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Annoying mispronunciations: do they make you go nucular? Probly | Language | The Guardian

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Name: Annoying mispronunciations.

Age: No pacific age.

Wait, what? Hey, shouldn't this be the "Appearance" line?

That can wait. What did you just say? I said I don't have a pacific age for mispronunciations.

Do you mean "specific"? I don't know, probly.

You mean "pro bab ly". Oh God, you're one of those people who go nucular whenever someone doesn't get every word exactly right, aren't you?

It's "nuc lear". I've been reading about people like you. Insights agency Perspectus Global recently surveyed 2,000 British people about hated mispronunciations. Apparently, while 65% of people are cool enough to let a mispronunciation go unchecked, 35% like to correct their friends, with 10% making a point of correcting strangers.

I don't see anything wrong with that. You must be a specially pedantic person, then.

"E specially". Please stop doing this. The most important thing about language is that it can communicate meaning. When I said "probly" earlier, you knew what I meant. You didn't have to correct me. In fact, I'd argue that you only did it to grasp at a wisp of intellectual superiority.

You're right. I've never really thought about it like that before. Sorry. It's OK. And to be fair, you're not alone: 35% of respondents were annoyed by people saying "pacifically" when they meant "specifically", making it the biggest offender. And 28% took issue with "probly" instead of "probably", making it the next. But it's important you don't persistently correct people or you'll become a pariah. Nobody wants to end up in the social artick.

ARCTIC. The word is ARCTIC. It really sounds like you have a problem, you know. Have you ever tried treating people like people, and not assessories for your own small-minded cultural preservation campaign?

Fancy an expresso? Not so fast ... Photograph: Jorn Georg Tomter/Getty Images

ACCESSORIES! There is no such thing as an assessory. Calm down, you're going red. You look like you've been drinking too much expresso, or running too many triathalons.

ESPRESSO! TRIATHLON! Why are you doing this to me? You know you're in the wrong here, don't you? Even Dr Alex Baratta, a linguistics lecturer at the University of Manchester, agrees with me. "Changes in pronunciation are a natural part of language evolution," he says. "Once the new pronunciation takes hold in a society, then it's no longer an error but an innovation."

So one day everyone on Earth might refer to it as the Artick Circle? Could be.

I cannot sanction this utter degradation of my beautiful language. Or you could just go along with it. It's only words, after all.

Perhaps you're right. Maybe ... Yes?

Maybe ... Keep going. I'm on tenderhooks.

TENTERHOOKS! TENTERHOOKS! TENTERHOOKS! As in the hook used to prevent wet cotton from shrinking on a 14th-century device known as a tenter. Oh, look at Mr Pacific over here.

Do say: "There is no such thing as linguistic decay, only linguistic change."

Don't say: "Good luck selling that to the internet."

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Annoying mispronunciations: do they make you go nucular? Probly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Name: Annoying mispronunciations. Age: No pacific age. Wait, what? Hey, shouldn't this be the "Appearance" line? That can wait. What did you just say? I said I don't have a pacific age for mispronunciations. Do you mean "specific"? I don't know, probly. You mean "pro bab ly".

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St Luke’s Grammar School asked boys to use rating system on girls, female students taught to keep virginity

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Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size

Boys at a northern beaches Anglican school were told to choose the qualities they looked for in a girl from a list that allocated more points for virginity, looks, and strong Christian values than for generosity and adventurousness.

The year 10 male students at co-ed St Luke's Grammar School were separated from the female students for the Christian studies exercise. In another classroom, girls were given articles to read about why remaining a virgin until marriage was important.

The female students were furious when they heard about the exercise given to the boys. "All the girls were disgusted and really offended," said one student. Some boys laughingly described their task as "build a bitch".

The school's headmaster Geoff Lancaster late last week sent parents a letter to apologise and addressed the year 10 students directly on Monday, acknowledging the material was inappropriate and pledged to personally oversee a review of Christian studies lessons.

