kirkgate Market, Vicar Lane, LS2 7HY
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
​Their donations will be going to Freedom 4 Girls.

Northampton - Daily Bread Co-operative
Their address is Daily Bread Co-op, Bedford Road, Northampton, NN4 7AD
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
​Their donations will be going to The Red Box Project Northampton.

Colchester - An Ethical Life
Their address is St Mary's Road, Great Bentley, Colchester, CO7 8NJ
You can find them on Facebook and Instagram.
Their donations will be going to a local charity.

Swansea - Brontosaurus
Their address is 23B Swansea Indoor Market, Swansea
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Their donations will be going to Matthew's House.

Shaftesbury - Coconut and Cotton
Their address is Unit 5A Swans Yard, Shaftesbury, Dorset, SP7 8JQ
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to a local charity.

Birmingham - Indigo Wholefoods
Their address is 50-52 St Mary's Row, Birmingham, B13 8JG
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to a local charity.

Bangor - Dimensions Health Store
Their address is 15 Holyhead Road, Bangor, Gwynedd
You can find them on Facebook.
​Their donations will be going to a local charity.

Southport - Nature's Remedies
Their address is 3 Market Street, Southport, PR8 1HH.
You can find them on Facebook and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to The Red Box Project Southport.
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Marlborough - Packaging Not Included
Their address is Unit 7 Hughenden Yard, High Street, Marlborough, Wiltshire, SN8 1LT
You can find them on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
​Their donations will be going to a local charity.

Thank you so much to all the shops that are getting involved to help support their local areas by taking Eco Period Action for Good! If you have a shop that sells plastic-free period products and/or reusables and would like to have a box in your shop, please get in touch by sending me a message through the contact page!

In 2018 the threat of plastic pollution and its adverse effects on the environment gained huge media coverage. Period products are no exception, with many becoming aware for the first time just like me that the tampons and pads that we had been using for years contained high amounts of plastic. That's why I took a stand against period plastic last year by starting a petition, which calls on key manufacturers and supermarkets to go plastic-free. Taking on these large multinational companies is a huge task, but one I am willing to take on; as the environment is at stake!

These products can contain up to 90% plastic, are constantly manufactured and discarded, with an estimated 100 billion disposed of annually worldwide; nearly all of which contain plastics! They can enter rivers and oceans and end up on beaches. In fact, a report by the European Commission found that period items are the fifth most common waste washed up on beaches!

This happens when they are incorrectly flushed down toilets, and shockingly an estimated up to 2 billion tampons, pads and applicators are flushed in the UK annually! This pollutes and negatively impacts the environment and contributes to ocean plastic, which kills around 1 million sea birds and 100,000 sea mammals, marine turtles and countless fish yearly. Overtime their plastic content disintegrates into smaller pieces, known as micro-plastics and fibres, which pose a further threat to marine-life and ecosystems.

They also contribute to over 200,000 tonnes of landfill waste every year, however, any not sent to landfill may be incinerated with the potential to release toxins due to their high plastic and synthetic content. But no matter where they end up, whether at the bottom of the sea, in landfill or on a beach, they will remain there for hundreds of years and pose constant danger to animals and birds.

Plastic applicators are another major issue stemming from the period industry. They are found so often on beaches that many have nicknamed them 'beach whistles'. Applicators are used for a matter of seconds and should never be made from a material that takes centuries to decompose. There is no excuse for this excessive use of plastic when there are environmentally-friendly alternatives such as cardboard applicators or non-applicator tampons! That's why this year I'm saying "See ya later plastic applicator!" and why I'm determined to make 2019 the year of the plastic-free period. ​

The issue of period plastic is incredibly important because the harmful impacts they are having on the environment, oceans and wildlife is completely avoidable, certainly as there are companies who have produced eco-friendly alternatives since the 80's. Therefore, it is evident that their plastic content is unnecessary, and this is why over 107,000 have signed the petition and continue to act because it is obvious that change must happen.

Last year we called upon Tesco and Sainsbury's to take responsibility by removing plastic from their period care and to make eco-friendly options available in-store. Our actions paid off. By standing up together and making our voices heard, they could not ignore consumer demand and both supermarkets responded by stocking a range of eco-friendly period care, including reusable cups, nationwide!

I've stepped things up in 2019, and kicked this year of action off by tackling two major period brands. The action on Lil-Lets has just taken place but next week I will be calling on Procter and Gamble who own Tampax and Always - regarding their needless use of plastic applicators and the wider issue of plastic in their tampons, pads and packaging!

Join me in taking action by signing and following updates, so that we can make 2019 the year of change; the 'Year of the Plastic-Free Period!'

I put the last item into my box yesterday which means that Eco Period Box 2018 has come to an end but what an incredible of month it has been! It has received fantastic media coverage and has been featured in a shop and at a festival in December which helped collect even more donations and start conversations about the issue of period poverty and the individuals it wrongly impacts.

Countless individuals and companies got involved with giving and I would like to thank everyone who joined me in taking action for good in December whether you donated to your local period poverty charity or food bank or made a donation online!

Altogether with the donations sent to me and pictures posted online combined we have collected:

835 tampons and 3,339 pads and pantyliners which will help supply 189 individuals with the essentials they need!

33 reusable pads which will support 6 individuals for 6 years with their periods - a total of 432!

6 menstrual cups which will support 6 individuals for 10 years with their periods - a total of 720!

Over the next few weeks I will be taking donations to various charities and food banks, you will be able to see these on all my social media platforms or by searching for #EcoPeriodBox!
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Thank you for your support with Eco Period Action for Good! Eco Period Box 2018 has been completed but there are going to be regular updates throughout the year!

Since I started my petition in February and began campaigning for change, I have become aware of just how many problems there are surrounding menstruation, through the fantastic work and campaigning that inspiring individuals and groups are doing in this field. These issues range from the taboo in talking about periods, the environmental impacts of plastic in our period care and period poverty.

Period poverty wrongly affects so many, in fact according to Plan UK 1 in 10 girls between the ages of 14-21 cannot afford menstrual products and a shocking 137,000 have missed school because of this. And it does not only impact those at school, it also affects those that are homeless, refugees and those who simply cannot afford them. It really saddened me that in 2018 there are so many individuals out there who do not have access to these essentials and I wanted to address this by taking action!

After seeing reverse advent calendars last year in the aid of food banks, I felt compelled to do this but instead for period poverty! That is why this year, rather than giving gifts to family and friends for Christmas, I am putting an item each day throughout December into my Eco Period Box, which starts on December 1st and ends on the 31st, this will then be donated to a period poverty charity at the start of the New Year! ​​

It would be fantastic to have your support with Eco Period Action for Good this December, you can get involved by:

1. Sharing the Eco Period Box video

2. Donating an item

3. Setting up a box at work or at home

4. Encouraging others to get involved

5. Share what your doing on social media using the hashtag #ecoperiodbox!

The Red Box Project
The Red box Project is a community lead and driven initiative that quietly ensures that no young woman misses out on her education because of her period.
They accept tampons, pads and panty-liners.
You can donate to their locations spread across thehere

Bloody Good Period
Bloody Good Period is a not-for-profit charitable project, they currently supply 16 asylum seeker drop in centres based in London and Leeds with feminine hygiene products.
They accept sanitary pads and panty-liners (They don't take tampons and menstrual cups)
You send donations directly to them using the address: Bloody Good Period c/o SafeStore, Alexandra Palace Way, London, N8 7HP

​Freedom 4 Girls
Freedom4Girls is a UK-registered charity fighting period poverty. They actively support women and girls in the UK and in developing countries, who struggle to access safe sanitary protection.
They accept all menstrual products.
You can donate to Freedom 4 Girls donation stations throughout Leeds!

The Trussell Trust and Food Banks
The Trussell Trust has been operating for 20 years, they network over 420 foodbanks out of more than 1,200 centres across the UK and provide a minimum of three days' emergency food and support to people experiencing crisis.
They accept all menstrual products.
You can find and donate to your local Trussell Trust food bank here!

Local health food shops
​Most local health food shops sell a variety of eco-friendly tampons and pads that you can then donate to a period poverty charity or food bank in person!
Supermarkets
Supermarkets such as Tesco, Sainsbury's and some Asda and Waitrose stores sell a range of eco-friendly period care and if you don't have time to donate to a charity directly, a lot of supermarkets have a food bank donation point by their exits - if you do this please take a picture and use #ecoperiodbox to spread the word!
Online
There are multiple online stores where you can buy eco-friendly period care and get your order sent directly to a period poverty charity or food bank of your choice by using their address in the delivery details! If you do send an order it would be great if you could add 'Eco Period Box or Eco Period Action for Good' in the delivery note, so that we can see just how many donations have been received because of the action you have taken with eco period box!

If you have any questions or would like to contact me then you can either fill out the form on the contact page or email me at ella@elladaish.com - I will get back to you as soon as I can!

​It would be brilliant to have your support and anything you do or donate is truly appreciated!
​I can't wait to see your pictures, don't forget to use #ecoperiodbox in your social media posts.
​Let's get donating this December and make a positive difference! ​

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Since starting my online campaign to #EndPeriodPlastic, there are a few questions I get asked regularly, including; 'Where can I access eco-friendly period products?' and 'What options are out there and what brands do you recommend?'. So, here we go, all hail the eco-period brand bible in all its glory!

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Guardian Article

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Lockdown, the noun that has come to define so many lives across the world in 2020, has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary.

Lockdown is defined by Collins as "the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces", and its usage has boomed over the last year. The 4.5bn-word Collins Corpus, which contains written material from websites, books and newspapers, as well as spoken material from radio, television and conversations, registered a 6,000% increase in its usage. In 2019, there were 4,000 recorded instances of lockdown being used. In 2020, this had soared to more than a quarter of a million.

"Language is a reflection of the world around us and 2020 has been dominated by the global pandemic," says Collins language content consultant Helen Newstead. "We have chosen lockdown as our word of the year because it encapsulates the shared experience of billions of people who have had to restrict their daily lives in order to contain the virus. Lockdown has affected the way we work, study, shop, and socialise. With many countries entering a second lockdown, it is not a word of the year to celebrate but it is, perhaps, one that sums up the year for most of the world."

Other pandemic-related words such as coronavirus, social distancing, self-isolate and furlough were on the dictionary's list of the top 10 words. So was the term key worker. According to Collins, key worker saw a 60-fold increase in usage over the last year, which reflects "the importance attributed this year to professions considered to be essential to society".

The abbreviation BLM, for Black Lives Matter, also made the shortlist. Defined by Collins as "a movement that campaigns against racially motivated violence and oppression", it registered a 581% increase in usage.

Previous words of the year for Collins include climate strike in 2019, single-use in 2018, fake news in 2017, and Brexit in 2016. This year the top 10 included the word Megxit, defined as "the withdrawal of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from royal duties, announced in January 2020". Collins said the informal noun, modelled on Brexit, showed "just how firmly established that word now is in our lexicon".

Collins Dictionary top 10 words of 2020

coronavirus ( noun): any one of a group of RNA-containing viruses that can cause infectious illnesses of the respiratory tract, including COVID-19. So called because of their crown-like appearance in electron micrographs.

furlough ( noun): a temporary laying-off of employees, usually because there is insufficient work to occupy them; ( verb) to lay off (staff) temporarily. From Dutch verlof, from ver (for) and lof (leave); related to Swedish förlof.

key worker or keyworker ( noun, Brit): an employee in any of a number of professions considered to be essential to the functioning of society, for example teachers, police officers, health workers, shop workers, etc.

lockdown ( noun): the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces.

Megxit ( noun, informal):the withdrawal of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from royal duties, announced in January 2020. From Meg(han), Duchess of Sussex and (e)xit; influenced by Brexit.

mukbang ( noun, Korean): a video or webcast in which the host eats a large quantity of food for the entertainment of viewers. From meogneun (eating) and bangsong (broadcast).

self-isolate ( verb):to quarantine oneself if one has or suspects one has a contagious disease.

social distancing ( noun): the practice of maintaining a certain distance between oneself and other people in order to prevent infection with a disease. Also called: physical distancing > social distance or socially distance ( verb).

TikToker ( noun):a person who regularly shares or appears in videos on TikTok.
Topics

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Lockdown named word of the year by Collins Dictionary

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Lockdown, the noun that has come to define so many lives across the world in 2020, has been named word of the year by Collins Dictionary. Lockdown is defined by Collins as "the imposition of stringent restrictions on travel, social interaction, and access to public spaces", and its usage has boomed over the last year.

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Guardian article on accent and discrimination at universities

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Guardian article on accent and discrimination at universities

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Universities must act to eradicate discrimination against working-class students, including the mockery of regional accents, equality campaigners have said.

A Guardian investigation has found widespread evidence of students at some of the country's leading universities being ridiculed over their accents and backgrounds, in some cases prompting them to leave education.

The analysis found discrimination against working-class students was particularly prevalent among Russell Group universities. The group, which is made up of 24 institutions, has a reputation for academic excellence.

In a series of Guardian interviews, students past and present reported bullying and harassment over their accents and working-class backgrounds. Some said their academic ability was questioned because of the way they spoke.

The Social Mobility Commission (SMC), which monitors progress in improving social mobility in the UK, described the situation as unacceptable and said accents had become a "tangible barrier" for some students.

This week the Guardian re ported complaints of a "toxic attitude" towards some northern students at Durham University. Last month the university launched an inquiry after wealthy prospective freshers reportedly planned a competition to have sex with the poorest student they could find.

But experiences of classism and accent prejudice are not confined to Durham, said Sammy Wright, the lead commissioner on schools and higher education for the SMC. He said the government body had spent 18 months examining the differing chances for young people based on where they come from.

"We found an entrenched pattern in certain areas where social mobility is very low, and often the only way to grasp opportunities involved moving away from where they were brought up - to go to university or find jobs," said Wright, who is also vice-principal of Southmoor Academy in Sunderland.

"But we also found that social and economic disadvantage often hampered any chance to move out. Accent is a part of this, alongside cultural capital and social networks. In my own work in schools in the north-east, accent can become a marker of everything else, a tangible barrier - most of all to the young people themselves, who internalise a sense of social inferiority."

Wright said well-meaning university outreach teams were consistently failing in their efforts to reassure working-class students. "They promise their institutions are friendly and welcoming, but when that message comes in a home counties accent from bored middle-class students who have been sent into the north to deliver the message, my students are rightly sceptical."

The Sutton Trust, a charity that helps young people from disadvantaged backgrounds access higher education, called on top universities to do more to ensure an inclusive and supportive environment for all undergraduates.

Sir Peter Lampl, the trust's founder and chair, described the experiences of some students as "scandalous". "It's really tough for young people from low-income backgrounds to get into top universities. For this and for other reasons, it's completely unacceptable that they are discriminated against while they're there," he said.

Analysis by the Office for Students (OfS), the government's higher education regulator, shows that virtually all communities with the lowest levels of access to higher education are in industrial towns and cities of the north of England and the Midlands, and in coastal towns. For example, the most recent data shows that 55% of young people in London go into higher education but only 40% in the north-east.

The OfS director for fair access and participation, Chris Millward, said the issue of accent prejudice spoke to deeper inequalities in the education system. "It is crucial that universities strive to create an open and inclusive culture for all. There is no such thing as a 'right' accent or background for higher education - all students deserve the opportunity to thrive, no matter where they come from," he said.

Sara Khan, a vice-president of the National Union of Students, said working-class students were sold a "myth of meritocracy", but in some cases the reality was starkly different.

"As long as working-class students have to pay for education, work alongside their studies to cover basic necessities, and are saddled with debt for the rest of their lives, higher education will never be a welcoming environment for them," she said. "It is unfortunately inevitable that in a system like this, such students would face prejudice and harassment, which is only the tip of the iceberg regarding the classism in our education system."

The Russell Group has been contacted for comment.

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UK's top universities urged to act on classism and accent prejudice

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Universities must act to eradicate discrimination against working-class students, including the mockery of regional accents, equality campaigners have said. A Guardian investigation has found widespread evidence of students at some of the country's leading universities being ridiculed over their accents and backgrounds, in some cases prompting them to leave education.

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Accents and discrimination

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Things Posh People Have Said to Me - b**p

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Lauren only studies 30 minutes down the road from where she grew up. But you wouldn’t believe the things posh people have said to her.

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A couple of years ago, a male colleague introduced me to someone as a 'ball-breaker'. He looked at me and smiled, clearly intending this as a compliment, and went on to make a joke about how even he was a little scared of me sometimes. 'Ball-breaker'. It makes me uncomfortable. It's a phrase which implies that the subject is aggressive, and has the power (and tendency) to emasculate men. It implies that the subject is brutal, perhaps destructive. I don't recognise myself in any of those depictions of leadership. This phrase is also heavily gendered; you seldom hear men described in such terms.

My colleague clearly felt that he was saying something positive about me; saying I am strong and effective in the workplace. In reality, phrases like this reduce women to being defined purely by the impact they have on men. She's not being called decisive, honest or driven; she's being called a 'ball-breaker', implying that all she does is dominate men and, no matter what she achieves professionally, it is only notable through the lens of how men feel about her leadership. If she makes a decision which a male colleague would not have made, she metaphorically 'breaks' his 'balls' - he is not the one in control and he is therefore rendered useless. She has done that; the 'ball-breaker.'
If a man had done it, everyone else's 'balls' would have remained in tact but, because she is a woman in leadership, she leaves a trail of emasculated colleagues in her wake.

How ridiculous.

Language like this is at the more extreme end of the scale of gendered language in our workplaces. It is damaging to women and men alike (there are plenty of words and phrases used to describe men which are also problematic). I would argue that, when your workplace is a school, this is potentially even more dangerous because it might also impact on how our young people see the world and themselves.

The split in language used to describe men and women in the workplace is well recognised; women are bossy, pushy, scatty, 'blonde', emotional, dramatic, bitchy, catty, manipulative... these are terms which we generally don't use to describe cis-gendered (straight) men. This starts early; we shower little girls with platitudes about their appearance and sweetness, while simultaneously describing boys as boisterous and strong. This is a problem in our schools, because it means that women in positions of authority generally have more to do in themselves to embrace and develop their confidence as leaders. Let me explain:

If we tell young boys it is ok to be strong, decisive, wilful, and we embrace the 'boys will be boys' (*shudder) reaction to aggression and play fighting, then it is not a huge leap as a male adult to be strong and direct in a leadership position. It is socially acceptable for men to be dominant figures and to engage in challenging others when necessary.

In contrast, let's look at the expectations of girls growing up in our society; there are heavily segregated aisles in toy shops which direct girls to looking after dolls, being nurses, not doctors, pink kitchens and not a toy car in sight (unless it's a pink convertible for Barbie). Girls are told from a young age that they are best suited to nurturing, caring roles, and that their value is measured by how pleasing they are to others. It is far less socially acceptable for women to be dominant and strong in a work environment; they are often expected to be the peace-makers, the glue, the compromisers.

The issue with this divide is that we need all of these characteristics in good leaders. Effective leaders should have the capacity to be strong and firm when it is necessary, and to be the compromiser and nurturer when appropriate. To develop the best leaders, we mush support people to develop these parts of themselves so that they have a broad toolkit to work with. The way we split supposedly 'male' and 'female' character traits means that, when those more traditionally masculine traits are called for, it is more difficult for a female leader to exhibit these characteristics because they have further to go - they have to embrace a persona which they have been conditioned from a young age to perceive as unfeminine. It also means that, for male colleagues, the reverse is true; there are real challenges and expectations around how they should behave which aren't necessarily fair either.

Personally, ideas of femininity and my own identity didn't bother me for a long time. I come from a family of very powerful women; my Nan wrote speeches for the Trades Unionists in the 60s and 70s, my aunt is a successful politician and business leader, my mother is a local welfare rights worker and campaigner. While I haven't escaped some degree of gender programming via the media (just look at my lipstick and heels collection), I have been very fortunate to see strong models of women in the workplace my entire life. This is not the case for many women I know and have worked with. I have seen women shy away from promotion opportunities which they really want, and are qualified for, because they don't think they are ready. I have seen women reluctant to have challenging conversations with colleagues because they don't want to be seen as being 'pushy'.
A friend of mine has agreed to share the following anecdote anonymously. At the time, she was a head of department working in a large school. She had a male second in department who she was working hard to develop. He was very ambitious and talented. For his own development, she took him into a data meeting with the principal and some other senior leaders. Throughout the meeting, though she was the head of department, and she had a proven track record of successful work and results in the school, the other people in the room (all men) addressed most of their questions to her second in department and, even when she was speaking, he often jumped in and interrupted her. She was really uncomfortable during the meeting and felt that something should be said. The next day, she went to speak to her line manager (one of the leaders who had been in the meeting) and explained how she felt. She was told that she should stop being so paranoid; her memory of the meeting was not at all how it happened, and perhaps she was being a bit insecure and over-sensitive.
This incident has two major implications for the female leader:
1. It is difficult to complain about something if those around you refuse to legitimise your feelings, and paint your reaction to something using gendered language. Terms such as 'insecure' and 'sensitive' suggest that the issue here is that she is being too weak, too soft, perhaps too feminine. In this situation, my friend did not take this further with her leadership team because she didn't want to be labelled 'whiny' or sensitive.
2. In order to address the behaviour of her second in department, she will need to have a clear, honest discussion to explain how unprofessional he was being by interrupting her. That is part of her job as his line manager; it is her duty to him to ensure that he understands how to behave appropriately in meetings. That is a difficult conversation to have. It requires direct challenge and confidence in your convictions. It also requires the firm composure you must have if the colleague in question disagrees with you, and you need to reiterate your expectations. In this situation, my friend did not have the conversation with her colleague. In her own words, she "chickened out". She didn't feel comfortable. This was perhaps made more difficult for her because her line manager didn't support her when she raised it with him.

This is one example. There is a double standard in what we expect from men and women, the way we describe them, the way we react to them. When I went back to work following maternity leave, my son went into nursery for three days per week, my husband began to work part time (he looks after our son for two days per week), and I worked full time (still do). This had been our plan for a long time; parenting is a team sport, and we put our players in the positions where they will be most successful. It works for us. The double standard we faced from people we knew, though, was really unexpected. My husband has had nothing but positive (if patronising) reactions to his part time move; "so caring," "such a good daddy," "so brave." On the flip side, I have had a number of quite unpleasant comments from the same people; "I don't know how you could leave him," "I could never have given up that time with my children," "don't you think a child needs his mother?" Our parenting choices are our own, we make them together, we are happy with them, but somehow my husband is a heroic model of the modern man, and I am some sort of heartless 'career woman'!

I am lucky. I work in a school which has a strong female presence on the leadership team, and a culture of developing and supporting teachers to be rounded leaders; there doesn't seem to be that false dichotomy in our school that men are a certain way and women are another. That is, perhaps, also because our academy trust has a very strong ethos of equality, developing staff and quite forward thinking working practices.

There are things which all schools can do, and things which both women and men can do to change institutional cultures:
Schools and school leaders:

Unpick 'masculine' leadership skills with women. Help them to talk about and embrace those characteristics which they might have subconsciously seen as being unfeminine or unattractive. You could provide scenarios to talk through and unpick how they make people feel and why that might be.

Provide practice support for challenging situations. Some of the most useful development I have had as a leader is when senior colleagues have let me practice with them before having the real challenging conversation with someone I lead. This gives you a sense of stability and conviction in what you are saying, as well as a chance to talk through what to do if conversations go in a direction you are not expecting. (Thanks to Mark, Jonny, Caroline and Kat - they are all leaders I have worked with who have given me that time.)

Provide coaching for women. Having someone to talk through concerns or challenges without them giving answers or solutions is important. A coach asks the right questions - the answers come from you. That strengthens your confidence in yourself, builds independence and resilience, whilst also giving you a range of angles and approaches to a problem.

Be vigilant, and call out gender stereotypes in your institutions. If school leaders openly criticise and deal with gendered language and inequality when they come across it, then cultures quickly shift. Remember, the people who are most heavily affected by this issue may not feel comfortable to speak out for themselves.
Women:

Be 10% braver. Speak out about your experiences. Educate colleagues. Challenge people when they say or do things which are inappropriate.

Re-define femininity. If your own femininity is something which is important to you, then remember that it means so much more than some 1950s submissive housewife. If you work with integrity and honesty, your behaviour at work should never be used to reflect negatively on you as a woman.

Ask for support. Reach out to women in your workplace, and women in the wider teaching community for support. Organisation such as WomenEd, the Maternity CPD Project and Women Leading in Education will happily provide mentors, coaches and support to women in education.

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Call me a 'ball-breaker' one more time...

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This is a re-post of a blog I wrote for WomenEd in February 2019. A couple of years ago, a male colleague introduced me to someone as a 'ball-breaker'. He looked at me and smiled, clearly intending this as a compliment, and went on to make a joke about how even he was a little...

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Use and usefulness of non-standard grammar

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Emma Moore, Professor of Sociolinguistics, explores how we evaluate the way other people form words and sentences, and what happens when people use non-standard grammar.

The project

Do the things we say reveal who we are?

Are some people better than others at matching words to viewpoints?

This 5 minute game showcases the incredible flexibility of language, and the clever ways in which our speech sends messages about who we are and what we believe. The game will also gently probe your prejudices by asking you to evaluate examples of real language use.

Prejudices are inevitable but become damaging when they stay hidden. Believing that certain dialects are 'better' than others can have real life consequences for those who speak in a negatively stereotyped way.

During the game, you will click on one of three pictures which you think best characterises where an utterance was spoken. This should make you think about the kind of person who most likely uttered it. So, for a sentence like "There ain't going to be no second chances", you might see a picture of a TV news studio, a night club, and a classroom. Can you get it right?

Getting an answer right scores a point, and you can see your total score at the end of the game, along with how the people next to you do. There's full feedback and a chance to explore why an utterance was used and why it provokes stereotypes.

The exhibition is situated in Futurecade, available to view both online and in person at the Millennium Gallery

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What did you say? - Podcast - Festival of the Mind 2020

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Emma Moore, Professor of Sociolinguistics, explores how we evaluate the way other people form words and sentences, and what happens when people use non-standard grammar. The project Do the things we say reveal who we are? Are some people better than others at matching words to viewpoints?

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All about Identity

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E10 Language, sexuality and identity special

Show notes for Episode 10 Welcome to Episode 10 of the Lexis podcast in which Jacky, Dan, Lisa and Matthew talk about: Another bad article about language, which takes a swipe at people who ask for people to respect their pronoun choices. We also talk to Associate Professor in Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham, Dr Lucy Jones about language, sexuality, gender and identity. Lucy Jones' blog: https://queerlinglang.wordpress.com/ Lucy Jones' University of Nottingham page: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/english/people/lucy.jones Lucy's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/jones_lucy Robert Podesva's study on falsetto and identity: https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/Courses/l1562018/Readings/Podesva2007.pdf Language in the News Here's the article by Joanna Williams in The Times that we analysed: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/declaring-your-pronouns-is-pure-narcissism-7rffv2mrz A couple of the bits we talked about are reproduced below: Declaring your pronouns is pure narcissism An identity-obsessed minority with too much time on its hands has lost touch with reality Joanna Williams I'm Joanna, she/her. You probably guessed that from my name and my photo. But declaring one's pronouns is all the rage and I'd hate to appear out of touch. I'm all for denying biology. I pretend I'm not getting older and can still drink too much without suffering the next day. I pretend I can fit into clothes I bought 20 years ago. But I don't insist other people confirm my delusions. Demanding to be called they/them rather than he/she is to insist that the rest of the world share in your fantasy. When Jeremy Corbyn spoke at the Pink News awards late last year he began his speech by saying: "My name is Jeremy Corbyn, pronouns he/him." Surely no one in attendance doubted Corbyn's manhood, or that men are commonly referred to as "he". People devise all kinds of ways to signal their political beliefs, particularly when they decide that doing so makes them out to be especially virtuous. Pronoun-declaring is, in truth, a game played by an identity-obsessed minority with far too much time on its hands. Forced attempts at normalising pronoun introductions may be done in the name of inclusivity but they reveal only how hopelessly out of touch those who run our universities, local authorities and political parties have become. They no longer have any idea how normal people talk to each other. Contact us @LexisPodcast. Subscribe: Lexis Podcast | Podcast on Spotify Contributors Matthew Butler Twitter: https://twitter.com/Matthewbutlerwy Lisa Casey blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates) Dan Clayton blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) Jacky Glancey Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey Music: Freenotes

2020 © Anchor FM Inc. All rights reserved.

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E10 Language, sexuality and identity special  by Lexis

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E10 Language, sexuality and identity special by Lexis

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Show notes for Episode 10 Welcome to Episode 10 of the Lexis podcast in which Jacky, Dan, Lisa and Matthew talk about: Another bad article about language, which takes a swipe at people who ask for people to respect their pronoun choices.

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Guardian article

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As Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers once sang, the difference between British and American English used to come down to whether someone said "tomato" or "tomAto".

Now though the lines are becoming increasingly blurred as the words, intonation and accent used by US internet stars are adopted by their young British fans.

A survey of 3,000 childcare providers and teachers for Childcare.co.uk, an online platform for childcare providers, parents, schools and tutors, has found that a quarter of primary school teachers are now familiar with the "YouTube accent" phenomenon - when children adopt an American accent or slang as a result of watching YouTube videos and television shows during lockdown.

Jane Setter, professor of phonetics at the University of Reading and author of Your Voice Speaks Volumes: It's Not What You Say, But How You Say It, suggested some children could be seeking "covert prestige" - when a group deliberately adopts non-standard or non-prestige speech forms to demonstrate a group identity.

She cited the example of working-class and lower middle-class men in the UK using dialect and swear words to demonstrate their masculinity.

Other children could be seeking a form of "accommodation", Setter suggested.

"For children, it could simply be because everyone is watching a particular trending YouTube influencer or group of influencers, or playing particular online interactive games, through word of mouth and a desire to fit in with their friends, that these people speak in a particular way, and the kids are using the features of those speakers with other kids to show they "belong" to that group."

American influencers such as nine-year-old Ryan Kaji, who has his own YouTube channel, Ryan's World; Leah Ashe, 27, a gaming and vlogging YouTuber; and James Charles, 21, an online makeup artist have become multimillionaires because of the army of young fans they attract.

James Charles's YouTube channel is popular with British teenagers. Photograph: James Charles/YouTube

"We do naturally gravitate towards and accommodate the speech styles of people we admire or feel positive towards," said Dr Rob Drummond, reader in linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. "We all do it. Only slightly, but it's there."

However, he questioned whether teachers were simply picking up on a few words and drawing overarching conclusions.

"It's very easy to overstate the effect and impact of very small changes in speech. For example, maybe a child has picked up the pronunciation of a particular word such as 'letter' using a more American-sounding 'ledder'; a parent hears this and says 'Oh my goodness, she's got an American accent!'. When really she is simply repeating one single pronunciation of one single word."

Either way, Drummond pointed out the phenomenon was hardly new. "Young people have always leaned towards whatever is deemed attractive and 'cool' at the time. Be that American culture, Jamaican culture, hip-hop culture, Japanese culture or K-pop culture."

Dr Punit Shah, associate professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Bath, suggested parents should not unduly worry (or get "salty") if their children have started speaking like YouTube stars.

"Compared with adults, children are much better at picking up language and linguistic tone and features - that's why it's actually really hard to learn a second language as an adult. But when you are a child the way you hear sounds in the context of language is far more malleable and that most likely explains what's going on here.

"If you are exposed to a greater amount of YouTube accents and Americanisms, it's no surprise we are seeing children pick up these linguistic features in the way they speak."

Shah said children "learning and being adaptable" was "almost always going to yield positive results". The real issue, he suggested, was what children were watching.

"The thing people should be more concerned about is the content they picked up on YouTube rather than the way they are speaking as a result of engagement with such content."

The phenomenon appears to provide further proof of the hegemony of American - as opposed to British-English. "American English has certainly risen in status above British English in many domains, and this could be for a number of different reasons," Setter said.

"The sheer number of speakers of American English, the political and economic rise of the US while the UK's influence has declined."

She suggested that schools had a role to play in exposing children to a range of accents, so that they did not discriminate against a person because of how they spoke.

Online platforms should also step up, Setter says. "Platforms like YouTube have a huge role to play in the presentation of diversity in a positive way. But with YouTube, it's largely about who puts the content up.

"While Google might police the platform, I don't believe it has any power to stop one group posting more than another - so if a particular YouTuber/influencer gains a following, as long as they are operating within the guidelines, how they speak could be going to have some kind of ... er ... influence."

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Why you shouldn't get salty if your child 'speaks YouTube'

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As Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers once sang, the difference between British and American English used to come down to whether someone said "tomato" or "tomAto". Now though the lines are becoming increasingly blurred as the words, intonation and accent used by US internet stars are adopted by their young British fans.

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Accent Expert Breaks Down Language Pet Peeves | WIRED

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Jodie Comer interview

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Jodie Comer on #Accentism https://t.co/OI3J7RnYZi pic.twitter.com/0C5tGWmDuo
— The Accentism Project (@AccentismProj) June 26, 2020

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Interesting Twitter discussion on how grammar can be used as a discrimination tool

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Interesting Twitter discussion on how grammar can be used as a discrimination tool

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Being a ‘grammar nazi’ doesn’t make you a literal nazi, obviously. But it isn’t harmless, either! Language prejudice is an super common way that people with good intentions reinforce social inequality. Science is real. And if you believe in science, believe this, too. /end

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Being a ‘grammar nazi’ doesn’t make you a literal nazi, obviously. But it isn’t harmless, either! Language prejudice is an super common way that people with good intentions reinforce social inequality. Science is real. And if you believe in science, believe this, too. /end

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The English language isn’t at risk if someone says ‘less friends’ instead of ‘fewer friends’ without you correcting it. “But surely that will lead to chaos!” Nope. False. What IS at risk: the social fabric. The social fabric that unfairly elevates some and oppresses others 17/

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Being a ‘grammar nazi’ doesn’t make you a literal nazi, obviously. But it isn’t harmless, either! Language prejudice is an super common way that people with good intentions reinforce social inequality. Science is real. And if you believe in science, believe this, too. /end
— Rikker Dockum /ɹɪkɹ̩/ (@thai101) June 30, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
Being a ‘grammar nazi’ doesn’t make you a literal nazi, obviously. But it isn’t harmless, either! Language prejudice is an super common way that people with good intentions reinforce social inequality. Science is real. And if you believe in science, believe this, too. /end

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
The English language isn’t at risk if someone says ‘less friends’ instead of ‘fewer friends’ without you correcting it. “But surely that will lead to chaos!” Nope. False. What IS at risk: the social fabric. The social fabric that unfairly elevates some and oppresses others 17/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Being a ‘grammar nazi’ doesn’t make you a literal nazi, obviously. But it isn’t harmless, either! Language prejudice is an super common way that people with good intentions reinforce social inequality. Science is real. And if you believe in science, believe this, too. /end

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Being a ‘grammar nazi’ doesn’t make you a literal nazi, obviously. But it isn’t harmless, either! Language prejudice is an super common way that people with good intentions reinforce social inequality. Science is real. And if you believe in science, believe this, too. /end

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
The English language isn’t at risk if someone says ‘less friends’ instead of ‘fewer friends’ without you correcting it. “But surely that will lead to chaos!” Nope. False. What IS at risk: the social fabric. The social fabric that unfairly elevates some and oppresses others 17/

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When I read about Amy Cooper, the woman in Central Park who called the police on a black birder because he'd asked her to leash her out-of-control dog, I was horrified.

But, as a sociolinguist who studies and writes about language and discrimination, I was also struck by the name given to Cooper in several headlines: " Central Park Karen." On Twitter, the birder's sister also referred to her as a "Karen."

There was no confusion about what this meant: It was a label for a white woman who had used her privilege to threaten and try to intimidate a black man by calling the police.

But this was just one way "Karen" has been deployed in recent months. There was the woman dubbed a Karen who, after being told that a waiter would bring ketchup to her table, ended up helping herself at the server's station. And then there was the mom who was called a Karen for telling a woman wearing a bikini to cover up. Countless other variations have emerged.

At first glance, a generic name becoming infused with so much meaning seems patently absurd. Imagine if your friend groused that his boss was being "a real David," or a sibling pointed out that mom was acting like "such a Christina."

So how, exactly, does a name like Karen become such a powerful form of social commentary? And how does it come to mean so many different things at the same time?

The many shapes of meaning

First names tend to contain a range of social cues. An obvious one is gender. But they can convey other kinds of information too, including age, ethnicity, religion, social class and geography. The first name Karen peaked in popularity in 1965, which means that in 2020, most people named Karen are middle aged. Because roughly 80% of the U.S. population was white in the 1960s, it's safe to assume that the proportion of people named Karen in 2020 is predominantly white.

So that's kind of a rough foundation for what the first name Karen might signal to people. But what about the way it evolved to mean much more than simply a first name relatively common among middle-aged white women?

On the one hand, meaning can directly reference something in the world. A kitchen is, well, a kitchen. For this reason, we often assume that meanings are fixed and stable.

But meaning can also be more indirect, indicating characteristics like where a person is from, their age or their ethnicity. Whether you say "soda," "pop" or "Coke" for a carbonated beverage can indicate where in the United States you likely grew up. In many African American communities, kitchen, in addition to being the place you cook, means " nape of the neck."

These different definitions are often referred to as " indexical" because different contexts indicate, or index, different meanings. Meaning, it turns out isn't nearly as stable or fixed as we like to think.

This is how the use and understandings of words change and shift over time. It's also how they can become vehicles for social commentary.

Karen's origin story

It's largely a coincidence that Karen - rather than, say, other popular baby names from the 1960s like Linda or Cynthia - is the name that became the label. Instead, it's the repeated use of the name on social media and on the street that reinforced its status.

By tracing the origins of Karen up until the Central Park incident, you can see how two separate threads of meaning converged to make Karen the label for an officious, entitled, white woman.

The first comes from African American communities, where certain generic first names have long been a shorthand for "a white woman to be wary of because she won't hesitate to wield privilege at the expense of others." Around 2018, people started posting pictures of white women calling the police on the mundane activities of black people. These individuals got labeled with hashtags like #bbqbecky, #permitpatti, #golfcartgail and #cornerstonecaroline.

The goal was to call out the inherent racism and white privilege of these women using a particular kind of alliterative flair. This was the same sort of behavior that Amy Cooper engaged in when she called the police claiming to be threatened.

The second thread emerges from stand-up comedy and Reddit. In 2005, Dane Cook performed a sketch comedy piece in which Karen is " that friend nobody likes." In the sketch, she's described as "always a douche." This portrayal of a "Karen" is less about her racism and contains more gender-based critiques, which might be why some continue to call the Karen meme sexist.

Then, in late 2017, Karen appeared on Reddit as a parody of a Reddit user who had ranted about his ex-wife named Karen who received custody of their children and possession of the family home. That's likely the point at which Karen became linked to pushy behaviors like "wanting to speak to the manager." A link that may have occurred first through parody went on to serve as an actual label for self-important, bossy people.

A Karen by many other names

The Central Park incident created the perfect moment for these two strands to come together. There's the intersection of entitled behavior, racism and demographics.

Interestingly, despite a lot of media analysis about what Karen "really" means, its use has been quite fluid. For example, we've seen people who deny the existence of racism, panic buy toilet paper or call for an end to social distancing all called "Karens."

In fact, the meaning and use of Karen continues to shift. We can find male Karens and black Karens. Donald Trump has even been called a Karen.

And then there's the way it's being used to push for justice, with protesters of police violence holding signs like "Karens against police brutality" and "I'd like to speak to the manager of systemic racism."

So is Karen fundamentally about white women using their racial privilege as a weapon? Is it about being an obnoxious rule follower? Or is it about being a no-fun, hysterical mom?

Karen can be and is all of those. That doesn't weaken the critique; it simply gives it more facets and nuance.

[ Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation's newsletter.]

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How 'Karen' went from a popular baby name to a stand-in for white entitlement

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When I read about Amy Cooper, the woman in Central Park who called the police on a black birder because he'd asked her to leash her out-of-control dog, I was horrified. But, as a sociolinguist who studies and writes about language and discrimination, I was also struck by the name given to Cooper in several headlines: " Central Park Karen."

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Here are the show notes for Episode 4 where Jacky, Dan, Lisa and Matthew talk about - sacking headlines: who's been sacked and who's doing the sacking? - TikTok teens and K-Pop stans trolling Trump - and talk to Dr Shivonne Gates about Multicultural London English and how language is used by teenagers to express their social identities. You can find the links to the stories and research we've mentioned in this programme, below. Some of Shivonne Gates' work mentioned in the interview: Voices and Practices in Applied Linguistics: Diversifying a Discipline Why the Long FACE?: Ethnic Stratification and Variation in the London Diphthong System Shivonne's book recommendation: https://wordery.com/homegirls-norma-mendoza-denton-9780631234906 Headlines: The Guardian Rebecca Long-Bailey sacked from Labour shadow cabinet by Keir Starmer - UK politics live Daily Mail Starmer reignites Labour civil war Story of Trump's Tulsa Rally being trolled by Tiktok users: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html Contact us @LexisPodcast. Subscribe: Lexis Podcast | Podcast on Spotify Contributors Matthew Butler Twitter: https://twitter.com/Matthewbutlerwy Lisa Casey blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates) Dan Clayton blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) Jacky Glancey Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey Music: Freenotes

2020 © Anchor FM Inc. All rights reserved.

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Here are the show notes for Episode 4 where Jacky, Dan, Lisa and Matthew talk about - sacking headlines: who's been sacked and who's doing the sacking? - TikTok teens and K-Pop stans trolling Trump - and talk to Dr Shivonne Gates about Multicultural London English and how language is used by teenagers to express their social identities.

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Rob Drummond - Abralin ao Vivo: Linguists Online

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The relationship between how we speak and who we are is a fascinating one. To what extent are our identities reflected through the way we speak, and to what extent are they performed? The subject is especially fascinating when we consider the experience of adolescents, who are at an age where they are constantly constructing, [...]

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Sociology podcast discussing language

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In this episode, Matthew talks to Dr. Ian Cushing from Brunel University about the issue of language. Ian is a lecturer in education and focuses on the ideas of language policy, language in schools, young people's language and whether language policing is simply another form of discrimination.

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Interview with Dr. Ian Cushing - The Sociology Show

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In this episode, Matthew talks to Dr. Ian Cushing from Brunel University about the issue of language. Ian is a lecturer in education and focuses on the ideas of language policy, language in schools, young people's language and whether language policing is simply another form of discrimination.

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Interesting video aimed at children

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

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What is white privilege?

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn pic.twitter.com/mQrYX6Y0N1
— BBC Bitesize (@bbcbitesize) August 5, 2020

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.data.entities.urls[].description
Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn https://t.co/mQrYX6Y0N1

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What is white privilege? 

We asked @JohnAmaechi, psychologist, best-selling author and former NBA basketball player to explain it for us.

👉 https://t.co/t7LIENTnPn

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Psychologist John Amaechi talks about white privilege.

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What is happening to the English language? Why are we allowing our greatest gift to the world to be mangled out of all recognition?

The number of boys dropping out of school or leaving without basic literacy skills is a national scandal but one that few in power dare speak about. Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission has blamed a 'lethal cocktail of inverted snobbery, racial victimhood and liberal guilt' for the reluctance to help educate white boys in particular, whom he describes as today's 'educational left-behinds': 'I doubt that I'll ever work out why the British appear untroubled that so many of their children emerge from over a decade of expensive, compulsory education with scarcely more in the way of literacy and numeracy than the average Neanderthal.'

But children aren't the only ones losing a grip on this most basic of life skills. A whole new set of buzzwords and phrases is spreading faster than Covid, polluting speech and taking up valuable space. Jargon, once the enemy of clear thinking, has established itself across many disciplines and much of the media. Impenetrable terminology, spawned by new courses like gender studies and critical race theory in elite universities, has entered the mainstream, chewing up meaning and leaving anyone with a modicum of reason baffled and demoralised. Here's an excerpt from the 2018′ Decolonising Sexuality Festival' schedule as an example:

Known for her theories of African-American female gender construction, Hortense Spillers' thought is foundational in acknowledging the irreconcilability of black women's experience with the hegemonic constructions of 'gender' and 'women.' Gail Lewis' robust feminist, postcolonial, poststructuralist and psychoanalytic interests centre on the constitution of subjectivity as racialised and gendered.

And another taken from a lecture on Sexual Politics and the Speculative held at the London School of Economics in December 2018.

I further want to argue that attending to ambivalence as a continuous political and affective reality for those who want to intervene in gendered, raced and sexual meanings and structures in order to ameliorate their harms, shifts the nature of historical and contemporary inquiry.

It remains unclear whether the use of such torturous terminology is a genuine attempt to explain complex ideas, a deliberate attempt to bamboozle the enemy, or merely pretentiousness masquerading as intellectual enquiry.

In broader culture too, words are becoming increasingly opaque. In politics for instance, the 'Conservative' party no longer stands for the conservation of received values any more than the 'Labour' party stands for the rights of the 'labouring' classes. In a culture rife with moral relativism, language has become as fluid as the moveable identities it tries to define.

Equally concerning is how quickly so many of us have adopted lazy forms of speech. We've grown accustomed to hearing cliché ridden sentences such as 'So', 'essentially', 'going forward' what we are doing is 'framing' 'nuanced' 'narratives' and 'unpacking' 'problematic' 'ideas' within the corporate world but now these ugly turns of phrase are peppering everyday speech. Most of us now occupy 'spaces' rather than homes or offices; anything difficult is described as 'challenging'. The therapisation of language is also rife. We demand 'platforms' whenever we feel 'vulnerable' and 'agency' whenever we feel 'dehumanised'.

Some of the blame can be laid at those looking to police our use of language with 'safe spaces', 'micro-aggressions' and 'hate speech'. Theirs is a world where 'silence is violence' but so too are words. Those who disagree need to 'own' their 'privilege'. Dare to question the validity of 'structural' 'oppressive' 'patriarchal' 'systems' and you'll be accused of 'gas-lighting' or 'strongman' tactics.

Back in the real world anyone seeking spiritual succour will have to contend with yoga bores bleating about being 'present' and 'blessed' as they 'honour' your 'personal space' while being 'mindful' of their own 'lived experience.'

Underpinning all of this new phonetic flaccidity is the ubiquitous rising inflection; a whiny repost that appears to offer the listener an opportunity to question what's being said while doing nothing of the sort. Those most guilty of upping their inflections are often the least tolerant of opposition; activists love the Aussie-rise because it allows them to make wild assertions without sounding aggressive or belligerent.

If we neglect to teach basic language skills to children and instead bombard them with politicised rhetoric, we'll leave them woefully ill equipped to function in the real world. They can only riff off language once they know the ground rules.

Inverted snobbery and a lame attempt at 'inclusivity' means we are losing the subtle, understated beauty of English. Like all great inheritances, the spoken word needs preserving, not in aspic but in clarity of meaning.
The Seven Ages of Man - How to Live a Meaningful Life by James Innes-Smith published Little, Brown November 2020

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War of the words: have we stopped making sense? | Spectator Life

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What is happening to the English language? Why are we allowing our greatest gift to the world to be mangled out of all recognition? The number of boys dropping out of school or leaving without basic literacy skills is a national scandal but one that few in power dare speak about.