St Luke's Grammar, an Anglican school in Dee Why. Credit:St Luke's Grammar website

The incident came as a landmark report commissioned by the Anglican church and released this month found the incidence of domestic abuse was greater amongst Anglicans in Australia than in the general population.

Year 10 students at St Luke's are usually separated by gender for Christian studies. At a boys' lesson last week, a slide was projected onto the whiteboard telling the boys they had 25 points to allocate on qualities they would look for in a girl.

The qualities worth six points in the exercise included popularity, loyalty, good-looking/attractive, intelligent, a strong Christian, kind and conservative, a virgin and trustworthy.

The five-point qualities included being physically fit, easy to talk to, fun/sense of humour and wise, while the four-point qualities included sporty/sexy, goes to church, honest/doesn't lie or cheat, and is friendly.

The exercise given to year 10 boys in Christian studies class at St Luke's Grammar

You have 25 points to allocate on qualities that you would look for in a girl. Now this is supposed to be for a lasting relationship. Listed below are a number of qualities, each marked with a point system. You have to prioritise what you think is important

Six points: popular, loyalty, good looking/attractive, intelligent, strong Christian, kind and considerate, virgin, trustworthy

Five points: physically fit, easy to talk to, fun/sense of humour, wise

Four points: sporty/sexy, goes to church, honest/doesn't lie or cheat, similar interests to you, friendly

Three points: well dressed/groomed, artistic, good manners, good pedigree, ambitious goals, hard-working, great kisser, owns a car

Two points: right height, good at school, brave - stands up for rights, socially competent

One point: favourite hair colour, favourite eye colour, has money, sincere and serious, generous, adventurous, similar beliefs, cares for the world, comfortable even in quiet moments

Attributes such as well-dressed/groomed, good pedigree, ambitious and owns a car were worth three points, while being the right height, brave, standing up for rights and being socially competent were worth two.

One point was allocated to hair or eye colour, having money, being generous, adventurous, and caring for the world. The boys laughed about the lesson afterwards. "They think joking about it was OK because their own teacher was telling them it was OK," said another student.

The girls did not have a similar lesson, and instead were given articles on the importance of virginity and how Satan provides opportunities for fleeting sexual encounters.

Mr Lancaster wrote to parents after school on Friday, apologising and saying he had spoken to the teacher - a member of the Anglican clergy - about his poor judgment in using the material to guide the class discussion on relationships.

"He is very sorry for the offence he has caused and saddened to think that the way this discussion was framed has upset our students," the letter said.

"This term the students have been looking at the complex issues of consent and toxic masculinity and contrasting the negative images portrayed in society with god's plan for strong, healthy relationships where people respect each other as equals.

"St Luke's always has been, and always will be, a school that respects, values and honours all students."

Mr Lancaster also addressed students on Monday to reassure them that the school was a proud advocate of equality, and he wanted them to hear that message clearly.

Christian studies classes would be co-ed from semester 2, and he would personally oversee a review of the subject's teaching program. "I will also be arranging for an external consultant to work with us to ensure the approach and messaging meets the needs of the school and the St Luke's community," he said.

In a statement to the Herald, Mr Lancaster said: "Despite the best efforts to teach respect, healthy relationships, gender equality, consent and inclusivity, we don't always get it right - and last week is a good example of how the very best intentions can go terribly wrong."

After apologising, "we have ... received overwhelmingly positive support for our decisive and honest response. As Principal, I have removed the offending material, and one of the Christian Studies teachers has voluntarily stood down while the matter is under investigation."
The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day's most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.

Jordan Baker is Education Editor of The Sydney Morning Herald

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School asked boys to use rating system on girls, female students taught to keep virginity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Boys at a northern beaches Anglican school were told to choose the qualities they looked for in a girl from a list that allocated more points for virginity, looks, and strong Christian values than for generosity and adventurousness. In another classroom, girls were given articles to read about why remaining a virgin until marriage was important.

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People Who Pick Up Accents Easily Are Nicer People - Australian Spinal Research Foundation

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Accents. Ever notice how easy it is for some people to pick them up? Ten minutes in New York and an Australian voice is already adopting the American drawl. Or traipsing around London and you find yourself starting to articulate the ends of your words in a more precise way?

It's called The Chameleon Effect; it's when we subconsciously copy someone else. Human beings are constantly imitating each other, copying everything from each other's facial expressions, mannerisms, even our postures.

Researchers at The University of California, Riverside, found we also imitate speech patters and inflections. That is we have the capacity to imitate accents.

The theory behind The Chameleon Effect is that we do it to build rapport and empathy. The better you are at building empathy the more likely you are to mimic. All those people who pick up accents easily are just nicer people!

The study published in the journal Attention, Perception & Psychophysics ¹ came to the conclusion that we can even imitate speech patterns of voices we have never heard.

Professor Lawrence D. Rosenblum who headed the study ¹ had individuals who had not lip read before watch a silent face articulate 80 simple words.

The subject was then required to say the word out loud clearly. In each case the individual was able to pronounce the word in the same accent as the silent speaker. In fact when they spoke the words aloud, it sounded significantly different to the way the word sounded if they simply read the word in their own voice from a list.

"Whether we are hearing or lipreading speech articulations, a talker's speaking style has subtle influences on our own manner of speaking," Rosenblum says. "This unintentional imitation could serve as a social glue, helping us to affiliate and empathize with each other.

Having said that, no doubt you've come across people who have die hard accents who still sound exactly the same even though they've been living in their new adopted homeland for many years.

According to Dr Christina Schelletter, head of English Language and Communication at the University of Hertfordshire, it's because some accents are harder to let go of than others.

As you get older it's harder to adopt a new accent, as length of exposure to the second language makes a difference. If you've spent most of your life living in the Yorkshire Dales and then move to Brooklyn, New York, you're unlikely to pick up the Brooklyn accent as most of your life you've been practicing the specific Yorkshire intonations. Phonological deafness can also make it difficult to imitate a new accent. It's a condition we find in older people. Getting older makes it harder to pick up the subtle nuances in the different accents, let alone integrating those changes into your own vocal patterns.

"Non-native speakers [try] to substitute their native sounds for non-equivalent sound in the target language," says Schekketter. "There are individual differences in terms of how strong an accent is, but overall, age and length of exposure to the second language very much contribute to the accent."

There's also some evidence to suggest that if you can carry a tune you're much more likely to be able to pick up accents. Musically minded folk are much quicker to adopt a new accent. Scientists believe that being able to tune into the sounds and rhythms of music are not dissimilar to being about to pick up the intonations in language.

Some people are better at tuning in to the sounds, stress and intonation of the other language than others," says Dr Schelletter. "It's a function of "musicality", she says.

Which leaves us with the following... If you're one of those people who can pick up accents quicker than you can buy a baguette in Paris, then you're probably not only a nice person, chances are you can hold a note too!

References

[1] Alignment to visual speech information. Miller et al. Attention Perception & Psychophysics, 2010; 72 (6): 1614 DOI: 10.3758/APP.72.6.1614

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People Who Pick Up Accents Easily Are Nicer People - Australian Spinal Research Foundation

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Accents. Ever notice how easy it is for some people to pick them up? Ten minutes in New York and an Australian voice is already adopting the American drawl. Or traipsing around London and you find yourself starting to articulate the ends of your words in a more precise way?

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Essex and London accents deemed less intelligent, researchers find - BBC News

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Essex and London accents deemed less intelligent, researchers find

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People with London and Essex accents downgrade others with London and Essex accents, a study finds.

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‘Extreme’ form of Cockney dialect in decline, says report – archive 1953 | Language | The Guardian

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In spite of strong adverse influences there has been some general improvement in the speech of Londoners in the last few decades, according to a booklet entitled The Art of Speaking prepared by the LCC's education inspectors for the consideration of teachers.

Today, says the booklet, one rarely hears the more extreme forms of cockney from younger adults; and in the schools, even in the poorest neighbourhoods, children are not often heard to drop an initial "h," though some vowels, diphthongs, and consonants continue to give difficulty. The substitution of "f" for "th," as in "fink" for "think," and "carn" for "can't" are common in some localities. Perhaps the most typical of the more slovenly omissions in the London dialect is the loss of "t" or "tt" as in "wa'er" for "water" or "bu'er" for "butter."