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BBC Radio 4 'In Our Time' podcast Archive

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BBC Radio 4 'In Our Time' podcast Archive

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BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Culture - Downloads

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Great starter for some mini-text analysis at the start of a new term. https://t.co/diyv6SpCXd

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Great starter for some mini-text analysis at the start of a new term. https://t.co/diyv6SpCXd

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A cracking example of synthetic personalisation on the back of my @innocent smoothie #TeamEnglish #ALevelEngLang https://t.co/rbKi1pUjLh

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Great starter for some mini-text analysis at the start of a new term. https://t.co/diyv6SpCXd
— EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) August 23, 2020

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Great starter for some mini-text analysis at the start of a new term. https://t.co/diyv6SpCXd

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props_source.includes.tweets[].text
A cracking example of synthetic personalisation on the back of my @innocent smoothie #TeamEnglish #ALevelEngLang https://t.co/rbKi1pUjLh

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
Great starter for some mini-text analysis at the start of a new term. https://t.co/diyv6SpCXd

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
Great starter for some mini-text analysis at the start of a new term. https://t.co/diyv6SpCXd

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.referenced_tweets[].text
A cracking example of synthetic personalisation on the back of my @innocent smoothie #TeamEnglish #ALevelEngLang https://t.co/rbKi1pUjLh

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Interesting article about the history and uses of the semicolon

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Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don't hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don't have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified "punctuation theorist" who teaches at Bard College, has written a whole book about them: " Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark."

At first, I thought Watson was doing with the semicolon what Simon Griffin did with the apostrophe in " Fucking Apostrophes " (2015). Both are slim volumes about an element of language that gives people endless grief. But whereas Griffin, an adman, provides straightforward rules, albeit with a bushel of exceptions (and a running joke: every use of the word "apostrophe" is preceded by a profanity), Watson, a historian and philosopher of science and a teacher of writing and the humanities-in other words, a Renaissance woman-gives us a deceptively playful-looking book that turns out to be a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization.

The semicolon itself was a Renaissance invention. It first appeared in 1494, in a book published in Venice by Aldus Manutius. "De Aetna," Watson explains, was "an essay, written in dialogue form," about climbing Mt. Etna. Its author, Pietro Bembo, is best known today not for his book but for the typeface, designed by Francesco Griffo, in which the first semicolon was displayed: Bembo. The mark was a hybrid between a comma and a colon, and its purpose was to prolong a pause or create a more distinct separation between parts of a sentence. In her delightful history, Watson brings the Bembo semicolon alive, describing "its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it." Designers, she explains, have since given the mark a "relaxed and fuzzy" look (Poliphilus), rendered it "aggressive" (Garamond), and otherwise adapted it for the modern age: "Palatino's is a thin flapper in a big hat slouched against the wall at a party."

The problem with the semicolon is not how it looks but what it does and how that has changed over time. In the old days, punctuation simply indicated a pause. Comma, colon: semicolon; period. Eventually, grammarians and copy editors came along and made themselves indispensable by punctuating ("pointing") a writer's prose "to delineate clauses properly, such that punctuation served syntax." That is, commas, semicolons, and colons were plugged into a sentence in order to highlight, subordinate, or otherwise conduct its elements, connecting them syntactically. One of the rules is that, unless you are composing a list, a semicolon is supposed to be followed by a complete clause, capable of standing on its own. The semicolon can take the place of a conjunction, like "and" or "but," but it should not be used in addition to it. This is what got circled in red in my attempts at scholarly criticism in graduate school. Sentence length has something to do with it-a long, complex sentence may benefit from a clarifying semicolon-but if a sentence scans without a semicolon it's best to leave it alone.

Watson has been keeping an eye out for effective semicolons for years. She calculates that there are four-thousand-odd semicolons in " Moby-Dick," or "one for every 52 words." Clumsy as nineteenth-century punctuation may seem to a modern reader, Melville's semicolons, she writes, act like "sturdy little nails," holding his wide-ranging narrative together. She is delighted with the "springy little semicolons" of Irvine Welsh in " Trainspotting" ("The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling") and she has a special fondness for the rare semicolon in Raymond Chandler, whose hardboiled private detective, Philip Marlowe, is not given to periodic sentences. In " The Big Sleep," for instance, Marlowe describes his room: "In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that." In Watson's perception, that choice of a semicolon after "Not much" creates a reflective silence. "The semicolon reads as Marlowe having to stop to think."

A sentence from Wittgenstein contains a "fantastically vague semicolon": " Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit." ("The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.") This has been translated by G. E. M. Anscombe thus: "The philosopher's treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness." But, in removing what Erich Heller, an expert in German philosophy, calls a "profound" semicolon, one that "marks a frontier between a thought and a triviality," the translator has reduced a deep thought to a bland one. Watson writes, sounding like the "punctuation therapist" she sometimes plays, "Ambiguity can be useful and productive, and it can make some room for new ideas."

Watson is especially thought-provoking on the topic of semicolons and the law, where ambiguity can lead to trouble. In Massachusetts, a semicolon that should have been a comma would have prevented hotels from selling liquor after 11 P.M.; it had the effect of making people buy a lot of drinks before last call. Worse, in a New Jersey murder trial in 1927, sloppy punctuation caused one of the defendants, Salvatore Rannelli, to be sentenced to life imprisonment while the other, Salvatore Merra, was sentenced to death-for the same crime. Legal cases are often built on precedent, and a judgment based on flawed punctuation sets a bad precedent, which can perpetuate injustice.

The semicolon's two main detractors, the antiheroes of Watson's book, are Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut, with Chandler complaining about a proofreader at The Atlantic (one Margaret Mutch) and Mark Twain weighing in on the ignorance of proofreaders in general. Barthelme found the semicolon "ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." Vonnegut wrote that semicolons are "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing," a statement that makes me feel only more sympathy for the semicolon. What's wrong with hermaphrodites?

Henry James, who would have been my choice for Master of the Semicolon, turns out to have been famous during his lifetime for his use of dashes. Watson writes that the dash "cutting a path" through any page of James is "an arm outstretched as a barrier to keep one thought from tumbling into the next." She has unearthed an interview, from 1915, that James gave to a reporter for the Times, in which the Master (who did not do interviews, and on this occasion insisted that the reporter note "his punctuation as well as his words") remarked that dashes "strike both the familiar and the empathic note . . . with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; although indeed a fine sense of the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood . . . seems anything but common." Watson observes, "We live in the Era of the Dash"-which is probably just as well.

Both the dash and the semicolon are put to brilliant use in a page-and-a-half-long sentence from " Letter from Birmingham Jail," which Watson quotes in full. In it, Martin Luther King, Jr., details the miseries of a black man, a victim of injustice, who is asked to wait patiently for change. King piles up clause after clause, each describing a more harrowing, frustrating event than the last, and each lofted by the semicolon that concludes the one before: "when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; . . . when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.' " The litany rises to a crescendo delivered with a dash: "-then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait." Watson concludes that "this is mimesis at its finest"; the semicolons hold the prose "in suspension," and the reader in suspense, waiting, along with King, for justice. Of course, King's letter is about much more than punctuation, but here is an instance in which the semicolon did its small part for civil rights.

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Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don't hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don't have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified "punctuation theorist" who teaches at Bard College, has written a whole book about them: " Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark."

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Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities

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Ever hear of Ballroom Culture? Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities

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Ever hear of Ballroom Culture? Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities https://t.co/9knMKMqOHN

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Ever hear of Ballroom Culture? Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities pic.twitter.com/9knMKMqOHN
— UM Language Matters (@UMLangMatters) July 3, 2020

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Ever hear of Ballroom Culture? Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities https://t.co/9knMKMqOHN

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Ever hear of Ballroom Culture? Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities https://t.co/9knMKMqOHN

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Ever hear of Ballroom Culture? Here are some examples of popular terms and language that originated in the Trans, Queer, BIPOC communities

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An excellent article on linguistic snobbery and the glottal stop - please read!

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An excellent article on linguistic snobbery and the glottal stop - please read!

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If you spoke as she does, sir, instead of the way you do
Why, you might be selling flowers, too.
- Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady

Everyone knows writers are fascinated by words. I am no different. When I was growing up, I would spend hours reading the dictionary, investigating a word's definition, etymology, and its phonetic representation. For this last, I'd assemble the word using the provided key, puzzling out the open vowels and constrained consonants.

The young voice that pronounced those words hasn't changed much. It remains a mix of my father's Cornish-inflected Wiltshire and my mother's smoother Estuary/Kent: an accent that never stood out as I was growing up, except when we spent summer holidays with family in either Cornwall or Lancashire. (I loved these trips: with no holidays abroad, they were the very edges of my linguistic world.)

It wasn't until I got to my thirties and quit my job to go to university that my voice - not the words I know, but how I say them - started to matter. I was questioned and corrected, told I sounded more Surrey than Swindon, and called Australian more times than I can count. It wasn't too bad; I shrugged it off and went about my day. Cambridge was very different to my work making cars, and I had books to read, papers to write. I worked hard. This interest in my voice never really stopped, though. Mostly, it was gentle. We were acknowledging difference, and that can be fruitful and friendly.

Then, while studying for a PhD, I organised a post-graduate conference called 'Writing Communities', where papers could be delivered on community-facing research. After selecting complementary abstracts and helping with travel arrangements, I was looking forward to just being with my fellow academic students and hearing about their research. The day was going well; stimulating discussion, ideas being shared and critiqued, helpful suggestions coming thick and fast in the leafy surrounds of Falmouth University.

I'd bid for, and won, a small budget for the event, but it wasn't quite enough to cover everything.Despite my financial struggles, I bought expensive cake and some extra drinks. It was this latter I'd left in the car, so excused myself during the coffee to 'fetch the water'.

And then one of the delegates laughed in my face. ' Wah-uh?' they shrieked, throwing up their hands and looking around to see who else had heard. 'What's WAH-uh?'

I blushed.'Well, my accent is part Estuary English, part West Country,' I said. 'And so has a glottal stop that gets more prevalent when I'm tired.'

Shrugging, I walked away, embarrassed, unsettled, but mostly confused. Before coffee, every one of us had loudly applauded the work of historians who'd documented community stories to preserve variations in accent and dialect. We were championing linguistic diversity, celebrating authentic voices with their region markers inflected in both grammar and tone.

But not, it seemed, when it came to me.

Sometimes I wonder why that person was so shocked at my pronunciation. Did they feel cheated? Up till then, had I unthinkingly inhabited some middle-class disguise, with my voice like some sort of forged passport with a glottal-stop mistake? Had they tried to shame me out of their own frustration at having read me wrong, at having wasted networking time on someone like me, with no capital or connections to exploit?

Worst of all is the suspicion that it was just genuine, uncontrollable shock that someone with my background was not only studying for their doctorate, but had convened a successful conference, and was just doing rather well with the whole student thing.

As with most writers, my worries get transmuted into my work. My fiction collection, Exercises in Control includes a re-telling of a song from My Fair Lady. This is the 1956 musical based on Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw, where Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower-girl, is 'trained' out of her accent by a professor of phonetics. The song from My Fair Lady that I rewrite, 'Just You Wait', is a pure revenge fantasy. This violent protest is sung by a browbeaten, exhausted Eliza, who has been forced to recite Tennyson through a mouthful of marbles.

In this song, the film's Eliza imagines her persecutor dying of fever, drowning, or being shot. My Eliza is less fantasist, more survivor. A celebrated singer, she refuses to speak even as she reclaims the sounds of language by tattooing phonetic symbols over her body.

Looking through my notebooks, I can see that I began drafting this story, 'The Higgins Method', shortly after the Writing Communities conference. There was no connection in my conscious mind, so I wasn't aware that this story was a way to exorcise my own confusion about my class. And really, what class am I? Am I the working class of my hardworking parents? Or am I the middle class of my (late) education of Cambridge and a PhD?

While researching this article, I took a 'what class are you' test on the BBC website and came out 'Precariat', which was the most deprived class group. (This is most certainly wrong unless we are talking purely about income.)

But what, I wonder, is right? This is not just idle curiosity on my part, as it has direct influence on my writing career. For example, when a working class writer prize or festival is announced, am I allowed to enter? I've come to terms with the fact that my background excludes me from many aspects of a writer's life... but does my education do the same?

I am genuinely confused by this, and by the need to be identified in such absolute terms. And I tend to keep quiet more, or not speak at all, just like Eliza in my story. Linguistic snobbery (just think for a minute about the aggression in the phrase 'well-spoken') limits people from diverse backgrounds. The medium is the message, yes, but when the medium is as natural and powerful as the human voice, we should pay attention to what people say instead of how they say it.

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If you spoke as she does, sir, instead of the way you do Why, you might be selling flowers, too. - Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady Everyone knows writers are fascinated by words. I am no different. When I was growing up, I would spend hours reading the dictionary, investigating a word's definition, etymology, and its phonetic representation.

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Interesting article from the WSJ (Wall Street Journal)

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In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: I checked in with @OED lexicographers to find out how they're monitoring English usage for rapid changes in coronavirus-era vocabulary, like "front-line." https://t.co/dffrKAQybu

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In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: I checked in with @OED lexicographers to find out how they're monitoring English usage for rapid changes in coronavirus-era vocabulary, like "front-line." https://t.co/dffrKAQybu https://t.co/8L3qgMF0tG

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In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: I checked in with @OED lexicographers to find out how they're monitoring English usage for rapid changes in coronavirus-era vocabulary, like "front-line." https://t.co/dffrKAQybu pic.twitter.com/8L3qgMF0tG
— Ben Zimmer (@bgzimmer) May 30, 2020

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In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: I checked in with @OED lexicographers to find out how they're monitoring English usage for rapid changes in coronavirus-era vocabulary, like "front-line." https://t.co/dffrKAQybu https://t.co/8L3qgMF0tG

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: I checked in with @OED lexicographers to find out how they're monitoring English usage for rapid changes in coronavirus-era vocabulary, like "front-line." https://t.co/dffrKAQybu https://t.co/8L3qgMF0tG

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
In this weekend's @WSJ Review section: I checked in with @OED lexicographers to find out how they're monitoring English usage for rapid changes in coronavirus-era vocabulary, like "front-line." https://t.co/dffrKAQybu

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Where have you just come back from?

'I've spent three or four months of almost every summer from 1971 or 72 until the present in Cape Cod, where I am right now, without really going anywhere. Travelling in the summer is no fun, because everyone else is doing it. The weather in Cape Cod is lovely throughout autumn, so I travel in the middle of winter, or in the spring. I also find I get a lot of work done in the summer; you can only write if you're in one place for an extended period of time uninterruptedly.'

Where in the world have you felt happiest?

'The guilty secret of a world traveller is that I love being at home. I have two homes, one in Cape Cod and one in Hawaii. When you get to a certain age, you figure out where you want to live, what bed you want, what kind of library you want, what kind of swimming pool, what kind of garden. And then that becomes where you are happiest. But if you are talking about a country, I would say Mexico. I love the food, I find the people amiable - they make wonderful friends once you've earned their respect - and the landscape is everything. It has mountains, beautiful coastline, jungles, forests. And one of the great cities of the world: Mexico City, 22 million people, 100 museums. Plus I speak the language. That is an essential.'

What made you want to write a book about Mexico?

'When I was working on my book about the Deep South, I went to Nogales, Arizona, which is right on the border with Mexico. I had never seen the 30ft rusty steel fence before. It's a strange, beautiful object, like a sculpture running through the landscape. It had a door in it, and it was simple enough: I parked my car in Arizona, went through the door and suddenly I was in Mexico with Mexican food, people, beer, tacos. I met migrants who were trying to get into the USA, people who had been kicked out. Then Trump became president. One of the reasons for travel is to destroy stereotypes, so I thought "I'm going to write about Mexico and see what it is, every bit of it".'

What is the greatest train route on earth?

' Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. It was built after the Vietnam War ended. You can book a sleeper and continue up to the Chinese border. It's a really interesting coastal route, with nice people, and a sense of forgiveness, which is a very big thing because they were destroyed in the war.'

I do have a fuck-it list of places I'd never go back to

How has your love of travel evolved?

'When I started, I was a self-involved smartie pants. I thought that a travel book was about the traveller: I like this, I don't like that. I put my ego in check and realised that it is not about whether you're having a good or bad time, it's about the stories that people tell. But that narrative is different now. I first went to Africa in 1963, when if you walked into a classroom and asked a student what they would like to be when they grow up, they would say a politician, an astronaut, a doctor. If you asked them now, in India, Africa, anywhere, they would say, I want to leave. I want to go to
Britain, the USA, Australia. Everything has changed so radically.'

Anywhere you still want to go?

'Well, I've never been to Greenland, Norway, Finland or Sweden. But I do have a fuck-it list of places I'd never go back to. Anywhere there is a cave, cavern or underground bunker. Skydiving out of a plane - definitely on the fuck-it list. Then there are some countries I don't have any great plans to return to, such as Albania. I could live without revisiting Turkmenistan. I don't really need to go to Taiwan again. It's actually a longer list than the bucket list.'

A place that most lived up to the hype?

'New England in the autumn. It never fails to dazzle me. The trees turn golden. Henry David Thoreau said 'the leaves teach us how to die', so when you see the changing of the season, you think, well this is a cycle. It's what is going to happen to us.'

Do you have a favourite city?

'I find city life nasty, but if I had to choose one, I would say London. You can still live in a house in London; my kids, Louis and Marcel, live in houses there. You can't do that in Manhattan. People in London are friendly and it's a lovely place to visit.'

And a favourite view?

'Looking west from Waimea Bay in Hawaii past the palm trees and the outcrops of lava rock, to the Pacific. There is something about watching the sea that is very calming, and it keeps changing with the light.'

What is your earliest holiday memory?

'Going to visit my aunt and uncle in Hartford, Connecticut, when I was seven or eight. My parents put me on the train in Boston, alone, and I sat by the window. It was early summer and I just looked out at the tobacco fields. It's a memory of being free and very content. I definitely had the feeling that I wanted to do it again, so that's the origin of my wanderlust, I suppose.'

The most interesting person you've met?

'A beachcomber, north of Cooktown in Australia. He was originally from Kent, and he was alone, with a dog, and an orderly little camp where he was brewing beer. He was building a raft which he said he was going to sail around the country. I asked, "Do you think you can do it?" He said, "You can go anywhere if you're not in a hurry." I don't know whether he made it, but that guy made an impression on me more than any head of state, painter or writer.'

How do you relax?

'I lie on very hot sand on a beach in Hawaii and fall asleep, with the heat against my back, and snore and drool.'
Like this? Now read:
The 10 best train journeys in the world

The 10 best train journeys in the world

Cape Cod: an all-American escape

Cape Cod: An all-American escape

The best train journeys through Europe

The best train journeys through Europe

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This article was first published in the January/February 2020 issue of Traveller magazine

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Paul Theroux on his favourite places in the world

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'I've spent three or four months of almost every summer from 1971 or 72 until the present in Cape Cod, where I am right now, without really going anywhere. Travelling in the summer is no fun, because everyone else is doing it.

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Brilliant podcasts and episodes from the archives.

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BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs - Desert Island Discs Podcasts

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Explore the archive with the Desert Island Discs podcasts

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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Jack Harries video transcript exam practice

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Jack Harries video transcript exam practice

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Lesson 21 homework identity - Jack Harries video transcript

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Lesson 21 homework Identity - Angélique Kidjo interview

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Excerpt from Syliva Patterson's 'I'm not with the band', writing about Ed Sheeran

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Excerpt from Syliva Patterson's 'I'm not with the band', writing about Ed Sheeran

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David Attenborough interviewed by Brian Cox

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David Attenborough interviewed by Brian Cox

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People of Science with Brian Cox - Sir David Attenborough on Charles Darwin

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Exam revision advice from an ex student

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In this blog post, we've invited former A level English Language student, Olivia to give some advice to students about how she revised and w...

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Analysis of the use of ‘like’

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The first guest blog this term is from Jacky Glancey, an A level English Language teacher at Macmillan Academy and it's a great way to get s...

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Read this BEFORE you complete your homework!

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You might have seen Dan's recent post for the Oxford Education blog; in it he distills the examiners reports on last year's A-Level exa...

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Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Auschwitz and the death camp's infamous doctor Josef Mengele, has passed away in Poland during a trip to the Holocaust site, sources said.

The Romanian-born Kor, who founded the Candles Museum in Indiana and devoted her life to Holocaust awareness, was 85.

"We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor, forgiveness advocate, and founder of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center," the museum said on its Twitter account.

It added that Kor passed away Thursday in Kraków, southern Poland, during an annual trip organised by the museum that included a visit to Auschwitz, a former Nazi camp in the nearby town of Oświęcim.

CANDLES Museum (@candlesmuseum)
We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of Eva Kor, Holocaust survivor, forgiveness advocate, and founder of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Eva passed peacefully today, July 4th, 2019, at 7:10am local time in Krakow, Poland on the annual CANDLES trip.

"Only five days ago we recorded a testimony of Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, for @AuschwitzMuseum Archive. Today came news about her passing away," the Auschwitz Museum said in a tweet late Thursday.

Auschwitz Memorial (@AuschwitzMuseum)
Only five days ago we recorded a testimony of Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, for @AuschwitzMuseum Archive. Today came a news about her passing away.

It more than just 'a breaking news'. It is a devastating one as one more survivor stopped sharing the story. https://t.co/ehGf2Gj27Q

"Broken-hearted to inform you that Ewa Kor has passed away and will be buried in the US," Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told AFP via a text message on Friday that used the Polish spelling of her first name.

"Forgive your worst enemies," Kor said in a video recording of her last visit to the Auschwitz Museum posted to its official Facebook page.
I fled Nazi Germany. I hope the US doesn't turn its back on refugees | Aryeh Neier
"The moment I forgave the Nazis, I felt free from Auschwitz and from all the tragedy that had occurred to me," she added.

Kor also said that for her, combatting the racial prejudice that can lead to genocide is as simple as "treating each other with respect and fairness".

"That doesn't take big laws, that doesn't take any government," she added.

Kor testified in the 2015 trial of former SS officer Oskar Groening, the so-called Bookkeeper of Auschwitz, who was accused on 300,000 counts of being an "accessory to murder" of Hungarian Jews.

During the trial, Kor described her experiences at the hands of Mengele, who had a fascination for twins.

She and her twin sister, Miriam, were 10 years old and managed to survive the regular mystery injections from Mengele, who was dubbed the "Angel of Death".

Kor recalled how, suffering a high fever, she saw Mengele at her bedside, "laugh sarcastically".

"Too bad, she's so young. She has only two weeks to live," she recalled him saying.

Crawling on the floor because she was unable to walk, Kor said she went on to find her sister who had been injected with a substance to freeze the growth of her kidneys.

"If I had died, Miriam would have been killed with an injection in the heart. Mengele would have performed comparative autopsy," she said.

On January 27, 1945, the two sisters watched as Russian soldiers liberated Auschwitz.

"They had smiles on their faces. They gave us chocolate, cookies and hugs. That was our first taste of freedom," Kor said.

Kor's parents and two other sisters perished at the death camp.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was built by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. With 1 million Jews killed there between 1940 to 1945, the camp has become a symbol of Adolf Hitler's genocide of the European Jews.

More than 100,000 other people also perished there, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and anti-Nazi resistance fighters.
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Eva Kor, survivor of Mengele, dies during annual trip to Auschwitz

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Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Auschwitz and the death camp's infamous doctor Josef Mengele, has passed away in Poland during a trip to the Holocaust site, sources said. The Romanian-born Kor, who founded the Candles Museum in Indiana and devoted her life to Holocaust awareness, was 85.

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Nicholas Parsons, who has died aged 96, entertained the public during eight decades as a versatile actor, straight man for top television comedians and, most famously, as a quizmaster, notably of BBC Radio 4's Just a Minute, which he chaired enthusiastically and with scarcely a break for more than 50 years.

In the show, which requires contestants to speak for 60 seconds on a given topic "without hesitation, repetition or deviation", the persona he chose to project, honed to perfection during a career that began in the 1940s, was that of a quibbling pedant from the professional classes who felt he had to treat his unruly panellists with lofty asperity. "My manner can best be described as laborious, rather pompous," he admitted disarmingly.

In reality he was, of course, as keen to get laughs at all costs as his charges, even - perhaps especially - if that meant robbing him of his dignity. For many years the show had the same panellists - Derek Nimmo, Kenneth Williams, Clement Freud and Peter Jones. Later regulars included Gyles Brandreth, Pam Ayres, Stephen Fry, Julian Clary, Sue Perkins, Graham Norton and Paul Merton. Only Parsons remained a constant. His longevity became the subject of much banter in recent years; an exchange on the topic "Oliver Cromwell" gives a flavour.

Parsons: "Well, it was 1653, not 1563 ..."

Norton: "Nicholas remembers."

Merton: "To be honest, he was doing the warm-up to Charles I's execution."

Norton: "He's still got the bladder on a stick!"

Merton: "Unfortunately, for different reasons these days."

What the panel could not rob him of, however, was his control and quick-wittedness. Having spent a lifetime in comedy, Parsons never failed to marvel at the show's format. "The essence of comedy," he told the Oldie in 2017, "is that you pause for effect, you repeat for emphasis, and you deviate to surprise. Yet these three things are exactly what you can't do in Just a Minute. And it's a comedy show, played for laughs."

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Nicholas Parsons, left, with Terry-Thomas in the 1959 film Too Many Crooks. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

In many ways, the testily humorous chairman was just another character role for a performer who spent the first 20 years of his career mostly as a jobbing actor, often specialising in dialects. For the BBC Radio Drama Company in the 50s, in various productions he was an Italian waiter, a Greek seaman, an Egyptian camel-herder, a Scottish gillie, a Welsh miner, a Croatian freedom-fighter and a London taxi-driver, among many others.

Parsons was born in Grantham, Lincolnshire, the middle child of a doctor, Paul, and a former nurse, Nell (nee Maggs). He attended the kindergarten of Kesteven and Grantham school for girls, where Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, was a pupil, and, after his father joined a medical practice in London, went to Colet Court prep school and then St Paul's senior school.

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Nicholas Parsons in Happy Is the Bride, 1958. Photograph: Ronald Grant

School days were not particularly happy. He was dyslexic (then undiagnosed) and, while left-handed, was instructed by his mother to write with his right. "This can create a disturbance in the mind because one part of the brain controls your actions on the left, and another the right," he wrote in a memoir in 2010. "If this is forcibly disrupted, it can result in difficulties in speech."

In Parsons's case it led to a life-long offstage stammer. Though highly intelligent, he struggled at school and compensated in two ways. He became a class clown to deflect from his hesitant progress in lessons, and because of his reading problem he developed a prodigious memory. All through his television career he never used an autocue because he could not read it. He simply remembered everything.

Although he wanted to be an actor from an early age, his parents were extremely unenthusiastic, his mother commenting: "Someone like you, Nicholas, will just end up as an alcoholic or some kind of pervert." So when he left school he got a job as an engineering apprentice at a factory making marine pumps on Clydebank near Glasgow.

In the five years he was there he spent two six-month periods studying engineering at the University of Glasgow and also developed a variety act, impersonating film stars, which was successful and came to the attention of the impresario Carroll Levis, who used him on his radio show.

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Nicholas Parsons, left, with Paul Merton on the 50th anniversary of Just a Minute in 2017. Photograph: BBC/Charlie Clift

In 1944 Parsons applied to join the merchant navy but within a few days of being accepted was taken seriously ill with pleurisy and spent five months in hospital. At one point the family was told his chances of survival were 50-50. After his recovery he returned to work and qualified as a mechanical engineer, performing as an entertainer in the evenings, and when the second world war ended he became a full-time professional actor with the grudging support of his parents.

He made his West End stage debut in The Hasty Heart at the Aldwych in 1945, then played the lead in a tour of Arsenic and Old Lace. He was in rep in various towns for two years and also played supporting roles in many British films. He continued to perfect his comedy act for variety and cabaret, and in 1952 became resident comedian at the Windmill theatre.

Parsons was ubiquitous on radio and television in the 50s, and there was a breakthrough, in terms of public recognition, when he became straight man for the character comedian Arthur Haynes for 10 years in several ITV series written mostly by Johnny Speight.

Haynes usually played a wily and contemptuous tramp, and Parsons "Mr Nicholarse", the authority figure dealing with him. The partnership broke up in 1966 and Parsons returned to the stage before working as foil for Benny Hill in more ITV shows from 1968 to 1971. He became a popular personality in his own right as quizmaster of Anglia Television's Sale of the Century (1971-83) - "and now, from Norwich, it's the quiz of the week".

Parsons had been chairman of Just a Minute, devised by Ian Messiter, since the first broadcast in 1967. In 2017, as the show's 50th anniversary approached, he concluded that: "It's the fun that keeps it going."

Parsons was appointed OBE in 2004 and CBE 10 years later. He served as rector at the University of St Andrews from 1988 to 1991, wrote two volumes of autobiography and performed his one-man show at the Edinburgh festival and around Britain for many years.

He is survived by his wife, Annie Reynolds, whom he married in 1995, and by two children, Suzy and Justin, from his first marriage, to the actor Denise Bryer, which ended in divorce.

* Christopher Nicholas Parsons, actor, comedian and quizmaster, born 10 October 1923; died 28 January 2020
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Nicholas Parsons, who has died aged 96, entertained the public during eight decades as a versatile actor, straight man for top television comedians and, most famously, as a quizmaster, notably of BBC Radio 4's Just a Minute, which he chaired enthusiastically and with scarcely a break for more than 50 years.

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Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook

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Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook

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In a speech last night at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen attacked Facebook and other social media platforms for enabling the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation.
The speech was striking in its sincerity - Baron Cohen appeared as himself, rather than "in character" as one of his satirical personas - and its blistering tone. Describing Facebook as "the greatest propaganda machine in history Here is the full transcript, from his prepared remarks:", Baron Cohen argued that the company, which does not vet political ads for truthfulness, would have allowed Hitler to run propaganda on its platform.
Thank you, ADL, for this recognition and your work in fighting racism, hate and bigotry. And to be clear, when I say "racism, hate and bigotry" I'm not referring to the names of Stephen Miller's Labradoodles.

Now, I realize that some of you may be thinking, what the hell is a comedian doing speaking at a conference like this! I certainly am. I've spent most of the past two decades in character. In fact, this is the first time that I have ever stood up and given a speech as my least popular character, Sacha Baron Cohen. And I have to confess, it is terrifying.

I realize that my presence here may also be unexpected for another reason. At times, some critics have said my comedy risks reinforcing old stereotypes.

The truth is, I've been passionate about challenging bigotry and intolerance throughout my life. As a teenager in the UK, I marched against the fascist National Front and to abolish apartheid. As an undergraduate, I traveled around America and wrote my thesis about the civil rights movement, with the help of the archives of the ADL. And as a comedian, I've tried to use my characters to get people to let down their guard and reveal what they actually believe, including their own prejudice.

Now, I'm not going to claim that everything I've done has been for a higher purpose. Yes, some of my comedy, OK probably half my comedy, has been absolutely juvenile and the other half completely puerile. I admit, there was nothing particularly enlightening about me - as Borat from Kazakhstan, the first fake news journalist - running through a conference of mortgage brokers when I was completely naked.

But when Borat was able to get an entire bar in Arizona to sing "Throw the Jew down the well," it did reveal people's indifference to antisemitism. When - as Bruno, the gay fashion reporter from Austria - I started kissing a man in a cage fight in Arkansas, nearly starting a riot, it showed the violent potential of homophobia. And when - disguised as an ultra-woke developer - I proposed building a mosque in one rural community, prompting a resident to proudly admit, "I am racist, against Muslims" - it showed the acceptance of Islamophobia.

That's why I appreciate the opportunity to be here with you. Today around the world, demagogues appeal to our worst instincts. Conspiracy theories once confined to the fringe are going mainstream. It's as if the Age of Reason - the era of evidential argument - is ending, and now knowledge is delegitimized and scientific consensus is dismissed. Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat, and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities.

What do all these dangerous trends have in common? I'm just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

The greatest propaganda machine in history.

Think about it. Facebook, YouTube and Google, Twitter and others - they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged - stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear. It's why YouTube recommended videos by the conspiracist Alex Jones billions of times. It's why fake news outperforms real news, because studies show that lies spread faster than truth. And it's no surprise that the greatest propaganda machine in history has spread the oldest conspiracy theory in history - the lie that Jews are somehow dangerous. As one headline put it, "Just Think What Goebbels Could Have Done with Facebook."

On the internet, everything can appear equally legitimate. Breitbart resembles the BBC. The fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion look as valid as an ADL report. And the rantings of a lunatic seem as credible as the findings of a Nobel prize winner. We have lost, it seems, a shared sense of the basic facts upon which democracy depends.

When I, as the wannabe gangsta Ali G, asked the astronaut Buzz Aldrin "what woz it like to walk on de sun?" the joke worked, because we, the audience, shared the same facts. If you believe the moon landing was a hoax, the joke was not funny.

When Borat got that bar in Arizona to agree that "Jews control everybody's money and never give it back," the joke worked because the audience shared the fact that the depiction of Jews as miserly is a conspiracy theory originating in the Middle Ages.

But when, thanks to social media, conspiracies take hold, it's easier for hate groups to recruit, easier for foreign intelligence agencies to interfere in our elections, and easier for a country like Myanmar to commit genocide against the Rohingya.

It's actually quite shocking how easy it is to turn conspiracy thinking into violence. In my last show Who is America?, I found an educated, normal guy who had held down a good job, but who, on social media, repeated many of the conspiracy theories that President Trump, using Twitter, has spread more than 1,700 times to his 67 million followers. The president even tweeted that he was considering designating Antifa - anti-fascists who march against the far right - as a terror organization.

So, disguised as an Israel anti-terrorism expert, Colonel Erran Morad, I told my interviewee that, at the Women's March in San Francisco, Antifa were plotting to put hormones into babies' diapers in order to "make them transgender". And he believed it.

I instructed him to plant small devices on three innocent people at the march and explained that when he pushed a button, he'd trigger an explosion that would kill them all. They weren't real explosives, of course, but he thought they were. I wanted to see - would he actually do it?

The answer was yes. He pushed the button and thought he had actually killed three human beings. Voltaire was right: "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." And social media lets authoritarians push absurdities to billions of people.

In their defense, these social media companies have taken some steps to reduce hate and conspiracies on their platforms, but these steps have been mostly superficial.

I'm speaking up today because I believe that our pluralistic democracies are on a precipice and that the next 12 months, and the role of social media, could be determinant. British voters will go to the polls while online conspiracists promote the despicable theory of "great replacement" that white Christians are being deliberately replaced by Muslim immigrants. Americans will vote for president while trolls and bots perpetuate the disgusting lie of a "Hispanic invasion". And after years of YouTube videos calling climate change a "hoax", the United States is on track, a year from now, to formally withdraw from the Paris accords. A sewer of bigotry and vile conspiracy theories that threatens democracy and our planet - this cannot possibly be what the creators of the internet had in mind.

I believe it's time for a fundamental rethink of social media and how it spreads hate, conspiracies and lies. Last month, however, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook delivered a major speech that, not surprisingly, warned against new laws and regulations on companies like his. Well, some of these arguments are simply absurd. Let's count the ways.

First, Zuckerberg tried to portray this whole issue as "choices ... around free expression". That is ludicrous. This is not about limiting anyone's free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet. Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly, there will always be racists, misogynists, antisemites and child abusers. But I think we could all agree that we should not be giving bigots and pedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims.

Second, Zuckerberg claimed that new limits on what's posted on social media would be to "pull back on free expression". This is utter nonsense. The first amendment says that "Congress shall make no law" abridging freedom of speech, however, this does not apply to private businesses like Facebook. We're not asking these companies to determine the boundaries of free speech across society. We just want them to be responsible on their platforms.

If a neo-Nazi comes goose-stepping into a restaurant and starts threatening other customers and saying he wants kill Jews, would the owner of the restaurant be required to serve him an elegant eight-course meal? Of course not! The restaurant owner has every legal right and a moral obligation to kick the Nazi out, and so do these internet companies.

Third, Zuckerberg seemed to equate regulation of companies like his to the actions of "the most repressive societies". Incredible. This, from one of the six people who decide what information so much of the world sees. Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sundar Pichai at Google, at its parent company Alphabet, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Brin's ex-sister-in-law, Susan Wojcicki at YouTube and Jack Dorsey at Twitter.

The Silicon Six - all billionaires, all Americans - who care more about boosting their share price than about protecting democracy. This is ideological imperialism - six unelected individuals in Silicon Valley imposing their vision on the rest of the world, unaccountable to any government and acting like they're above the reach of law. It's like we're living in the Roman Empire, and Mark Zuckerberg is Caesar. At least that would explain his haircut.

Here's an idea. Instead of letting the Silicon Six decide the fate of the world, let our elected representatives, voted for by the people, of every democracy in the world, have at least some say.

Fourth, Zuckerberg speaks of welcoming a "diversity of ideas", and last year he gave us an example. He said that he found posts denying the Holocaust "deeply offensive", but he didn't think Facebook should take them down "because I think there are things that different people get wrong". At this very moment, there are still Holocaust deniers on Facebook, and Google still takes you to the most repulsive Holocaust denial sites with a simple click. One of the heads of Google once told me, incredibly, that these sites just show "both sides" of the issue. This is madness.

To quote Edward R Murrow, one "cannot accept that there are, on every story, two equal and logical sides to an argument". We have millions of pieces of evidence for the Holocaust - it is an historical fact. And denying it is not some random opinion. Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one.

Still, Zuckerberg says that "people should decide what is credible, not tech companies." But at a time when two-thirds of millennials say they haven't even heard of Auschwitz, how are they supposed to know what's "credible"? How are they supposed to know that the lie is a lie?

There is such a thing as objective truth. Facts do exist. And if these internet companies really want to make a difference, they should hire enough monitors to actually monitor, work closely with groups like the ADL, insist on facts and purge these lies and conspiracies from their platforms.

Fifth, when discussing the difficulty of removing content, Zuckerberg asked "where do you draw the line?" Yes, drawing the line can be difficult. But here's what he's really saying: removing more of these lies and conspiracies is just too expensive.

These are the richest companies in the world, and they have the best engineers in the world. They could fix these problems if they wanted to. Twitter could deploy an algorithm to remove more white supremacist hate speech, but they reportedly haven't because it would eject some very prominent politicians from their platform. Maybe that's not a bad thing! The truth is, these companies won't fundamentally change because their entire business model relies on generating more engagement, and nothing generates more engagement than lies, fear and outrage.

It's time to finally call these companies what they really are - the largest publishers in history. And here's an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day. We have standards and practices in television and the movies; there are certain things we cannot say or do. In England, I was told that Ali G could not curse when he appeared before 9pm. Here in the US, the Motion Picture Association of America regulates and rates what we see. I've had scenes in my movies cut or reduced to abide by those standards. If there are standards and practices for what cinemas and television channels can show, then surely companies that publish material to billions of people should have to abide by basic standards and practices too.

Take the issue of political ads. Fortunately, Twitter finally banned them, and Google is making changes, too. But if you pay them, Facebook will run any "political" ad you want, even if it's a lie. And they'll even help you micro-target those lies to their users for maximum effect. Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around in the 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his "solution" to the "Jewish problem". So here's a good standard and practice: Facebook, start factchecking political ads before you run them, stop micro-targeted lies immediately, and when the ads are false, give back the money and don't publish them.

Here's another good practice: slow down. Every single post doesn't need to be published immediately. Oscar Wilde once said that "we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities." But is having every thought or video posted instantly online, even if it is racist or criminal or murderous, really a necessity? Of course not!

The shooter who massacred Muslims in New Zealand live-streamed his atrocity on Facebook where it then spread across the internet and was viewed likely millions of times. It was a snuff film, brought to you by social media. Why can't we have more of a delay so this trauma-inducing filth can be caught and stopped before it's posted in the first place?

Finally, Zuckerberg said that social media companies should "live up to their responsibilities", but he's totally silent about what should happen when they don't. By now it's pretty clear, they cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. As with the Industrial Revolution, it's time for regulation and legislation to curb the greed of these hi-tech robber barons.

In every other industry, a company can be held liable when their product is defective. When engines explode or seatbelts malfunction, car companies recall tens of thousands of vehicles, at a cost of billions of dollars. It only seems fair to say to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter: your product is defective, you are obliged to fix it, no matter how much it costs and no matter how many moderators you need to employ.

In every other industry, you can be sued for the harm you cause. Publishers can be sued for libel, people can be sued for defamation. I've been sued many times! I'm being sued right now by someone whose name I won't mention because he might sue me again! But social media companies are largely protected from liability for the content their users post - no matter how indecent it is - by Section 230 of, get ready for it, the Communications Decency Act. Absurd!

Fortunately, internet companies can now be held responsible for pedophiles who use their sites to target children. I say, let's also hold these companies responsible for those who use their sites to advocate for the mass murder of children because of their race or religion. And maybe fines are not enough. Maybe it's time to tell Mark Zuckerberg and the CEOs of these companies: you already allowed one foreign power to interfere in our elections, you already facilitated one genocide in Myanmar, do it again and you go to jail.

In the end, it all comes down to what kind of world we want. In his speech, Zuckerberg said that one of his main goals is to "uphold as wide a definition of freedom of expression as possible". Yet our freedoms are not only an end in themselves, they're also the means to another end - as you say here in the US, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But today these rights are threatened by hate, conspiracies and lies.

Allow me to leave you with a suggestion for a different aim for society. The ultimate aim of society should be to make sure that people are not targeted, not harassed and not murdered because of who they are, where they come from, who they love or how they pray.

If we make that our aim - if we prioritize truth over lies, tolerance over prejudice, empathy over indifference and experts over ignoramuses - then maybe, just maybe, we can stop the greatest propaganda machine in history, we can save democracy, we can still have a place for free speech and free expression, and, most importantly, my jokes will still work.

Thank you all very much.
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Read Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook in full: 'greatest propaganda machine in history'

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In a speech last night at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen attacked Facebook and other social media platforms for enabling the proliferation of hate speech and misinformation. The speech was striking in its sincerity - Baron Cohen appeared as himself, rather than "in character" as one of his satirical personas - and its blistering tone.

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"I'd never really thought about the way I spoke until I moved to London," says Alex, 26, from north Liverpool. "Obviously I knew I didn't speak the Queen's English but I didn't think my accent was especially broad. Apparently it really is though, because if I met somebody on a night out it'd be two seconds before they were asking if I was as dirty as my accent."

When you're surrounded by other people who sound like you, there's no reason to think about your accent. As Alex found, this makes it all the more jarring when the way you speak begins to be used against you. Depending on where you are from, accents can be used as a way to judge, reject or even sexualise you.

Negative associations with certain accents - be they regional within the UK or non-native - are known as accent bias. Dr Bronwen Evans, an associate professor in speech, hearing and phonetic sciences at UCL, tells Refinery29: "We're more likely to talk about negative biases we have towards a particular accent or voice, even though we know that people also have positive associations with different accents; they [may] find Geordies 'friendly and funny', and some Scottish accents very trustworthy."

The way these associations play out can directly impact people's lives. This is most apparent in the workplace, with several studies demonstrating there is still a clear 'accent hierarchy' in the UK. As part of the Accent Bias In Britain project, researchers at Queen Mary University of London and University of York examined public attitudes to accent 'labels' and responses to recorded voices, before looking more specifically at how accent bias plays out in professional settings. Their research showed that while there has been some reduction of bias compared to earlier studies (the distances between 'highest' and 'lowest' rated accents are smaller in their study), there is still a persistent hierarchy of accents, which penalises "non-standard working-class and ethnic accents and upholds the belief that national standard varieties are the most prestigious". This is an incredibly frustrating finding.

What about finding a partner - can accent have an effect there, too? According to Bronwen, although there is limited research into accents and dating, there is no doubt that accent has an impact on whether we find someone attractive. In 2014, YouGov ran a survey which claimed that the Birmingham accent is the 'least attractive' in the British Isles, while southern Irish is the 'most attractive'.

Rosie, 23, from Birmingham, confirms that she's received plenty of unsolicited feedback about the way she speaks and says that people have made negative comments about her accent "more times than I could count". She goes on to say that people have said her accent sounds "uneducated" or "common" and was even told "that my tone could make great news sound like terrible news. Rude!"

How has it impacted her dating life? "I have had people in the past say things like, 'You were so attractive until you opened your mouth'," although it also swings the other way: "On the other hand I've had people [say things] like, 'I absolutely love the Birmingham accent on a girl'." Either way, "these conversations usually end in them taking the absolute piss out of how I say 'BUURMINGUM', which I'm more than used to."

There are a few theories why some accents are considered universally attractive. "We think that accent attitudes in adults typically reflect knowledge of cultural stereotypes about different groups of individuals," Bronwen says. "However, we don't have a good understanding of how these different biases develop."

What we do know is that the way these cultural stereotypes interact is complex - we are more likely to be culturally biased against so-called 'regional' accents, for example, but we are also influenced by individual preferences and the situation in which we encounter a voice. "For instance, even within the same accent background, some voices are preferred more than others in particular situations because they are associated with certain characteristics, like women in public life might be described as 'shrill'," says Bronwen. "Famously, Margaret Thatcher had voice coaching to lower her pitch to sound more authoritative."

She goes on: "People tend to associate certain qualities or characteristics with particular accents which, in turn, impacts what we're drawn to. Standard southern British English and Received Pronunciation might be stereotyped as posh and not so friendly, but they are typically rated highly in terms of intelligence and competence. On the other hand, the Geordie accent is stereotyped as 'friendly and trustworthy' but rated lower in terms of intelligence and competence."

Rosie says that the media has exacerbated negative stereotypes about her accent. "I've found that characters on TV with the [Birmingham] accent have, in the past, been portrayed as dull/stupid." Since the success of Peaky Blinders, she reckons the accent has gained a little more credit but notes that it's "still associated with the lower class". These stereotypes obviously don't hold for everyone, though; other factors, such as a family association, might override them. For instance, you might love a Glaswegian accent because it reminds you of a loved one or someone you like and admire.

Interestingly, these preferences change when applied to people from outside the UK. In a piece for The Conversation, Gerry Howley, a teaching associate in sociolinguistics at the University of Sheffield, points to the work of one PhD researcher who asked native and non-native English speakers to rate 20 different accents including southern Irish, Welsh, Liverpudlian and Birmingham. While the native English speakers followed the hierarchy outlined by the YouGov survey, the non-native speakers rated Welsh second, Brummie third, Scouse sixth and southern Irish 10th in terms of attractiveness. "The non-native English speakers also described the Birmingham accent as 'beautiful', 'cool', 'sexy', 'sweet', and 'lovely'."

This appears to suggest that it isn't the sound of an accent that makes someone appear attractive or not but rather cultural perceptions and internalised biases that lead us to subconsciously dismiss a Brummie or a Scouse person (for example). We can and should check those negative biases, and the impulse to categorise someone based on how they sound.

Happily, the study cited above shows that in the workplace it is entirely possible to resist the urge to discriminate, something that we should do in all areas of our lives. Letting our biases dictate how we treat people, whether deliberately or subconsciously, allows negative biases to flourish unchecked and leaves people feeling shitty and undesirable because of where they come from. Ultimately, an accent can bond people together. As Rosie said: "I think the bad press does rub off on how you see your accent but it's definitely something I've grown to be really proud of. I feel like through all the negativity, there's no better feeling than hearing a Birmingham accent outside of the city. It's a bond that no one outside Birmingham can understand!"

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Why You Find Some Accents Sexier Than Others - & What That Says About You

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"I'd never really thought about the way I spoke until I moved to London," says Alex, 26, from north Liverpool. "Obviously I knew I didn't speak the Queen's English but I didn't think my accent was especially broad.

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Teachers who ban slang could cause pupils "long-term damage", making them feel stigmatised and discriminated against, a linguistics expert has warned.

A new study by Ian Cushing, an education lecturer at Brunel University and expert in applied linguistics, finds policies that ban the use of non-standard English words - such as "bare" and "peng"- have a negative impact on pupils' learning and can make them feel that their language is "worthless".
Related: Opinion: News: Gibb stresses oracy as primary bans the word 'like' Non-standard English is not sub-standard Teaching slang at primary could help fight 'middle-class' Sats bias, says academic
Dr Cushing interviewed 16 primary school teachers as part of his research, as well as visiting schools and analysing media reports and government policies, finding a growing trend for schools to ban the use of slang. For example:

One school banned the use of "Yorkshire verbs" and gave Year 7 students the role of "grammar police".

Banned words appeared inside "word jail" posters in some primary classrooms.

One school had produced a policy called "Elocution for Employment", which described how pupils were "competing" for jobs with Europeans and non-native speakers, encouraging teachers to correct pupils if they "lapse into poor spoken habits" to prepare them for the world of work.

Many school policies cited the language of popular reality television programmes such as The Only Way is Essex and Love Island as examples of the kinds of speech pupils should avoid.

Dr Cushing said these policies were unlikely to raise standards and could cause pupils long-term harm.

"Banning language and non-standard grammar is a punitive practice which can make people feel stigmatised, discriminated against and that their language is worthless," he said.

"I think some adults feel threatened by how kids speak, but kids having their own language is a big part of how they form identities and interact with different social groups.

"There's nothing incorrect or wrong about non-standard language, but a lot of school policies - as well as government policy, grammar tests and guidance for teachers - seem to reproduce the problematic idea that there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways of using language."

However, some English teachers argue that schools are a "dry run" for adult life and reinforcing formal language helps pupils.

Lauran Hampshire-Dell, an English teacher, said: "The classroom is a dry run for habits students will need later in life and speech is as important as writing.

"Slang is natural, but students should be taught when it's appropriate and when it isn't. One way of approaching this is stopping students when their formal speech lapses in class and asking them to restart their sentence.

"It can take a while, but it is effective for them and their peers - who become aware of their own slips, too. Applied consistently, and paired with giving students the vocabulary you want used, slang quickly disappears."

Dr Cushing said that standard English "has its place for things like job interviews or ceremonies".

But he argued that children were adept at code-switching - adapting the formality of their language according to the context - and that policies dictating which forms of language were "correct" revealed a misunderstanding of how language worked.

"They don't need to have their language policed, they police it themselves," the academic said. "I am not suggesting students shouldn't have access to standard English, but they need to be taught why it carries social power, and that using non-standard English is not 'incorrect', 'wrong' or 'inappropriate'."

Pupils who were reprimanded for how they spoke in lessons were less likely to take part in class discussions, he said.

"There's likely to be long-term damage. Taking a punitive stance won't teach good standards in any meaningful way."

He told Tes: "Children need to be taught about the reasons why standard English has so much power - and the current curriculum doesn't do that."

Dr Cushing said it was a "shame" that the English language GCSE controlled assessment on spoken language - which encouraged pupils to consider how they adapted the formality of their language in different contexts - had been dropped when GCSEs were reformed from 2014, and that this represented "a lack of opportunity for children to learn about linguistic diversity".

"There has been a shift towards conservative - both little c and big C - agendas in education, a focus on what's called knowledge, and this is reflected in language policies," Dr Cushing added.

The Department for Education has been contacted for comment.

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Teachers' slang bans 'likely to cause long-term damage'

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Teachers who ban slang could cause pupils "long-term damage", making them feel stigmatised and discriminated against, a linguistics expert has warned. A new study by Ian Cushing, an education lecturer at Brunel University and expert in applied linguistics, finds policies that ban the use of non-standard English words - such as "bare" and "peng"- have a negative impact on pupils' learning and can make them feel that their language is "worthless".

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Identity language in the press Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis

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Identity language in the press Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis

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Jessica Ennis, Mo Farah, and Identity Language in the British Press - Migration Observatory

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Investigates media use of languages of identity and origins in association with Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah.

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In 2019, young people learned how to talk like boomers. It showed up in tweets ("why do boomers all have such a strange relationship with capitalization and punctuation"), on Reddit ("On my first ever Facebook post to a friend's wall, I signed my name like some kind of boomer"), and people who type "ok boomer" as "O.K., Boomer." There's a Facebook group where people pretend to be boomers, which consists of typing things like "say hi to Joe and the kids for me,,, love! You." There are even memes, like this take on the Distracted Boyfriend meme.

Many of these pieces had been around before, but as boomerspeak, they crystallized into a genre ripe for parody. Boomerspeak's canonical features include the dot dot dot, repeated commas, and the period at the end of a text message. It can also involve random mid-sentence capitalization, typing in all caps, double-spacing after a period, signing your name at the end of a text message, and confusion between the face with tears of joy emoji and the loudly crying emoji. But it's not just a question of intergenerational strife. Watching boomerspeak distill and crystalize into a distinct genre this year can help us understand a bigger phenomenon: how distinctive ways of speaking bubble up into the popular consciousness and become available for commentary or imitation, a linguistic process known as enregisterment.

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A register is a particular socially identifiable variety of a language, whether that's texting like a boomer or the prestigious British linguistic register known as Received Pronunciation. This social identification doesn't exist permanently. Instead, it develops over time, a process that the linguist Asif Agha named enregisterment. Agha wrote a classic paper introducing the term in 2003, where he used the well-documented history of Received Pronunciation as a case study. It might feel obvious to a modern-day English speaker that of course there's a fancy register associated with the Queen and the upper classes and the media, but Agha points out that this wasn't the case before the 18th century, when the nobility tended to have a regional accent associated with their lands. Received Pronunciation was gradually constructed in the minds of the public, from grammarians and other language pundits of the 18th century who expressed a desire for a unified national English accent, to 19th-century etiquette manuals aimed at a growing middle class, fictional representations of speech by authors like Charles Dickens, and increasing codification through boarding schools and the BBC into the 20th century.

The idea of enregisterment has been applied to many other linguistic varieties. One particularly vivid example comes from linguist Barbara Johnstone, who spent 11 years collecting "Pittsburghese" T-shirts and other memorabilia (mugs, bumper stickers) with characteristic Pittsburgh words, phrases, and folk respellings on them, such as "yinz" and "dahntahn" (downtown) and "needs washed." Johnstone makes the point that linguistic features becoming characteristic of Pittsburgh in the popular imagination is a distinct step from them existing at all, which they did for decades before they started getting noticed and put on T-shirts. What's more, the words and sounds on a Pittsburghese T-shirt aren't necessarily representative of all and only Pittsburghers-many of these features are also found in the speech of surrounding areas, and many residents of Pittsburgh use only some of them, or even none at all, as this style is linked especially to a white, working-class identity. Accuracy aside, an imagined Pittsburghese lexicon makes the T-shirts more valuable at a very practical level-they sell in souvenir shops at a healthy markup over their production cost.

Enregisterment is often partially, rather than completely, true, sort of like an accent viewed through a funhouse mirror. It's like how many Americans can do a sort of accent that's recognizably "British" even though it sounds like no actual real British person ever, a confusing jumble sliding around between Cockney and the Queen. Similarly, many Brits can do an "American" accent that sounds like no American I've ever met (but possibly like a cowboy in an old-school Western movie and/or Hollywood's version of a Valley Girl). Or it's like how most English speakers can put on a recognizable Dracula voice to say, "I vant to suck your bloood," with only the vaguest awareness that this accent was originally an imitation of Bela Lugosi, who played the iconic 1931 Dracula using his native Hungarian accent (and technically never said that line). "I vant to suck your bloood" isn't enregistered as Hungarian; it's enregistered as Dracula.

It's with this distortion in mind that we can turn back to the growing popular conception of "boomerspeak"-it's only loosely related to the actual communicative practices of boomers, but that's par for the course when it comes to enregisterment. For one thing, these punctuation styles are much older. In my research for Because Internet, I found evidence of the dot dot dot in casual writing ranging from handwritten Beatles postcards to recipe cards written on a real typewriter. For another thing, #NotAllBoomers-this writing style is actually more characteristic of one generation older than the Baby Boom, but there's just not a lot of social media discourse to be had about members of the Silent Generation. ‾\_(ツ)_/‾

As with the Wikipedia battles over "ok boomer", we might ask ourselves whether boomerspeak parodies are a case of harmless joshing or cruel mockery. It depends.

Enregisterment tends to inherit the power dynamics of the people that it's associated with-since the US and UK are on reasonably equal terms, an American doing a fake British accent might get mocked for doing so poorly, but the attempt itself is unlikely to bother anyone. On the other hand, given the history of systemic racism, white people doing verbal imitations of African American English have been called out for "verbal blackface." Linguistic styles can also be sensitive to in-group dynamics-Pittsburghers, former Pittsburghers, and even tourists visiting Pittsburgh may enjoy buying and wearing "yinzer" T-shirts, but as I've never been there, it might be strange if I started doing so for no apparent reason.

Whether you think of boomerspeak parodies as punching up or punching down depends on whether you think older people are being disadvantaged. When it comes to tech hiring, the data suggests yes; when it comes to political influence, the data suggests no.

Personally, I see it as fighting back. After all, the linguistic style of younger people has long been enregistered and available for parody. Exaggerated, morally panicked versions of youth internet styles have appeared everywhere from media hyperbole about emoji in the 2010s (most notably, Seattle's Q13 local FOX News affiliate claiming hilariously false things about the fox and hibiscus emoji) to media hyperbole about internet acronyms and plain-text emoticons in the 2000s-so much a media staple of the time that an academic paper was written analyzing 101 of them. A year of boomerspeak parodies on social media pales in comparison to several decades of exaggerated representations of youthspeak in mainstream media. In a better world, we wouldn't mock accents at all, but in the imperfect world we live in, perhaps a half-measure on the way there is to make the mockery slightly more evenly distributed.

Regardless of your stance on boomerspeak parodies, it's a golden opportunity to watch a linguistic variety enter the popular imagination in real time. Writing Because Internet has placed me on the front lines-this whole year, I've been seeing a constant stream of tweets along the lines of "why is it that my dad/mom/boss/ Neil Gaiman texts that way?" because other people keep tagging me in the replies.

In a small, bizarre way, I've even been participating directly in the enregisterment of boomerspeak myself. Remember that boomerspeak variant on the Distracted Boyfriend meme?

I came across the meme while working on this article and immediately filed it to use. A few hours later, though, I thought, hold on a sec, why does this meme look kinda familiar? And why had the memeist used the more noncommittal "older people" rather than the zeitgeisty "boomers"? I searched back through my own Twitter feed and sure enough ... I actually created this particular image myself over a year ago, released it into the wilds of the internet, and forgot about it entirely a week later. As one does.

Now my creation was proving a point in spite of me. I hadn't created the meme as a boomer meme-I'd just written a chapter about the history of the dot dot dot, so I knew very well that this punctuation mark dated back to older styles of casual writing-but The Discourse cared not, and the meme came back to me like, I suppose we could say, a boomerang.

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'Boomerspeak' Is Now Available for Your Parodying Pleasure

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In 2019, young people learned how to talk like boomers. It showed up in tweets ("why do boomers all have such a strange relationship with capitalization and punctuation"), on Reddit ("On my first ever Facebook post to a friend's wall, I signed my name like some kind of boomer"), and people who type "ok boomer" as "O.K., Boomer."

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Interview with Murph - Big Issue vendor - exam practice

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Interview with Murph - Big Issue vendor - exam practice

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Excerpt from Stephen Fry's autobiography - exam practice

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Excerpt from Stephen Fry's autobiography - exam practice

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Alas, the Apostrophe Protection Society is no more. John Richards, who founded the Society in 2001 in order to help maintain the correct use of the "much abused" punctuation mark, has thrown in the towel, claiming that "the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won".

This is understandable. Mr Richards is 96, and undoubtedly has more interesting things to be doing than fretting over whether Waterstones will ever see the light and reinstate the apostrophe it so wilfully discarded back in 2012.

But where does this leave the rest of us? If there is no APS, who is actually in charge of apostrophes? How will we know how to use them? Without the APS's (APS'? - see, it's happening already) guidance, how can we know for sure when to be outraged at their misuse?

As a linguistics expert who researches and teaches the use of the English language and the way it changes over time, I am interested in how people view its different aspects. I actually like to think of the APS not only as a guardian of good apostrophe use, but also as a supplier of quality apostrophes. You can probably pick up cheaper apostrophes from supermarkets and online retailers, but the APS will give you the real deal.

A supermarket or online apostrophe might come packaged in a jumbled set of other punctuation marks with no guidance as to how to use them - whereas a genuine APS apostrophe will come with its own provenance and will be made to fit precisely the context for which it is needed.

Much like a traditional tailor or shoemaker, every item will be infused with craftsmanship and tradition, and a lifelong guarantee if used correctly.

So, no more APS, no more quality apostrophes. And no guidance as to how to use the ones we might already have - even the quality APS ones. It will be a shame to see genuine APS apostrophes being used willy-nilly in badly punctuated signs at the village fete pointing people towards the Tea's and Coffee's. But this is what we will be faced with.

Of course, without new quality apostrophes being provided, people might eventually simply stop using them altogether. Maybe they will keep hold of the few APS-certified examples they have left to use for things like wedding invitations and legal documents, and - rather than risk using sub-standard online-sourced punctuation - decide to go without them the rest of the time.

Eventually, those last remaining apostrophes will be used up, leaving us with nothing.

Comma chameleon

Imagine that. Imagine a world where proper apostrophes ceased to exist. What would happen? There would probably be a period during which people misguidedly tried to re-task commas to do the job of an apostrophe. But this is clearly unsustainable (it's a gravity issue). We would soon be left apostrophe-less.

To be honest, one outcome of this state of affairs would be to remove a whole source of ammunition for pedants to use against the less-enlightened. The "teas and coffees" issue is immediately rectified - along with every other example of the so-called " greengrocer's apostrophe " (apple's, tomato's and pear's) that seems to get some people so worked up.

Hardcore apostrophites would no longer be able to roll their eyes at people's inability to work out where the apostrophe goes in examples such as "The Joneses front door", "Holding each others hand" or "Others opinions". Neither would they be able to indulge in their habitual mocking of someone who has used the wrong form of "its".

In fact, by removing apostrophes altogether, the pedantry arsenal is vastly reduced. Without their favourite punctuation mark of judgement, your average pedant will be forced to make do with old favourites such as split infinitives and insisting on the "correct" meaning of " decimate ".

Who's rules anyway?

Put this way, the demise of the APS and its guardianship over the apostrophe can only be a good thing. Far from indicating a win for ignorance and laziness, this is a victory for common sense and freedom. In most cases (and certainly in almost all cases of possession), an apostrophe is not actually necessary for understanding. There are very few examples where the lack of an apostrophe genuinely creates confusion or ambiguity, despite what many would have you believe.

The most persuasive illustration of apostrophes not being necessary is the fact that we get along fine without them in spoken language. If something is ambiguous in speech, we rephrase so that it isn't. We can easily do (and routinely already do) the same in writing. If we all took this view, we would be left with just a handful of genuinely useful apostrophes.

In reality, the Apostrophe Protection Society did not, of course, hold dominion over apostrophes or any other aspect of English. Nobody does. Linguistic conventions (for this is all they are) come and go, and are often based on idiosyncratic preferences from another era. A good grasp of apostrophe use says more about your ability to remember inconsistent patterns than it does about your intelligence.

It seems to me that apostrophes are used to judge others as much as they are used to clarify writing. Maybe the APS finally saw the light and realised this, and decided it wanted no further part in the snobbish pedantry that surrounds this fetishised punctuation mark. Or maybe John Richards will read this article, and, passion renewed, decide he must carry on the fight.

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Apostrophes: linguistics expert imagines a happier world without them

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Alas, the Apostrophe Protection Society is no more. John Richards, who founded the Society in 2001 in order to help maintain the correct use of the "much abused" punctuation mark, has thrown in the towel, claiming that "the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won". This is understandable.

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The debate about pronunciation of Epstein's name and whether it is anti-semitic

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The debate about pronunciation of Epstein's name and whether it is anti-semitic

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The latest installment in the Corbyn anti-Jewish racism saga sent me down an orthoepic route. Why, exactly, is Jewish Twitter so up in arms about his pronunciation of “Epstein” as “Ep-shtine” rather than “Ep-steen”? Why was I so shocked when he said it last night? (A thread) /1

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The latest installment in the Corbyn anti-Jewish racism saga sent me down an orthoepic route. Why, exactly, is Jewish Twitter so up in arms about his pronunciation of “Epstein” as “Ep-shtine” rather than “Ep-steen”? Why was I so shocked when he said it last night? (A thread) /1

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The latest installment in the Corbyn anti-Jewish racism saga sent me down an orthoepic route. Why, exactly, is Jewish Twitter so up in arms about his pronunciation of “Epstein” as “Ep-shtine” rather than “Ep-steen”? Why was I so shocked when he said it last night? (A thread) /1
— Catherine Lenson (@CatherineLenson) November 20, 2019

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The latest installment in the Corbyn anti-Jewish racism saga sent me down an orthoepic route. Why, exactly, is Jewish Twitter so up in arms about his pronunciation of “Epstein” as “Ep-shtine” rather than “Ep-steen”? Why was I so shocked when he said it last night? (A thread) /1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
The latest installment in the Corbyn anti-Jewish racism saga sent me down an orthoepic route. Why, exactly, is Jewish Twitter so up in arms about his pronunciation of “Epstein” as “Ep-shtine” rather than “Ep-steen”? Why was I so shocked when he said it last night? (A thread) /1

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
The latest installment in the Corbyn anti-Jewish racism saga sent me down an orthoepic route. Why, exactly, is Jewish Twitter so up in arms about his pronunciation of “Epstein” as “Ep-shtine” rather than “Ep-steen”? Why was I so shocked when he said it last night? (A thread) /1

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Oxford Dictionaries has declared "climate emergency" the word of the year for 2019, following a hundred-fold increase in usage that it says demonstrated a "greater immediacy" in the way we talk about the climate.

Defined as "a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it", Oxford said the words soared from "relative obscurity" to "one of the most prominent - and prominently debated - terms of 2019."

According to the dictionary's data, usage of "climate emergency" soared 10,796%.
The climate science is clear: it's now or never to avert catastrophe | Bill McKibben
Oxford said the choice was reflective, not just of the rise in climate awareness, but the focus specifically on the language we use to discuss it. The rise of "climate emergency" reflected a conscious push towards language of immediacy and urgency, the dictionary said.

In 2019, "climate" became the most common word associated with "emergency", three times more than "health emergency" in second.

In May, the Guardian updated its style guide to clarify that "climate emergency" or "global heating" would be favoured over "climate change" or "global warming" (although the original terms are not banned) - to better reflect the scientific consensus that this was "a catastrophe for humanity".

Q&A
Why is the Guardian changing the language it uses about the environment?

The Guardian has updated its style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Instead of "climate change", the preferred terms are "climate emergency, crisis or breakdown" and "global heating" is favoured over "global warming".

The scale of the climate and wildlife crises has been laid bare by two landmark reports from the world's scientists. In October 2018, they said carbon emissions must halve by 2030 to avoid even greater risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people. In May 2019, global scientists said human society was in jeopardy from the accelerating annihilation of wildlife and destruction of the ecosystems that support all life on Earth.

The editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, says: "We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue. The phrase 'climate change', for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity."

Other terms that have been updated include the use of "wildlife" rather than "biodiversity", "fish populations" instead of "fish stocks" and "climate science denier" rather than "climate sceptic".

Damian Carrington Environment editor

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Thank you for your feedback.

Hundreds of cities, towns and even countries have also declared "climate emergencies" during 2019 - from Scotland in April, the UK parliament in May, Canada, France and the city of Sydney in Australia.

"In 2018, climate did not feature in the top words typically used to modify emergency, instead the top types of emergencies people wrote about were health, hospital, and family emergencies," the selection panel said.

"But with climate emergency, we see something new, an extension of emergency to the global level."

And for those protesting that "climate emergency" is two words, as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's resident linguist explained in 2017, single words can consist of two parts.

Such multipart constructions, like "heart attack", "man-of-war" or the 2017 American Dialect Society word of the year "fake news", are commonly accepted by linguists as words.

"Climate emergency" beat the words "climate crisis", "climate action", "climate denial", "extinction", "flight shame", "global heating" and "plant-based", which were on the shortlist.

The dictionary's word of the year is chosen to "reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of the passing year" and should have "lasting potential as a term of cultural significance".

"In 2019, climate emergency surpassed all of those other types of emergency to become the most written about emergency by a huge margin, with over three times the usage frequency of health, the second-ranking word," Oxford said.

Previous choices for word of the year include "toxic" in 2018 and "youthquake" in 2017.
Topics

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Oxford Dictionaries declares 'climate emergency' the word of 2019

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Oxford Dictionaries has declared "climate emergency" the word of the year for 2019, following a hundred-fold increase in usage that it says demonstrated a "greater immediacy" in the way we talk about the climate.

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Why it's time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language - podcast

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People often complain that English is deteriorating under the influence of new technology, adolescent fads and loose grammar. Why does this nonsensical belief persist?

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BBC News article

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A phrase which hit headlines after millions of people joined climate change protests around the world has been named 2019's word of the year.

"Climate strike" was picked by Collins Dictionary after being used on average 100 times more this year than in 2018.

The term was first recorded four years ago when pupils skipped school to protest over global warming - but the movement has grown over the last year.

Collins said it has also recognised the word "non-binary" as a specific term.

Lexicographers said it added non-binary in recognition of "changes in how people relate to each other and define themselves".

Non-binary people do not identify as either male or female and often prefer the pronouns they or them instead of he or she.

It comes after pop star Sam Smith said this year that they identified as non-binary, joining other celebrities including Me Too campaigner Rose McGowan and Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness.

Also added by Collins are the terms "double down", "influencer", "hopepunk" (a TV genre) and "deepfake ("a digital imaging technique").

Climate strike

The 2019 word of the year - which will get its own entry in the next edition of the dictionary - is defined by Collins as "a form of protest in which people absent themselves from education or work in order to join demonstrations demanding action to counter climate change".

It is the second year in a row that an environmental term has been picked as word of the year, after "single-use" in 2018.

The term climate strike was first registered in November 2015 during the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris when the first event of its kind took place.

But the movement was reignited thanks to Swedish teenage activist Greta Thunberg.

On 20 August 2018, Thunberg sat outside Sweden's parliament carrying a "school strike for climate change" sign and saying she was refusing to attend classes until Swedish politicians took action.

The movement snowballed with students around the world missing school to demand action on global warming, and in September millions of people took part in a global climate strike.

BBC News first appeared to use the term on its website in February 2019, and used it again the following day when covering the wave of protests in the UK.

Previous Collins words of the year

2018: Single-use

2017: Fake news

2016: Brexit

2015: Binge-watch

2014: Photobomb

The Oxford English Dictionary also choose their own word of the year, opting for "toxic" in 2018, "youthquake" in 2017 and "post-truth" in 2016.

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A phrase which hit headlines after millions of people joined climate change protests around the world has been named 2019's word of the year. "Climate strike" was picked by Collins Dictionary after being used on average 100 times more this year than in 2018.

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Use this as exam practice

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Tensions are running high. The battle for Brexit is reaching its climax. The need for government ministers to sound decisive and determined is tantamount. So why does government minister Michael Gove suddenly sound like he's speaking in someone else's voice?

In a recent interview with BBC Politics Live, the host Andrew Neil asked Michael Gove what the government would do if Labour succeeded in getting a referendum amendment attached to the deal. Gove's answer was short and blunt: "That ain't gonna happen ... There ain't gonna be no second referendum."

Gove's answer used two grammatical constructions of Nonstandard English (any structured variety of English which differs from Standard English): "ain't" (instead of Standard English "isn't") and a construction referred to as a double negative (or as an instance of multiple negation, or negative concord). Double negatives use two negative elements in a sentence instead of one (compare: "There ain't gonna be no second referendum" with "There isn't going to be a second referendum").

These constructions are regularly and systematically used in Nonstandard dialects (that is to say, there are grammatical rules about when and where they can be used in the varieties that use them - they aren't just "mistakes"). But they never appear in Standard English - the variety of English that most closely describes how Gove would normally speak.

Going a bit 'street'

So why does Gove use them? Nonstandard negative constructions are most often found in the speech of people with working-class backgrounds, so their use is often linked to the social characteristics associated with working-class people. Depending on who you are (and what you think about working-class people), rightly or wrongly, this can include characteristics such as "straight-talking" and "resilient".

We also know that repetition in English can be associated with emphasis. So the use of two negative elements, instead of one, might also help to intensify the strength of what is being communicated.

In this way, Gove's use of nonstandard negative constructions might communicate his attempt to portray himself as "straight-talking" and "resilient". It also aims to stress his commitment to what he is saying - to emphasise his belief that there will be no second referendum. Of course, whether or not we read that in his message depends upon what we believe about Gove and precisely what we, as individuals, infer when we hear instances of nonstandard negation.

The fact that Gove doesn't normally speak like this contributes to how we interpret what he's saying. So, we might understand that he's trying to sound "tough" but we might read this as disingenuous or fake, because he doesn't sound like himself.

Keeping up standards

What has all of this got to do with the National Curriculum? Well, in 2014, a new National Curriculum in English in England was introduced. It was designed and launched by Gove as education minister. The new National Curriculum for English placed increased emphasis on the importance of children using Standard English - not just in writing, but also "in a range of formal and informal contexts of speech".

While everyone expects Standard English to be the norm in writing, it is not the norm in speech for the majority of English children (or, indeed, adults). Many of us use the nonstandard features of our local dialect all of the time when we are speaking, but we often interchange them with features of Standard English.

Undrey via Shutterstock

In many cases, this is not because we don't know how to speak in Standard English, but because using our local variety signals the many positive associations we have to our local area. It can also help us to communicate more nuanced messages about the content of what we say - that we are being "emphatic", "determined" or "tough" when we use an instance of nonstandard negation.

In this way, nonstandard grammatical items can be very useful because they allow us to communicate our feelings or stances concisely. Saying: "I ain't done nothing" is a quick way to say: "I haven't done anything, I'm strongly telling you this, and I don't agree with what you have said." How people use Nonstandard English in this way shows us how useful it can be.

Gove's National Curriculum policy suggests that Nonstandard English is never useful because Standard English " covers most registers". This has led to criticisms that schools are teaching grammar as inflexible and fixed: there are right and wrong ways to use language - and Standard English is always the right way. But as Gove himself has shown, sometimes Nonstandard English can be the right way to speak - it communicates a message quickly, efficiently and directly, and it does so better than a Standard English "equivalent" might.

This doesn't mean that Nonstandard English is appropriate in formal writing (or that we shouldn't be teaching children to write in Standard English) but it does suggest that attempts to remove Nonstandard English from speech will not necessarily result in more efficient, interesting and effective communication.

In this way, Gove's use of nonstandard negative constructions in speech not only exposes the flexibility of grammatical variation and its rich social meaning potentials, it also exposes the flaws in his National Curriculum policy. In two small statements about Brexit, Gove has been hoisted by his own petard.

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Michael Gove's grammar: former education minister is gonna rue the day he used Nonstandard English

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Tensions are running high. The battle for Brexit is reaching its climax. The need for government ministers to sound decisive and determined is tantamount. So why does government minister Michael Gove suddenly sound like he's speaking in someone else's voice?

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Guardian article on the Climate crisis

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In addition to providing updated guidelines on which images our editors should use to illustrate the climate emergency, we have updated our style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said: "We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue". These are the guidelines provided to our journalists and editors to be used in the production of all environment coverage across the Guardian's website and paper:
The urgency of climate crisis needed robust new language to describe it | Paul Chadwick 1.) "climate emergency" or "climate crisis" to be used instead of "climate change"
Climate change is no longer considered to accurately reflect the seriousness of the overall situation; use climate emergency or climate crisis instead to describe the broader impact of climate change. However, use climate breakdown or climate change or global heating when describing it specifically in a scientific or geophysical sense eg "Scientists say climate breakdown has led to an increase in the intensity of hurricanes".

2.) "climate science denier" or "climate denier" to be used instead of "climate sceptic"

The OED defines a sceptic as "a seeker of the truth; an inquirer who has not yet arrived at definite conclusions". Most "climate sceptics", in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence, deny climate change is happening, or is caused by human activity, so 'denier' is more accurate.

3.) Use "global heating" not "global warming"
'Global heating' is more scientifically accurate. Greenhouse gases form an atmospheric blanket that stops the sun's heat escaping back to space.

4.) "greenhouse gas emissions" is preferred to "carbon emissions" or "carbon dioxide emissions". Although carbon emissions is not inaccurate, if we're talking about all gases that warm the atmosphere, this term recognises all of the climate-damaging gases, including methane, nitrogen oxides, CFCs etc.

5.) Use "wildlife", not "biodiversity"
We felt that 'wildlife' is a much more accessible word and is fair to use in many stories, and is a bit less clinical when talking about all the creatures with whom we share the planet.

6.) Use "fish populations" instead of "fish stocks"

This change emphasises that fish do not exist solely to be harvested by humans - they play a vital role in the natural health of the oceans.
Today we pledge to give the climate crisis the attention it demands | Katharine Viner
Since we announced these changes, they have been reported widely, shared across social media channels, and even prompted some other media outlets to reconsider the term s they use in their own coverage.

The update to the Guardian's style guide, originally announced earlier this year, followed the addition of the global carbon dioxide level to the Guardian's daily weather pages - the simplest measure of how the mass burning of fossil fuels is disrupting the stable climate. To put it simply, while weather changes daily, climate changes over years and decades. So alongside the daily carbon count, we publish the level in previous years for comparison, as well as the pre-industrial-era baseline of 280ppm, and the level seen as manageable in the long term of 350ppm.

In order to keep below 1.5C of warming, the aspiration of the world's nations, we need to halve emissions by 2030 and reach zero by mid century. It is also likely we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, perhaps by the large-scale restoration of nature. It is a huge task, but we hope that tracking the daily rise of CO2 will help to maintain focus on it.

Viner said: "People need reminding that the climate crisis is no longer a future problem - we need to tackle it now, and every day matters."
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'It's a crisis, not a change': the six Guardian language changes on climate matters

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In addition to providing updated guidelines on which images our editors should use to illustrate the climate emergency, we have updated our style guide to introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. Our editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, said: "We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue".

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Use this as exam practice

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In the first episode, Skunk Anansie star Skin reveals how the quiet refuge of Brixton Library helped to set her on the path to rock stardom.

Brixton Library was my library... Sometimes I wouldn't even read, I'd write lyrics in there and I'd write songs in there

Skin on the pivotal role that her local library had on her future career

In a wide-ranging conversation for Turn Up for the Books, Skin explained that space was at a premium during her childhood in a Brixton two-up, two-down house.

She said: "I have three brothers and until I was 12, we all lived in the same room. In the winter I spent all my time in a corner in the library.

"Growing up as a child, Brixton Library was my library. I felt like I owned it. It was just peaceful for me, and it was my personal, peaceful space. And it was the only time in my life where I had a quiet space to just suck in information and be me.

"It was kind of like Alice in Wonderland, just like going through this door and there were books everywhere. I remember that dusty smell of the library, which I actually really love to this day because I have so many memories attached to that dusty library smell.

"I was always taking out books and taking them home and then having to bring them back and getting fined because I brought them back too late and stuff like that.

"It was like a second home, like a living room. I used to go to the same corner in the library, in the same place, and I would just sit on one of the stools and read my books in the corner. It was the only place I had in my whole life that was mine, and that belonged to me, that I could go and just be myself and be quiet.

But Brixton Library was more than just a quiet place to read. In fact, it was in this location that Skin laid some of the foundations for her future career as the frontwoman of Skunk Anansie, the rock band who had 10 Top 40 hits in the 1990s.

She admitted: "Sometimes I wouldn't even read, I would just sit there and just watch other people reading and just take stuff in. And I'd write lyrics in there and I'd write songs in there - I'd be pretending to read.

"I think I would have actually been a different person if I didn't have that in my life as a 9, 10, 11, 12-year-old child."

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BBC Arts - BBC Arts - Discover 100 amazing novels with brand new BBC Sounds podcast

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Dan Smith, Irenosen Okojie & Simon Savidge explore The Novels That Shaped Our World list

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In her memoir, written as letters to her two young daughters, Ali Wong tells them she would be worried if they wanted to become standup comics like her. Wong, who slogged it out on the open-mic circuit, presents a grim account of life on the road: dying onstage, bad food, bad men. She did it for more than a decade before becoming a star seemingly overnight with her first Netflix special, performed while seven-and-a-half months pregnant. Did she ever consider giving up? "There were times when I thought to myself: 'I really don't know if I can do this for the rest of my life,'" she says on the phone from her home in LA. "You know, staying at those motels, getting paid that little amount of money. I'm certain I would not have endured. I couldn't. Especially after having kids."

Luckily for Wong, she didn't have to; instead, her career blew up. In 2016, Netflix launched her special, Baby Cobra, and she has since had a second, Hard Knock Wife. She has also co-written and starred in a romantic comedy film, Always Be My Maybe; had her two children; and published Dear Girls, the memoir written for them. Her tours sell out and her peers rave about her (Amy Schumer calls her "revolutionary", Chris Rock championed her). "It's been an unbelievable three years," she says with some understatement.

Offstage, she seems softer and more laid-back than her fierce and foul-mouthed standup persona. In the book, she recalls starting out: "I was very dirty back then. Even now, I'll look back on those days and think: 'God, you were disgusting.'" Which is very funny if you have seen any of Wong's comedy, because you will know how filthy she is now. In Baby Cobra, there are gags about anal sex and vaginal secretions; in Hard Knock Wife, there are jokes about the things she would like to do to their nanny if he was 25, male and "not ugly".

When Wong first performed comedy, she was repeatedly told it was all too much. "All of these people in the industry kept on telling me: 'You're likable and you're cute, or whatever, but the jokes are really dirty and you'd get booked a lot more, and you'd be a lot more appealing if they were clean,'" she says. "Maybe people were half-laughing, half-cringing at my jokes. But if you're successful, people should be too busy laughing to cringe." Her jokes may not have got cleaner, but they did get better.

Even now, she says people (men) told her that her material on childbirth and breastfeeding, which made it into her second special, wasn't interesting enough. "There was one guy who said: 'It was so much better when you were talking about dating because people can't relate to breastfeeding,'" she says. "But it's all I wanted to talk about. That's kind of the whole point for me with standup, that this is not a network TV sitcom where I have to appeal to everyone." She pauses for a split second: "I ignored that advice."

Wong is not the first female comic to tell dirty jokes, or talk about sex, but what does feel unusual is her insistence on busting the idea that at the raw, biological level, women aren't every bit as revolting as men. Why is it still so taboo for women to talk about bodily functions and all the fluids and secretions that ooze out of us? "I was raised to be very open about my body," she says. Her father was a doctor, and she says her parents were always very straight with her about everything, from sex to the nonexistence of Santa Claus. She thinks for a moment about the question of taboo. "Maybe it's because women feel they want to maintain some mystery that they're not gross, to be more attractive or something. For me it's all part of intimacy. That's how I define intimacy - living closer and being more honest, closer to what your real desires are - and it's exciting."

Still, people thank me for making them feel less embarrassed, less ashamed and less sad about having a miscarriage

Her parents have been to her shows. Worse, so have her in-laws. (She is married to Justin Hakuta, who worked for a tech company but gave it up to support her career.) "That was nerve-racking. I was much less polished then and I think I talked about Japanese porn and how they blur out the genitals, and I did an imitation of a Japanese porn star screaming. That was pretty wild. But they were really supportive."

I wonder if she is unembarrassable (there are jokes about defecating at work and her promiscuity during her 20s). "No. For sure, no. I'll give you an example." She says that the other day, she and Randall Park, her friend and co-star in Always Be My Maybe, were guest judges on the TV show Top Chef. "I saw his face sort of scrunch up and I was like: 'Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I think I accidentally farted.' He moved his chair away from me and he was laughing hysterically, too. It smelled so bad and I was so embarrassed." She laughs: "I'm definitely embarrassable."

When she had a miscarriage, which she talked about in her first Netflix show, one of her emotions was embarrassment. "I felt a lot of things. I felt sad, but then when I had to tell everybody the news it was something ..." She pauses. "Embarrassment is when you wish you didn't have to tell somebody something, and it wasn't something I really wanted to share with everybody but I had to because I had bragged that I was pregnant." There was a huge reaction to Wong talking about her miscarriage at the time. "It was very taboo for women to talk about miscarriage and it still kind of is. Still to this day, people walk up to me on the street, thanking me for making them feel less embarrassed, less ashamed and less sad about having a miscarriage."

Wong writes that "comedy requires taking risks", although she says this is less about subject matter - nothing is off-limits as long as the joke is well-written - than about being unafraid of failure. "I guess that's what I meant about taking risks: for every polished joke you see onstage, there are maybe 100 I tried out that failed. And people in the audience thinking I was a terrible comedian. I was always kind of OK with that."

As a child, Wong was funny but, the youngest of four, she was also a quiet observer. "I would say that I grew up listening, a lot. I have vivid memories of details, things people said and how exactly they said them." She grew up in San Francisco, where her father, born to Chinese parents, was an anaesthetist, and her mother, born in Vietnam, was a social worker. What was it like to write about her family's experience of being immigrants? "It was great because I think about it all the time," she says. Her paternal grandfather came to the US from China as an eight-year-old, travelling alone by ship. "I see kids and how young they really are and I cannot imagine them coming on a boat by themselves, going to another country to work and be separated from their parents. It really humbles me and makes me grateful and it gave me a huge sense of ..." She thinks for a second. "It's part of my identity and gave me a very strong work ethic."

A few hours after she got married in San Francisco, Wong performed in her wedding dress at a club in the city; some nights early on in her career, while living in New York, she would perform up to nine sets at different clubs. She has only had four breaks from standup - her honeymoon, after the births of her two daughters, and when she was shooting the film. These days, once the children are in bed, she turns up unannounced and unpaid at comedy clubs up to five nights a week to try out new material. She describes it as a "calling. I just really like telling jokes".

I used to dress like a kid, to desexualise myself. I'd be terrified if my daughters wanted to be standups

She writes that she has an "unusual amount of Asian pride". That came from her parents, she says. "A lot of people talk about how they never saw themselves on screen but my parents actively made sure I saw myself on screen all the time. And we had friends who were artists and we would go to their gallery shows." Now, she says, she makes an effort to see what other Asian American creators are up to - whether in TV, literature, art or fashion - and will introduce her children to it. "I think [if you] consume mainstream pop culture and don't activate a search for any other niche outlets then you can fall into this feeling that you are inferior."

One male comic once told her that her career was only taking off because she was female and from an ethnic minority. "That they have that attitude towards me is an indicator of why they are lacking in success. If you think that is the winning combo for success then you're in trouble." Wasn't it infuriating? "You know, it's not. If it was someone that I respected it would really bum me out."

When Wong first started performing, she would wear her hair in two cute buns, and dress in "huge cargo pants". "I used to dress like a kid, to desexualise myself," she says. "I think that's the main reason why I would be so terrified if my daughters wanted to be standup comics - it's not because of them being onstage, it's because of the road. You kind of have to go through that." The comics she respects are the ones who came up through the circuit, rather than those who got famous on a sitcom or YouTube videos. "But the road is very scary. It always felt unsafe. Even now, when I perform at shows around town, I always ask somebody to walk me back to my car."

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Ali Wong in a still from her feature film, Always Be My Maybe. Photograph: Ed Araquel/Netflix

With the #MeToo movement, comedy has come under scrutiny and there have been allegations of sexual harassment made against several male comics. Has Wong ever experienced sexual harassment at work? She is hesitant for a while, trying to find the words. "I think I'm just not ready to share all that stuff yet, but of course there has been not-great stuff that's happened. So ... yeah. In terms of how things have changed, I guess nowadays the culture has changed, so that when people do some joke that you've heard before about women being 'naggy' or something, it just feels dated. A lot of material that would make fun of women that used to be maybe kind of funny doesn't feel funny any more."

Wong runs jokes about her husband past him before they make it into her shows. "A hilarious joke that performs well in front of strangers but that my husband hates is not worth getting divorced over," she says. "My marriage is much more valuable than a great joke." Does he mind being talked about? "I get asked that all the time but male comics have been making fun of their wives for so long and I wonder if male comics get asked the same thing. This is what standup comics do: they talk about their life and if they have a partner, they talk about their partner. But I don't feel like male comics are ever asked about what it's like for their wife." I think she is right, but a male comic probably would get asked, were he to make jokes, as Wong does, about the most intimate details of their sex life. "Right," says Wong, with a laugh. "Yes, yes. That's true."

While her hilarious and unrelenting filthiness is what got Wong noticed, her comedy is full of more nuanced commentary on what it is to be a woman: the double standards of mothering, the pressures of out-earning one's husband, the reconciliation of bringing up two children under four and doing a job she loves. "I constantly feel like I'm failing at both working and being your mom," she writes in Dear Girls. In Hard Knock Wife, she talks about the scandal of the US's lack of paid maternity leave; is she interested in being more political? "I don't know," she says, then, as an aside: "As a British person, don't you think it's just so barbaric that we don't give maternity leave?" Topical, political jokes, she says, have "never been my forte. I'm also a little bit intimidated because there are so many other comics who are so good at that." She is well placed to skewer it in the current climate in the US, increasingly hostile to immigrants, but doesn't seem sure if she wants to go there. Still, she points out, by doing what she loves and doing it well, "even me putting myself out there sometimes is political. You know what I mean? Some people can't stand that."
Dear Girls is out today, published by Canongate, available for £13.19 from Guardian Bookshop. Topics

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'God, I was disgusting!' - Ali Wong on why women's bodies are the last taboo

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In her memoir, written as letters to her two young daughters, Ali Wong tells them she would be worried if they wanted to become standup comics like her. Wong, who slogged it out on the open-mic circuit, presents a grim account of life on the road: dying onstage, bad food, bad men.

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In her speech to the Tory conference last week the home secretary, Priti Patel, pledged to "end the free movement of people once and for all". The applause was lacklustre but she could barely contain her glee as she added, as a daughter of immigrants, she would take no lectures from the "north London metropolitan liberal elite".

That brought resounding cheers. Ending a freedom is rarely an inspirational cause, but identifying a scapegoat can often stir the spirits. Of course, it's discordant to hear senior politicians disparage elites, in much the same way that it would be confusing if Kim Kardashian condemned the cult of celebrity.

But leaving that minor issue aside, who are these people Patel doesn't need lectures from? Presumably she wasn't referring to her boss, Boris Johnson, who, before the break-up of his marriage, lived in Islington in north London for many years, boasted of his metropolitanism and liberalism while mayor of London, and as a graduate of Eton and Oxford knows a thing or two about economic and educational elitism.

So if not people like the prime minister, then whom? Three years ago Theresa May gave more clues to that answer, when she promised to attack the metropolitan liberal elite in her keynote speech to the Tory conference. Or at least, that's what the Daily Mail said she would do, helpfully defining May's target as "the well-heeled group of London 'intellectuals ' which is used to having everything its own way".

But May said nothing about metropolitan liberals; she warned of people in positions of power who had more in common with international elites than with the average person, and concluded that if you believe you're a citizen of the world, " you're a citizen of nowhere ".

In many respects, Patel was merely delivering on what May had alluded to. The division they both sought to mark out was between those who wanted to end the free movement of people - mainly those who voted to leave the EU - and a well-educated urban class that they claim is oblivious to the social currents created by this freedom.

David Goodhart is author of the book The Road to Somewhere, which argued that Britain is split into three groupings: Somewhere, the half of the population that feels rooted to a particular community and the security it affords; Inbetweeners; and Anywhere - 20-25% of people who are mobile, socially liberal, well educated and, according to Goodhart, overrule majority attitudes.

He believes the Anywhere group, which loosely approximates to a metropolitan liberal elite, is fixated on economic benefits to the exclusion of social and cultural unease.

"That is why the north London liberal elite don't get it on notions of meaning, respect, status," he says. "They don't get the psychology of Brexit. They don't get the psychology of rapid social change and why it makes people uncomfortable. Or they immediately default to [attributing it to] xenophobia and nativism."

As the founding editor of Prospectmagazine, and an Islingtonite who was a Marxist at Eton, Goodhart was undoubtedly a member of the north London metropolitan liberal elite. But in recent years, increasingly at odds with his friends and peers, he has relinquished his membership of what he calls the "liberal tribe".

Like an anthropologist with an Oyster card, I begin my search for this tribe outside Waterstones in Hampstead. Home to Sigmund Freud, Michael Foot and Stephen Fry, Hampstead has long been a byword for intellectual, free-thinking liberalism. But how unconstrained is that free-thinking?

This elite's been too emotionally unintelligent about how its priorities aren't shared by many perfectly decent citizens

David Goodhart

I ask a rather severe-looking woman what she thinks of Patel's speech and she snaps: "Oh no, I can't stand that woman," and disappears into the bookshop.

Near the Coffee Cup, a cafe with a history of serving philosophers and politicians, I meet a violinist who's not prepared to give her name. "We're very opinionated," she says of her fellow denizens. "Hampstead is full of highly educated people who don't hold back." Are their opinions disproportionately influential? "I wish," she says, sighing. "If they were, we wouldn't be in this mess."

A few doors from where the poet Edith Sitwell lived, I encounter a lawyer named Michael Patchett-Joyce, who says he fulfils every category of Patel's definition. He doesn't have a problem with it, except when it's used in a negative sense, in the way the chattering classes and champagne socialism are employed. "Champagne socialism is a pejorative term because there is an inherent oxymoron within that phrase," says Patchett-Joyce. "In terms of a liberal elite, I don't think there necessarily is the same sort of oxymoron. It's not that far removed from one-nation Toryism, which of course is under big debate at the moment."

That kind of eloquence is not typical of vox-pop contributions, which tend more towards the "I'd get rid of the whole lot of 'em" school of opinion. And it raises the question of whether it's a bad thing to have a liberal elite. "It's a bad thing if it's too powerful and not aware of its own power," says Goodhart. "There have to be elites. The metropolitan liberal one is a subset of a bigger elite, and one reason we're experiencing Brexit and Trump is that this elite has been too emotionally unintelligent about how its priorities are not shared by many perfectly decent citizens."

Yet metropolitan liberals are not immune to the discomfort of change that Goodhart ascribes to the Somewhere half of the population. Primrose Hill Books has long been a browsing place for the intellectuals who moved to this pretty Georgian neighbourhood in the 1960s and 70s - people like Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller, Claire Tomalin and Ralph Miliband (father of Ed and David). Stanley Johnson, Boris's father, used to have an account at the shop.

"My parents were university lecturers," says customer Aileen Harvey. "But it seems like now everyone is a French or American City worker or a celebrity." Harvey doesn't like the way the neighbourhood has gone. She thinks Patel's label was designed to appeal to the "less well-off and less well-educated by saying 'Let's activate that chip on their shoulder'." The home secretary was referring to "educated Labour voters", she says. "They don't live here any more."

Jessica Graham, who runs the bookshop with her husband, looks back fondly on the period when Primrose Hill was a centre of intellectual ideas. "When I first came here 30 years ago, it was full of academics, journalists and professional people. Everybody cared, read and everybody discussed things. Those kind of people have been priced out of the neighbourhood."

She thinks the idea of a liberal elite is an anachronism, partly because in the age of social media and the internet, ideas are less geographically tethered and more widely disseminated. But also due to the effects of high finance.

"It's more like a global elite," she says. "Half the houses round here are empty half the time. They're second homes for anyone from a Russian oligarch to a movie star."

If these international elites don't fall within Patel's crosshairs, it may be because their money is welcome and, on the whole, they're not critical of the government. A characteristic of metropolitan liberals is that they're outspoken about how things could or should be. Goodhart sees this as a form of narcissism. "They're saying: be like us," he says. "We've done it. We've gone off to good universities and become middle-class professionals, why can't you do it? Well, actually because lots of people don't want to do that and can't do that."

He may have a point, but the demonisation of the educated classes is a populist trait that is a well-trodden step on the road to demagoguery. It's easy to mock metropolitan liberals for hypocrisy. After all, they're often opposed to gentrification, while being the vanguard of gentrifiers. They're the loudest proponents of multiculturalism while frequently maintaining a distinctly unicultural lifestyle. But even in this age of bovine anti-elitism, it would be the height of stupidity if people who like to visit bookshops come to be seen as the problem.
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A journey in search of the north London metropolitan elite

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In her speech to the Tory conference last week the home secretary, Priti Patel, pledged to "end the free movement of people once and for all". The applause was lacklustre but she could barely contain her glee as she added, as a daughter of immigrants, she would take no lectures from the "north London metropolitan liberal elite".

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A history lesson for people who think that history doesn't matter:
What's the big deal about railroad tracks?
The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why was that gauge used?
Well, because that's the way

they built them in England, and English engineers designed the first US railroads.
Why did the English build them like that?
Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the wagon tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
So, why did 'they' use that gauge

then?
Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they had used for building wagons, which used that same wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?
Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels

would break more often on some of the old, long distance roads in England . You see, that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.
So who built those old rutted roads?
Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (including England ) for their legions. Those roads have

been used ever since.

And what about the ruts in the roads?
Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match or run the risk of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome , they were all alike in the matter of wheel

spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. Bureaucracies live forever.
So the next time you are handed a specification/procedure/process and wonder 'What horse's

ass came up with this?', you may be exactly right. Imperial Roman army chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two war horses. (Two horses' asses.)
Now, the twist to the story:
When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big

booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory in Utah . The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but they had to be shipped by train

from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains, and the SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide

as two horses' behinds.
So, a major Space Shuttle design feature, of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system, was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. And you thought being a horse's ass wasn't important? So,

Ancient horse's asses control almost everything and....

CURRENT Horses Asses are controlling everything else.

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Thread by @BillHolohanSolr: "A history lesson for people who think that history doesn't matter: What's the big deal about railroad tracks? The US standard railroad gauge [...]"

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Thread by @BillHolohanSolr: "A history lesson for people who think that history doesn't matter: What's the big deal about railroad tracks? Throad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an exceedingly odd number. Why was that [...]"

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I've been going to Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands on holiday on a semi-regular basis since I was a little girl, and needless to say it's one of my favourite parts of Scotland. We were most recently there in late autumn last year, where we spent a week fitting in all of our favourite things to do in Aviemore, and it never disappoints.

I had actually started to put this post together after we got back but completely ran out of steam and the post has sat in my drafts folder since November. Time to turn this ship around! There are a ton of things to do in Aviemore, most of which are family friendly, so today I thought I'd (finally!) share some of my favourites.

Things To Do In Aviemore

The Mountain Cafe

Let's kick this guide off starting with food, because what's a holiday without knowing where the best places to eat are?!

Our all time favourite place to eat in Aviemore is the Mountain Cafe. They are only open until 5pm or 5:30pm depending on the day (best to check their website before you visit), so it's only good for breakfast or lunch, but my, the lunches are delicious. As vegetarians we were really well catered for, with bountiful options (I went for a halloumi flatbread this time, which was delicious, but their veggie burgers are highly recommended!). Meat eaters are also well catered for, as are vegans and those that are gluten intolerant.

It's not just the lunches, and the cosy atmosphere that attract us to the Mountain Cafe. The Mountain Cafe has one of the best selection of homemade cake I've ever seen - think 20 plus delicious cakes to choose from! We are always too full from lunch to manage cake afterwards, but we always get some to takeaway to enjoy later! Portion sizes are very generous too, and we always find a slice lasts two days (and from someone who loves cake then this is saying something!). I've even been known to swing past the Mountain Cafe to grab some takeaway cake before boarding the train home to Edinburgh, 'tis that good.

Inshriach Nursery

Another favourite for tea and cake is the Potting Shed at Inshriach Nursery. They, again, have an amazing selection of delicious homemade cake (my absolute favourite is the peanut cake!). And while the cake would be a big enough draw in itself, the Potting Shed has an amazing viewing area that overlooks an array of squirrel and bird feeders. It's definitely one of life's great pleasures, sitting eating your cake and observing the birds and red squirrels feeding. We saw two red squirrels on our most recent trip there, which most impressed my daughter.

To burn off the cake, you can then have an amble around the nursery. It sells a vast array of hardy alpine plants, and it's always a joy to walk around this beautiful nursery.

Rothiemurchus Centre

Another Aviemore favourite is the Rothiemurchus Centre. We always make a point of walking there and enjoying a steaming mug of hot chocolate and a slice of homemade cake in the cosy cafe, however the lunches do look very very good! Whilst you're there you can also visit the farm shop, and book any activities held on the Rothiemurchus Estate that take your fancy. Quad biking anyone?

My daughter said she enjoyed the Rothiemurchus Centre most, out of all the things we did in Aviemore on this trip, which is quite the compliment! I think it was the hot chocolate, cake selection and very friendly staff that swung it for her!

The Old Bridge Inn

We didn't do any drinking on our last trip to Aviemore on account of me being pregnant, but somewhere we have thoroughly enjoyed in the past is the Old Bridge Inn. It's a really cosy bar, with a friendly laid back atmosphere. We've spent many an evening in the past, meeting up with friends and having a few drinks in front of their log fire, and occasionally caught the odd live band. They do serve food as well, but we've yet to give this a go!

I've also heard from friends in the area that the Cairngorm Hotel is good for a drink, and that the buffet at La Taverna is pretty good! Next time we're in Aviemore both are on our list!

Landmark Centre

We visited the Landmark Centre in Carrbridge (a few miles from Aviemore) this time around - a forest fun park. I'd been a couple of times as a kid and had such fond memories of the place, but hadn't been back in well over 25 years. Visiting again as an adult did not disappoint.

It's fantastic for families: there's so much for kids to do, and for adults to enjoy too. We all enjoyed the red squirrel trail (above) and my daughter loved all of the play parks, mazes and more. We went off season where it was only £6.25 entry per adult (under four's get in free), which was incredibly good value. The rollercoaster, aerial assault course, and water ride were all closed, but my daughter wasn't tall enough to go on those rides, and I wasn't able to go on them either so the fact that they were closed made no difference to our trip (and saved us £11 each off high season prices).

Walk/Cycle

You're really spoiled for choice when it comes to walking and cycling in and around Aviemore. There are so many stunning walks and trails that it's impossible for me to list them all here.

The very photogenic Loch An Eilein is very highly recommended for walking or cycling around. This stunning Loch is about 4.5 miles in circumference, so makes for a good short walk/cycle. I've walked it a few times, and mountain biked it and both were really enjoyable. I am not a mountain biker by any stretch of the imagination (I'm an A to B cyclist, or a leisurely cyclist) but the trail is very gentle and ideal for beginners (or leisure cyclists like me!). There are heaps of bike rental companies in and around Aviemore offering competitive prices on bike hire, either by the day or for longer periods of time so you don't have to bring your own bike to enjoy the trails in and around Aviemore.

We've done a few walks in Glenmore, which offered stunning views, as well as around Loch Morlich and Loch Insh. We've also done a few walks/cycles on the Old Logging Way. Try the Walk Highlands website for other suggestions/routes.

Water Sports

Water sports are not my bag, but if they are yours then you're spoiled for choice in Aviemore. Try Loch Insh, where you can sail, kayak, canoe, and windsurf, and Loch Morlich, where you can do all of the above as well as mountain bike if you've had your fill of water!

Red Squirrel Spotting

You can't go to Aviemore and not go red squirrel spotting. Thankfully it's not that hard to spot our native furry friends, but always a treat! Spend any amount of time in any woodland in or around Aviemore and I promise you you'll see a squirrel! I've always found early morning or late afternoon best red squirrel spotting time.

Outside of Aviemore

If you find you've had your fill of Aviemore, the bright lights of Inverness aren't far away. When in the city I always make a point of heading straight to Leakey's Bookshop - Scotland's largest (and I'd say best) secondhand bookshop. If you love old books, old maps and antique prints, then this is the place for you. Situated in a converted church, this charming bookshop is stocked floor to ceiling with secondhand books. A woodburner in the middle of the shop adds to the ambiance, and the upstairs cafe serving tea, cakes and lunches means you could easily spend the best part of a day in Leakey's.

Of course, it goes without saying that Loch Ness isn't far away either, and the charming Fort Augustus, but you don't have to stray too far away from Aviemore to have a varied and fun packed holiday. We'll certainly be back soon,

Have you been to Aviemore? What are your favourite things to do in Aviemore?

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Overnight Breaks Archives | Moral Fibres - UK Eco Green Blog

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I've been going to Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands on holiday on a semi-regular basis since I was a little girl, and needless to say it's one of my favourite parts of Scotland. We were most recently there in late autumn last year, where we spent a week fitting in all of our favourite things to do in Aviemore, and it never disappoints.

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I expect that he still has a loyal fanbase among us middle-aged women who continue to swoon over the salt and pepper hair, the piercing eyes, the manner of furiously striding around the technical area, a man whom a tabloid newspaper once described as "a naked sexual challenge on the touchline".

But as far as the rest of the nation is concerned, it's clear the Chelsea manager Jose Mourinho is having something of a grim patch.

The same goes for his team. After the team's Champions League ambitions were squashed this week by the French side PSG, which doggedly triumphed with only 10 men for most of the night, the Special One and his squad are not being regarded as, well, very special any more. Everyone, it seems, hates Chelsea.

This is not going down too well chez Millard, since for historical reasons and thanks to the influence of a lovely godfather, my two sons are ardent Chelsea fans. Early cheers while watching the PSG game on television soon turned to stony silence. After the whistle blew, they just went sadly to bed. They didn't bother with post-match analysis. Amazingly, because it is his daily regime, the 10-year-old didn't even want to read the match reports the next day in the papers. They are still wearing their shirts emblazoned with the names of their heroes (Fabregas, Courtois), and are still chipper about their team's chances in the Premiership ("because that's the only thing that really counts, Mummy"), but it's clear that a spring has gone out of their step. And not because Chelsea lost fair and square, but because it is clear they lost while playing a game which was very low in terms of sportsmanship.

24/24 Best off the bench: Ezequiel Lavezzi

Took place of Matuidi in closing minutes as French side sought leveller. Almost made immediate impact with header at Courtois before Luiz's bullet header. 6

24/24 Best off the bench: Ezequiel Lavezzi

Took place of Matuidi in closing minutes as French side sought leveller. Almost made immediate impact with header at Courtois before Luiz's bullet header. 6

What is it about Chelsea that makes them such a hard team to love? In the mind of a small boy, tackling with the vexed character that is the undeniably talented defender - and team captain - John Terry is not easy. Far better to focus your adoration on the few players who can measure up in terms of decency, terms defined in recent football history by the likes of Beckham, Bale or Lineker, a striker who famously never received a red card in his career.

So, in terms of Chelsea, I think it is fair to suggest that the goalkeepers Courtois and Cech and midfielders Fabregas and Hazard still continue to stand for Proper Players. Those are the names that my sons, and I suspect this is true for boys across the country, admire. Let's just overlook the rest of the morally suspect crew that revel in winding up the opposition, and a manager who cries "foul play" every time the referee's decision goes against him.

Then there are the adult fans. Why is it no surprise that Jeremy Clarkson is one? We all know about the hideous behaviour on the Paris Metro, but I might as well remind readers that the grim tail of violence and prejudice in the Chelsea fanbase is a long one. Indeed, many years ago, my family briefly had to pack up our home and move into a safe house thanks to my husband's work with the investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre on the so-called Chelsea Headhunters, two of whom were sent for a lengthy time in prison after a MacIntyre BBC undercover sting.

So is following Chelsea doomed to become a sort of negative joke, a bit like supporting Millwall, owners of the "No one likes us, we don't care" chant? Not really, because Chelsea cannot be dismissed in that way. Lording it over the rest of the Premiership, the team has a swaggering grandeur and a glamour Millwall can only dream of. The millionaire players and their mercurial manager, who is satisfied only with winning at any cost, are uncompromising and unrepentant. Even to the extent, say their critics, of being unsporting.

Equally, as the comments about hating Chelsea swirl around Facebook ("Seven Reasons to Hate Chelsea") or Twitter (Mahatma Gandhi: "I hate Arsenal because I am a Tottenham fan. I hate Chelsea because I am a human being") show, does a team which seems to have no problem filling its stadium need to be loved by anyone? Arguably with Abramovich's millions and Mourinho's almost pathological desire to win, Chelsea can carry on picking up titles. Does a team have to be noble to gain accolades? One thinks it should, but perhaps that attitude is outdated and irrelevant.

But if you are a parent who, like me, kisses your children good night underneath Chelsea flags pinned to their bedroom wall, you find yourself hoping that a) the team modify its brand image a little and b) your offspring won't pick up any tactics from the Blues during a match for their school side.

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Big moral questions are never far away when you live with young boys

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I expect that he still has a loyal fanbase among us middle-aged women who continue to swoon over the salt and pepper hair, the piercing eyes, the manner of furiously striding around the technical area, a man whom a tabloid newspaper once described as "a naked sexual challenge on the touchline".

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Children's books are never just for children - discuss!

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Children's books are never just for children - discuss!

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Who today remembers the plays of AA Milne or the political writing of Erich Kästner? Yet their children's books are read the world over.

Salman Rushdie has suggested that of all his work - including Midnight's Children, which won the Best of the Booker - his children's books may last the longest. He recalled being urged to write them by publisher Kurt Maschler, who had published Kästner's Emil and the Detectives.

"As Kurt Maschler said to me, 'It's the only one of his books that's still in print!' That was a lesson I didn't forget. It may end up that Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Luka and the Fire of Life are the only books of mine that remain in print. And that would be fine, actually."

Neil Gaiman tells the similar story of AA Milne, who is no longer remembered as a West End playwright or features editor of Punch, but only as "the author of two books of short stories and two books of verse for small children".

It's striking how long children's books can last. One explanation may be the way in which they're read. They become part of our emotional autobiographies, acquiring associations and memories, more like music than prose.

Another explanation may lie in the fact that children's books are designed with re-reading in mind. For all children's writers are conscious that our books may be re-read by children themselves.

"Yes, kids read and re-read favourite books," says Francesca Simon. "My favourite Horrid Henry books to sign are the ones which are so dog-eared and stained through re-reading they are practically translucent. When Simon Mayo interviewed me, he commented that he had read them to his kids over 200 times. He looked like a man undergoing penance ..."

A similar view is taken by Gaiman, who writes for all ages. "When I'm writing for kids," he says, "I'm always assuming that a story, if it is loved, is going to be re-read. So I try and be much more conscious of it than I am with adults, just in terms of word choices. I once said that while I could not justify every word in American Gods, I can justify every single word in Coraline."

Many parents will know this already. They sometimes even fear there's something wrong with a child who re-reads favourite books rather than new ones.

"There's nothing wrong with them," says Charlotte Hacking, of the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE). "Children need to read and re-read and keep coming back to books, looking at them in different ways. It's actually a really good thing; it allows you to go deeper."

So re-reading is a given for children's authors. It's one reason why we try to write books that have many layers and work on different levels, rewarding re-reading by growing richer each time.

But if this is true, then why are children's books rarely considered for literary prizes such as the Man Booker and the Costa? This year's Costa coverage barely considered the possibility that the children's prize-winner, Kate Saunders's Five Children on the Western Front, might win the overall prize.

Yet it's an exceptional book that already feels like a classic. In a stunning twist on E Nesbit's Five Children and It, Saunders takes those carefree Edwardian children and plunges them into the first world war. For they belonged to the generation who would die in the trenches, and she works this to devastating emotional effect.

"It's an amazing book," says Guardian children's books editor Julia Eccleshare. "If that was an adult book working with Jane Austen, as it were, people would be wowing about it. The textual play on a classic, in the adult world, would receive far more praise than I think she has been noticed for - yet."

Perhaps it's unsurprising, given that only one winner of the Costa/Whitbread children's book prize has ever won the overall book of the year. That was Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass, back in 2001.

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The Amber Spyglass Illustration: PR

"It hasn't happened since," says Pullman. "But one day they'll have to find a book they just have to give it to. Maybe one day a children's book will get the Booker prize. Why not? Why not a children's author winning the Nobel prize?"

Sarah Churchwell, one of last year's Booker judges, has written about the judging process. She said that it "asks of books something they're not really designed for: to be read three times in a row by people probing for weakness. Most books just crumble under that kind of pressure: only the most rich, the most layered, continue to dazzle and reveal ever more."

She concluded that only two books on last year's list met this criterion. Yet as a children's writer, I couldn't help thinking that this is exactly what all children's books are designed to do. They may achieve it to a greater or lesser degree, but that's always the aim.

Children's laureate Malorie Blackman agrees. "Call me biased," she says, "but I find the standard of storytelling in children's books and books for young adults second to none. I find it telling that even now, there are far more children's books and books for teens that I'd like to re-read than books for adults."

These are the books that get handed down through generations, becoming classics, but perhaps their readability works against them. Reflecting on the children's books he still re-reads, Pullman observes: "Part of the joy of all these books is a sort of perfect lightness and grace in the words. Everything is in its right place. Not a comma needs changing. Things like that make it possible to read them again and again without fatigue."

That lightness and grace is a hallmark of the best children's writing, along with the multi-layered richness Churchwell found so rare. Yet only The Amber Spyglass and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time have ever appeared on a Booker longlist. Not one single children's book has made the shortlist, let alone won, in the history of the prize.

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Luke Treadaway as Christopher in The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Meanwhile, media coverage of children's books is vanishingly small. Former Children's laureate Julia Donaldson has pointed out that they get less than one in 40 of all review spaces. And yet children's books now account for one in four of all books sold in the UK. This is the most vibrant sector of British publishing, outperforming adult fiction in 2014.

A generational shift may now be occurring. For many of my generation, growing up in the 1970s with books like Watership Down, story is story, regardless of age. That's even truer of younger writers.

"I certainly don't see children's books as being in any way lesser than adult literature," says Katherine Woodfine, born in the 1980s, whose debut The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow is published this year. "If anything, I'd argue the opposite. Children's books can have a hugely powerful effect on their readers, helping to shape and inform their view of the world, in a way that adult books rarely achieve. They're the first literature we engage with, and what's more, they're often the first art works we ever encounter."

Woodfine's response to the lack of coverage is to create new media space. Together with Melissa Cox of Waterstones, she hosts Down the Rabbit Hole on Resonance 104.4FM: the only dedicated children's books radio show. It's part of a vibrant online community, too. Twitter, the Guardian children's books site, and other digital spaces are connecting writers, readers, bloggers, vloggers, booksellers, librarians and teachers as never before, while hashtag chats such as #ukyachat and #ukmgchat regularly trend.

"Since JK Rowling's Harry Potter and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials," Jeanette Winterson has observed, "children's literature has been repositioned as central, not peripheral, shifting what children read, what we write about what children read, and what we read as adults. At last we seem to understand that imagination is ageless."

It's true that such books brought children's fiction to higher prominence in the early 2000s, but they are part of a literature that is continually regenerating itself. And as the generation who grew up on Rowling and Pullman begin to publish their own books, it will only go further.

Yet neither media coverage nor literary prizes have kept pace. Until they do, anyone looking for the richest contemporary literature might be advised to consult the lists for prizes such as the Guardian children's fiction award and the Carnegie medal instead. Because that is where you will find book after book that stands up to re-reading: the true classics of the future.

Children's books that we re-read

Philip Pullman:
The Magic Pudding. Anything by Arthur Ransome. Tove Jansson's Moomins.

Neil Gaiman:
The Narnia books. The Mary Poppins books. The Wind In the Willows.

Francesca Simon:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Half Magic, by Edward Eager. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.

Andrew Motion (former poet laureate and Man Booker prize jury chair):
Treasure Island and other books by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Erica Wagner (former Times literary editor and Man Booker prize judge):
A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin. The Owl Service by Alan Garner. Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban. All of George and Martha by James Marshall. All of Maurice Sendak. Watership Down by Richard Adams.

Daniel Hahn (translator and chair of the Society Of Authors):
Asterix.

Charlotte Higgins (Guardian chief culture writer)
The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff. The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley.
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Children's books are never just for children

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Who today remembers the plays of AA Milne or the political writing of Erich Kästner? Yet their children's books are read the world over. Salman Rushdie has suggested that of all his work - including Midnight's Children, which won the Best of the Booker - his children's books may last the longest.

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My Very Personal Taste of Racism Abroad (Published 2018)

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For an African-American woman, a study-abroad program in Italy led to an eye-opening experience. “Disgusting black women” were the stinging words of one racial encounter.

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Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.
"My message is that we'll be watching you.

"This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

"For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

"The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

"Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

"So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us - we who have to live with the consequences.

"To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise - the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] - the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

"How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years.

"There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

"You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.

"We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

"Thank you."

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Transcript: Greta Thunberg's Speech At The U.N. Climate Action Summit

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"You have stolen my dreams, and my childhood, with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones," activist Greta Thunberg, 16, tells world leaders.

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As a fan of West Ham United I'm always looking to legitimise my dislike of Chelsea FC. And on first viewing, this week's jarring retro-Métro-racism seems like a good reason to condemn the denizens of Stamford Bridge.

Galling bigotry filmed on a phone; toxic nostalgia captured by modern technology. The train doors chirp and whirr with Blade Runner newness, but the white men clustered in the carriage sneer and chant like cavemen.

It doesn't make sense any more, "Those days are gone," we nervously think as we listen to them sing "We're racist, and that's the way we like it".

To see anyone bullied hurts in our guts, and watching as Souleymane S gamely tries to board his train home I admire his tenacity and feel the vicarious guilt that my racial and national affiliation with the perpetrators provokes.

Why are these men - white like me, English like me, football fans like me - behaving so abominably? A spokesman for Chelsea said: "These actions have no place in football or society." But society is where this took place - not in another world or another time but here and now.

David Cameron said the incident was "disturbing and worrying." What these statements, these vague and abstract sentiments fail to address is the context in which the event occurred.

It is embarrassing that this familiar face of football should flare up like forgotten herpes at a time when the Premier League has sold itself for 5 billion quid or some other inconceivable number. There's an amoral hooliganism in capitalism that's difficult to comprehend when the figures gratuitously inflate. Why not 6 billion or 7? A pound from every person on the planet to watch the people's game.

The Premier League boss, Richard Scudamore, said he could make no guarantee of the redistribution of this astro-cash, or of reducing ticket prices. Of course not. It's not his job to represent fans or the majority of people who work in the game - his job is to ensure profit.

That's everybody's job now, whether we like it or not: to be profitable or be irrelevant. Chelsea, in fact, are the only club that offers a living wage to its staff. Most clubs in a sport awash with money pay their staff the minimum wage. The minimum: the smallest amount allowed. What a tawdry ambition.

The idea that this tremendous sum of TV money may find its way into fans' pockets is beyond risible. It's heretical. It's against the doctrine of "market fundamentalism". Fans are customers, and customers will be charged the maximum amount possible. The maximum: what an unpleasant sentiment.

The continuing disregard for the role of fans will no doubt be exacerbated by this extraordinary wodge of dosh. The game is funded by big business, and fans don't matter: they are little more than set dressing, crowd artists, extras, herded ambience for a global TV audience.

Can we bear to try to understand those white men? Those neat Neanderthals in a silver fuselage have probably supported Chelsea all their lives. Their dads and grandfathers probably supported Chelsea, the Chelsea that existed in a world that may as well have been in the stone age, with none of Roman Abramovich's dubious billions: the Chelsea of Ken Bates, or further back a team that, before 1905, was run from their local pub.

Their club has been taken from them; their game has been taken from them. You understand, I'm not seeking to excuse racism. Racism is no longer on the table of discussion for right-minded people. Even the most ardent racists grudgingly cast aside their dumb creed as obsolete, along with the VHS. It is a curse for those who suffer from it and a burden to those who practise it. What must they be feeling to behave so cruelly to another man, a man ultimately no different from them?

My feeling is that behind the ugly bravado and louche violence is a fearful impotence. Lost, with nothing to believe in, and knowing they don't matter, they dig for meaning by stirring the cadaver of revolting, dead prejudice.

Souleymane S said these men should be found and locked up, and it's difficult to disagree with this unjustly abused man, attacked in his own country by invading thugs. I would agree that these men should be found, because clearly they are lost. But they are already locked up: locked in lives without meaning, where they are as obsolete as their wailing, where their connection to community and history has been coldly stripped and sold.

In Germany all but two of the Bundesliga clubs are controlled by fans. Tickets are reasonably priced, and the common voice is heard. All football clubs should be controlled by the fans who support them, who love them and the communities that they represent.

Perhaps the Chelsea spokesman was right. Perhaps these actions took place outside society. Perhaps these men are outside society, discarded and redundant, bonded only by shared hate.

Perhaps the Premier League similarly exists outside society, garnering huge wealth and hogging it for itself, not sharing the bounty with fans growing bitter on the fringes. Or perhaps under capitalist extremism there is no society at all.

The destination of the hooligans on the train is inextricably linked to the journey of the modern game. If you treat fans like they don't matter, like they're not worthy of grace, then it isn't surprising some behave disgracefully.

When fans take back the clubs that are theirs and run them collectively, aberrant acts such as the Métro racism can be communally condemned from a just position, not from the altar of cold profiteering and cunning hypocrisy.

* Russell Brand is donating the fee from this article to Show Racism the Red Card
Topics

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Let's kick cold profiteering out of football, along with racism | Russell Brand

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As a fan of West Ham United I'm always looking to legitimise my dislike of Chelsea FC. And on first viewing, this week's jarring retro-Métro-racism seems like a good reason to condemn the denizens of Stamford Bridge. Galling bigotry filmed on a phone; toxic nostalgia captured by modern technology.

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1. There is a reason why we refer to dogs as "man's best friend," and it's because they have a special connection with us that no other animal does. They read our communication cues, look to us for direction, and feel with us (unlike their disdainful, indifferent cousin, the cat).

2. They protect things by their awesome nature, including when they are barely bigger than the teensy kittens they are defending:

3. While they may occasionally rub their asses across the carpet right in front of you as though that wasn't THE RUDEST THING THEY COULD POSSIBLY DO, they immediately regret their indiscretions and will look at you with that adorable face of "I'm sorry, please don't stop loving me."

4. Sometimes they want a belly rub and so they turn over as you're walking over to them, and it's like some magical magnet that will draw your hand to their tummy.

5. Unlike cats, who often show complete disregard for their owners until food is being taken down from a shelf, dogs will run up to you as you walk in the door because a few hours at work for you is an eternity without their best friend for them.

6. Dogs welcoming soldiers home is literally the most adorable/wonderful/beautiful thing ever. Please direct me to a cat who would ever behave like this after their owner has been at war.

7. Every day is Christmas for a dog when there are table scraps that go into his bowl after dinner.

8. There is an incredibly powerful sense of loyalty with dogs, where you can depend on their love and their companionship even in your lowest moments. They demonstrate a kind of unconditional compassion that very few humans, if any, are capable of themselves.

9. While they have a diverse range of interests, not one of their activities includes licking their hair off and vomiting small piles of fiber around your house.

10. (That said, sometimes they eat a little too much grass and throw up fluorescent green puddles, but this is a more rare occasion and is heavily balanced by the humor factor.)

11. Despite the fact that they're likely dying inside with impatience and constipation, dogs will wait patiently for you to give them the signal that it's okay to go out. You can torture them with a high-pitched "Wanna go out???" for basically as long as you want, if you're totally evil.

12. They don't poop in boxes in your house that you then have to empty out by hand like a medieval serf.

13. There is a size and shape of dog for everyone, from the Great Pyrenees who will fill all your Winterfell-related needs, to the trembling chihuahua that can be dressed up humiliatingly and carried around in your oversized purse.

14. When you are sad, they know, and they will come over to you with that look that's like, "Hey, large, hairless dog that I love, please stop being sad. There are so many tennis balls to be thrown, the world is a beautiful place."

15. Much like Snow White, they befriend all matter of fauna and engage them in hilarious games. They are basically the only animals that are just like the Disney version of themselves.

16. Sometimes, seeing the way your dog looks at you makes you want to be a better person for them.

17. If you have neither the money nor the pipe network to have a garbage disposal, your dog's dish is a viable substitute for all the things you don't want to throw away. (Yes, they would love those pieces of fat you cut off your steak, thank you for asking!)

18. When you are injured or ill, they will lick you a lot in the hopes of bringing you back to tennis-ball throwing form. The licking won't help on a physiological level, but it will help spiritually.

19. If you have a herding dog, they will often "herd" the family when they sense danger, by doing adorable things such as booping you with their noses or lightly nipping at your ankles to get you in a little manageable circle. They especially love doing this with children.

20. Even tiny dogs who can't do shit are still going to do their best to protect you.

21. While a cat is liable to knock your full glasses off the table for their own morbid amusement, dogs can bring you things when you need them, such as the paper, or a sense of dignity in your superior choice of animal companion.

22. No matter how playful the dog might be with a grown up, they know to be gentle and soft with the new hairless baby family member.

23. This story (which is one amongst many) of dogs showing eternal loyalty even after their master's death, because no cat in the whole wide world would ever do something like this.

24. When you put socks on them, they will look at you with the unmistakable gaze of, "Why, human? I have only loved you, what have I done to deserve this?"

25. Sometimes they want to cuddle you so much that they start crying because they can't cuddle you hard enough, and it is the most wonderful thing ever.

26. Even tigers respect the seriousness that is a dog mid-grub.

27. It may be a cliché, but only because it's true: There are no bad dogs, only bad owners. Dogs are beautiful creatures that we are capable of destroying, but none of them are born bad. Cats, however, are certified assholes from fetushood on. Any love you sense from a cat is projected entirely on them, or because of the camaraderie you feel with their general disdain for life and human beings. Cats are just waiting for us to die, so they can eat our yummy faces and have free range of the furniture.

Go dogs.

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27 Indisputable Reasons Why Dogs Are Better Than Cats

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1. There is a reason why we refer to dogs as "man's best friend," and it's because they have a special connection with us that no other animal does. They read our communication cues, look to us for direction, and feel with us (unlike their disdainful, indifferent cousin, the cat).

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We're all going to die eventually, but Andrew Hozier-Byrne, a.k.a. Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, has been reckoning with his mortality -- and the fate of humanity in general -- by writing through it.

"There's something Tom Waits said about bad news [coming] from a pretty mouth, which is something I've always enjoyed," he says. We're talking about Wasteland, Baby!, his sophomore album, at the New York City headquarters of his label, Columbia Records, when the conversation turns to the title track. The song features some of his gentlest, calmest crooning on the record, even though he's quite literally singing about the death of the planet and end of humankind. He's not exactly smiling when he quotes Waits, but there's a mischievous glint in his eyes when he speaks about this collection of "love songs for the end of the world," as he introduces them.

"It's dealing with the absolute worst case scenario to a comical point," he explains. "[If] it's an absurd love song that's about the world ending in no metaphorical way, at least make it a whistle-able tune... You get great results out of just approaching that light and dark."

Hozier devours the news and keeps up with all of the political unrest, environmental catastrophes and violent clashes contained therein. His consumption of it all has yielded a haunting and challenging yet ultimately satisfying listen that anyone genuinely worried about the state of the world will find relatable.

The sharpness of the subject matter isn't a huge surprise for fans who were moved by the music videos for past singles "Take Me to Church" and "Cherry Wine," which examined homophobia and domestic abuse, and loved last year's Nina Cried Power EP, which featured collaborations with his heroes. (The set's title track -- Hozier's highest-entering chart debut -- features the talents of Mavis Staples and Stax Records legend Booker T. Jones, who played organ on the song and produced the bulk of Wasteland, Baby!' s songs.)

His willingness to confront difficult topics and world-shifting calamites takes different shapes across Wasteland, Baby!: Uplifting tunes ripe for festival season like "Almost (Sweet Music)" and "Nobody" offer brief, flirtatious reprives from doom, while "Dinner and Diatribes," the song he's most excited to play for audiences on tour this time around, is imbued with a far more erotic (and fatalistic) urgency: I'd suffer hell if you'd tell me what you'd do to me tonight.

But "Wasteland, Baby!" is the mission statement, and it ends the album not with a bang, but a Sufjan Stevens-esque whisper. The end of life on earth as we know it is directly addressed in the lyrics, as is the hope that something new will follow: When the stench of the sea/ And the absence of green/ Are the death of all things/ That are seen and unseen/ Are an end, but the start of all things that are left to do.

In a conversation with Billboard, Hozier explored this "light and dark" of his Wasteland and spoke about working with Staples and Jones, the negative trade-offs of success and why he found the apocalypse to be a fitting muse.
The last time we spoke, our conversation landed on a heavy note: Your Nina Cried Power EP is about optimism in dark times, and Wasteland, Baby! is... not. How does the process of making and putting out Wasteland compare to the process behind Nina?
All that work was made around the same time, so all the work was written in the same period. That said, songs that were on that EP, like "Nothing Fucks With My Baby" -- that's very much another love song for the end of the world. It draws less from environmental disaster and plays with a kind of biblical apocalypse, drawing from Yeats' "Second Coming" poem and how he characterizes that happening. I'm happy with the work, I'm proud of the work. I just hope people enjoy it and know where it's coming from.
I know that Booker T played on "Nina Cried Power," but he has a stronger presence on Wasteland than he does Nina, right?
Certainly, yeah. He's maybe on one or two tracks on the EP, but we did eight or nine songs with Booker in studio. There's an extended version of "Nina Cried Power" which hasn't been released which has him playing a lot more. He's across a huge amount of those songs. Working with him was a total dream. The first band I ever was in, we were covering mainly Stax Records tunes -- Booker T and the MGs, Sam and Dave, soul music and blues music. Booker T was the Stax band leader and arranger, and he wrote a lot of blues classics, like "Under a Bad Sign" by Albert King. He's a genius. He's a total dude.
What's something you learned from working with him?
There's a kind of quiet genius to Booker T's presence. He's had such an incredible career. For me, the hardest part of the game nowadays is to have a career in four years' time, in forty years' time, as opposed to writing a quick smash hit. I wouldn't find that as much of a challenge. Yeah, you can write a trendy pop hit, but for me, the challenge is to have a career and still be working and contributing music at Mavis or Booker T's age. There's something incredible about that. It's also wonderful talking to him about the music he listened to and what switched the light on. For him, it was seeing Al Jackson's band perform once. That was the thing that changed his life, which was awesome talking to him about. His music was one of the things that changed my life.
Speaking of hits and longevity: You had a massive hit out the gate with "Take Me to Church." Is that something that stresses you out, this goal of staying present and continuing to make music for years to come?
I've been fortunate with that success. Ultimately it can't stress me out, because if people connected with "Take Me to Church" for whatever reason that they did, if I was to go into a writing room and try to create that four times over, I wouldn't be writing from the same place I wrote that song, and there'd be something disingenuous about it. It was important for me to take a step back and take stock of what it is that I wanted out of my own work. That was very much the intention with this record and writing something like "Nina Cried Power." I didn't consider how it could impact. Everybody has a duty they feel they need to make. I wanted to just write something that I felt I wanted to hear being written. Whether I would write it or someone else would write it, I wanted to write music I wish I heard more of.
Wasteland has a lot of what your fans loved about the first album: the folk strains, the choir elements, the bluesy underbelly. But it just sounds like there's more on this album -- more voices singing, more hands clapping, the presence of more people. Was this a more collaborative effort in general?
The band that I had last time round, we were seven-piece all in all. It was always big, there were always harmonies that needed singing. Now there's one extra player, an organ player who's trying to fill the void of Booker T. I was listening to a lot of folk music, a lot of Alan Lomax recordings and blues music before writing some of this stuff. They're recordings of music just being performed and played by congregations, people singing for its own sake as they go about their day. I like listening to some Irish folk music as well, too. Folk music is very much at the core of where I started writing. There are a lot of hand claps and natural sounds -- the sounds of people making noises with their own instruments, their own physical bodies. I still find that to be a really, really powerful sound. It has something to it, with hands and feet stomping and voices in harmony. There's a good element of that.

I consider myself a singer before anything else. I'm not a guitarist's guitarist; I'm not a great guitar player, and I'm sure as hell not a good keyboard player. So for me, I often explore the arrangements of a song with just vocal parts. I might write parts as voices that end up being played as other instruments when I'm in the demoing process, because it's far easier for me to sing the part I hear in my head as opposed to transposing it and finding it on guitar.
So much great folk and soul music came out of fractured moments in history. You wrote these songs a year ago, but now they have a whole new context. Has Wasteland intensified for you between the time you wrote it and its release?
At the time, I was just reading the news and trying to reconcile these anxieties and concerns with what we might be facing as a global community over the next few years. I won't speak to whether I'm hopeful or what my outlook is, but some of the songs are trying to confront those concerns. Sometimes answer them, sometimes not. Sometimes they just yield to that anxiety, the dread -- like "Wasteland, Baby!"

In some cases, the stuff I was reading and worried about [was] still down the line, but it's amazing to see how shit has gotten far, far worse in regards to environmental crises or disasters. There was a report funded by NASA sometime in 2016 which concluded that organized society as we know it, in 50 years or 100 years time, could alter irreparably. It's interesting seeing stuff like that, or the "12 years" talking point, which someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was pushing -- a United Nations report that said, "Look, there's 12 years to make severe change to the way we consume energy, or we could be in a runaway global warming scenario." It's interesting seeing how much things have changed, and not always for the better. Sometimes you look at that, and it's like, Jesus. Sometimes you think twice about why you wrote a song. I don't think on this one, with cases like that, I don't necessarily regret writing the tune.
Why Wasteland, Baby!? Where did the name come from, and why is this the final song we hear on the album?
I stood back from the main body of the work, which was maybe 15-20 songs at first. The songs all either carried consciously or unconsciously some element of doom and gloom approaching, or they were taking stock of something or saying farewell to something. Like "Shrike," which says, "Remember me in the next life when this is all said and done," or "Would That I," which is just obsessed with fire and the burning of things.

When "Wasteland, Baby!" was written, it seemed to sum up a certain vibe across the album. I think it certainly felt at the time, in 2016, 2017, with the kind of civil discourse and political discourse that was taking place at home and abroad in Europe and over here of course, like we were moving towards -- in regards to our leadership -- a bit of a moral wasteland. It was just really leaning into that. "Wasteland, Baby!" the tune, with its exclamation mark and this wry smile to it, seemed to just sum up some of that kind of gallows humor that's across all the songs. It's dealing with the worst case scenario, but maybe it's a very Irish thing -- if you don't laugh, you'd cry, so you try to meet these things with a smile on your face.

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Hozier Knows the World Is Ending, So He Wrote Apocalyptic Love Songs For 'Wasteland, Baby!'

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We're all going to die eventually, but Andrew Hozier-Byrne, a.k.a. Irish singer-songwriter Hozier, has been reckoning with his mortality -- and the fate of humanity in general -- by writing through it. "There's something Tom Waits said about bad news [coming] from a pretty mouth, which is something I've always enjoyed," he says.

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How does Rachel convey her personal and social identity? Good practice for the exam.

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7am

I wake up and lie in bed for a while looking forward to the day ahead.

8am

I drive to the studio, AKA Dirtee Stank HQ - I've been the label manager at Dirtee Stank (owned by Dizzee Rascal & manager/producer Nick Cage) for six months and love it!

9am

I arrive at the studio and check the diary to see if there are any meetings and see which of our artists will be in studio. It's a really great environment to work in and there's always plenty of scope to diversify and develop news ideas and concepts.

10am

I speak with the directors Hope Audikana about the Newham Generals video which will be their first shoot and for the duo's first official release on Dirtee Stank (my background is film and TV and I originally met Nick and Dizzee through my own film production company Rebel State). I then go through the budget to make sure that we're organised and that there are no nasty surprises lurking.

11.30am

I have a general business discussion with Nick - as well as dealing with the growing release schedule, we're currently embarking on a number of joint ventures with regards to Dirtee Stank merchandise, planned for 2009 launches.

12.30pm

Paddy the tour manager and I have a chat about the last few concerts - Dizzee sold out in Inverness and Edinburgh and his performances at Reading and Leeds were incredible. I have a bit of lunch and carry on reading and replying to e-mails.

1.30pm

I deal with press enquiries and speak to Dizzee about some other interviews that are arranged for him. He's been inundated, especially since Dance Wiv Me went to number one. It's been the most fantastic beginning for the label and we're working hard on the next releases, of which there are definitely a few hits.

2.00pm

Footsie of the Newham Generals arrives at the studio ready for a session with Cage - they're putting the finishing touches to their long awaited album 'Generally Speaking' due for release this November.

4.00pm

Chrome pops into the studio. He's the singer featured on Dance Wiv Me and will be releasing a solo single early 2009. His style is very soulful and definitely commercial - I'm really looking forward to watching him progress.

5.00pm

Speak to our lawyer with regards to license deals - it seems that the world has gone crazy for Dance Wiv Me...happy days!! We recently locked down deals in Australia and New Zealand as well as the US and we're currently dealing with the rest of Europe, the Middle East and Japan, amongst other territories.

6.30pm

I deal with general admin and accounts to make sure that I'm ahead of the game. I then make a few changes to the release schedule before sending over to our distributor. Then I send a few e-mails to arrange for The Gens album to be mastered.

7.30pm

I sit down with Nick and have a chat about our plans and the overall vision. I love everything about my work, especially the people that I work with and the talent that I'm surrounded by.

8.30pm

I head home and watch a bit of TV, which usually involves flipping between music channels, grab some food and hit the gym which inevitably energises me too much... So much for an early night!

Upcoming releases:

Newham Generals 'Generally Speaking' album, November

Smurife 'Syco' EP, November

Chrome single, early 2009

Dizzee Rascal new album scheduled for release early 2009.

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Day in the Life: Rachel McClelland, label manager at Dirtee Stank

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7am I wake up and lie in bed for a while looking forward to the day ahead. 8am I drive to the studio, AKA Dirtee Stank HQ - I've been the label manager at Dirtee Stank (owned by Dizzee Rascal & manager/producer Nick Cage) for six months and love it!

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We're much more likely to be hanging out on social media than at the watercooler these days. But just because we're no longer face-to-face when we chat, doesn't mean our communication is completely disembodied.

Over the last three decades, psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists, along with researchers from other traditions, have come together to understand how people gesture, and the relationship between gesture and speech.

The field of gesture studies has demonstrated that there are several different categories of gesture, and each of them has a different relationship to the words that we say them with. In a paper I co-authored with my colleague Gretchen McCulloch, we demonstrate that the same is true of emoji. The way we use emoji in our digital messages is similar to the way we use gestures when we talk.

Read more: What your emojis say about you

What gestures and emoji have in common

We can break speech down into its component parts: sentences are made of words, words are made of morphemes, and morphemes are made of sounds.

Signed languages have the same features of grammar as spoken languages, but with hand shapes instead of sounds. They have some advantages in complex expressions that spoken languages don't have, but there are gestures as well as grammatical features when people sign.

By contrast, gestures and emoji don't break down into smaller parts. Nor do they easily combine into larger words or sentences (unless we're using a clunky version of the grammar of our language).

While there are preferences, there is nothing "grammatical" about using 😂 instead of 😹. Rather, what is most important is context. 🐶 could be a reference to your own dog, a good dog you saw while out for a walk, or a sign of your fondness for puppers over kitties.

There are some gestures that can have a full meaning even in the absence of speech, including the thumbs up 👍, the OK sign 👌 and good luck 🤞. Gestures like these are known as emblems, some of which are found in the emoji palette. Some object emoji have also developed emblematic meanings, such as the peach 🍑, which is most typically used non-illustratively to represent a butt.

Many gestures and emoji do not have these specific meanings. So, let's take a look at different ways emoji are used to communicate with reference to a common framework used to categorise gestures.

Illustrative and metaphoric emoji

Illustrative gestures model an object by indicating a property of its shape, use, or movement, such as the classic "the fish was THIS big" gesture. Similarly, we often use emoji to illustrate the nature of a message. When you wish someone a happy birthday you might use a variety of emoji, such as the cake with candles 🎂, slice of cake 🍰, balloon 🎈, and wrapped gift 🎁.

It's not grammatically correct to say "birthday happy", but there's no "correct" sequence of emoji, just as there is no one correct way to gesture your description of the fish you caught.

We also have metaphoric uses of gesture and emoji. Unlike a "big fish", a "big idea" doesn't have a physical size, but we might gesture that it does. Similarly, our analysis showed that people typically use the "top" emoji 🔝 to mean something is good.

Read more: Emoji are becoming more inclusive, but not necessarily more representative

Beat gestures are used for emphasis

Another common type of gesture used to draw attention is a beat gesture, distinguished by a repetitive "beat" pattern. Some uses of emoji have a direct parallel to beat gestures. For example, using the double clap 👏 for emphasis, which has its origins in African American English.

The emphatic nature of beat gestures helps explain something about common strings of emoji. When we looked at sequences of emoji the most common patterns are pure repetition, such as two tears of joy emoji 😂😂, or partial repetition such as two heart eyes and blowing a kiss/heart 😍😍😘. Repetition for emphasis is rare (but possible) with words, but very common for gesture and emoji.

Along with these categories, we also looked at pointing and illocutionary gestures and emoji, which help show your intentions behind what you're saying - whether that's amused 😂 or ambivalent 🙃.

Read more: Understanding the emoji of solidarity

Emoji have limitations that gestures don't

There are obviously some differences between online and physical chat. Gestures and speech are closely synchronised in a way emoji and text can't be. Also, the scope of possibilities with gesture are limited only to what the hands and body can do, while emoji use is limited to the (currently) 2,823 symbols encoded by Unicode.

Despite these differences, people still use the resources available to them online to do what they've been doing in face-to-face conversations for millennia. Bringing together research on gesture and internet linguistics, we argue there are far more similarities between emoji and gesture than there are between emoji and grammar.

Instead of worrying that emoji might be replacing competent language use, we can celebrate the fact that emoji are creating a richer form of online communication that returns the features of gesture to language.

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Emoji aren't ruining language: they're a natural substitute for gesture 🔥🔥🔥

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Instead of worrying that emoji is replacing competent language use, we can celebrate that emoji are creating a richer form of online communication that returns the features of gesture to language.

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What makes us Human?  Stephen Fry believes it is Language.  This is a MUST listen to episode.  You may need to create a log in for the BBC - create one, you will need it! 

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What makes us Human?  Stephen Fry believes it is Language.  This is a MUST listen to episode.  You may need to create a log in for the BBC - create one, you will need it! 

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What Makes Us Human with Jeremy Vine - Stephen Fry: What Makes Us Human? - BBC Sounds

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Catch up on your favourite BBC radio show from your favourite DJ right here, whenever you like. Listen without limits with BBC Sounds.

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New on Language: a feminist guide: for people who like listening as well as reading, I've just added a page with links to some broadcasts and podcasts where I (and sometimes other linguists) talk about language, gender and power. https://t.co/RR0Tr8jYkl

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New on Language: a feminist guide: for people who like listening as well as reading, I've just added a page with links to some broadcasts and podcasts where I (and sometimes other linguists) talk about language, gender and power. https://t.co/RR0Tr8jYkl

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New on Language: a feminist guide: for people who like listening as well as reading, I've just added a page with links to some broadcasts and podcasts where I (and sometimes other linguists) talk about language, gender and power. https://t.co/RR0Tr8jYkl
— Debbie Cameron (@wordspinster) November 21, 2017

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New on Language: a feminist guide: for people who like listening as well as reading, I've just added a page with links to some broadcasts and podcasts where I (and sometimes other linguists) talk about language, gender and power. https://t.co/RR0Tr8jYkl

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
New on Language: a feminist guide: for people who like listening as well as reading, I've just added a page with links to some broadcasts and podcasts where I (and sometimes other linguists) talk about language, gender and power. https://t.co/RR0Tr8jYkl

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
New on Language: a feminist guide: for people who like listening as well as reading, I've just added a page with links to some broadcasts and podcasts where I (and sometimes other linguists) talk about language, gender and power. https://t.co/RR0Tr8jYkl

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Exploring the world of words

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Series exploring the world of words and the ways in which we use them