Bilingualism
The booklet defines the aim of speech training as being to impart to pupils the power of courteous, fluent, and clearly articulated speech which will not warp the personality or cause a child to be a stranger in his own home environment. For the great majority of pupils "bi-lingualism" - the use of one mode of speaking in school and another out of school - is to be preferred to the replacement of their native speech by a colourless standard dialect.

Schools in good residential areas have relatively few speech problems. "It is otherwise in neighbourhoods where children have little home life, where from quite an early age they 'run the streets' and where the restless kaleidoscopic swiftly changing nature of their play and interests fosters rough, spasmodic, clipped, and slovenly speech.

In the overcrowded home, everyone tends to shout or raise the pitch of the voice to command attention. Courteous discussion is nearly impossible; strident bickering is sometimes the norm. The children are more likely to be 'shut up' than listened to by their eiders." They seldom hear good speech.

If the London dialect is not dying as quickly as some would like, at least a snobbish attitude towards it is less prominent

"Of the influences outside school and home that mould the speech-habits of children, the cinema and wireless might be expected to have some effect, the cinema generally for the worse and wireless for the better. Yet some of the more extreme effects of the cinema on London speech have been quite transitory. It is seldom indeed that such expressions as 'OK' or 'Yeah' (in its American form) are still heard, though both for a few years enjoyed wide popularity; nor, except as an affectation, is the nasalised speech of Hollywood finding many imitators.

Dialect with a pedigree
If the London dialect (as distinct from slovenly speech) is not dying as quickly as some would like, at least a snobbish attitude towards it is less prominent than formerly. It may be that there is a growing realisation that its pedigree is as sound as that of any of the dialects of the shires, for it has its roots in the earlier speech of Kent, Essex, and the east Midlands. Yet a young Londoner who cannot speak the local form of standard English, which is a hybrid between unslovenly cockney and BBC 'correctness' is undoubtedly at a social disadvantage and probably suffers setbacks when he seeks employment outside the ranks of the manual workers, even though his abilities qualify him for more intellectual work.

In very general terms, the aim in all schools must be so to educate children that they speak easily, clearly, and courteously, without self-consciousness. By laying good foundations in the schools we can save many a young Londoner from frustration and social bitterness."

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'Extreme' form of Cockney dialect in decline, says report - archive, 10 June 1953

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In spite of strong adverse influences there has been some general improvement in the speech of Londoners in the last few decades, according to a booklet entitled The Art of Speaking prepared by the LCC's education inspectors for the consideration of teachers.

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The Different Words We Use to Describe Male and Female Leaders

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We like to think of ourselves as unbiased and objective in our employment decisions, but with two equal candidates, who are you going to promote? Someone who is described in their performance evaluations as analytical or someone who is described as compassionate? On the other end of the employment spectrum, if you're downsizing and have to fire someone and the two people in jeopardy are very similar, who are you going to fire? Someone perceived as arrogant or someone perceived as inept? Leadership attributions in performance evaluations are powerful.

A unique and fascinating data set allowed us to explore the language used to describe individuals in subjective performance evaluations and provides evidence that, as we suspected, language in performance evaluations is applied differently to describe men and women. We analyzed a large-scale military dataset (over 4,000 participants and 81,000 evaluations) to examine objective and subjective performance measures that included a list of 89 positive and negative leadership attributes that were used to assess leader performance in a military leadership setting.

The military provides an interesting and significant setting to evaluate gender bias as it is a long-standing and traditionally male profession that has, over several decades, worked to eliminate formal gender segregation and discrimination. For performance evaluations specifically, the military has long been predicated on meritocratic ideals of fairness and justice providing equal opportunity regardless of demographics. The top-down enforcement of equal employment opportunity policies, hierarchical organization by military rank and not social status characteristics, and recent total gender integration in all occupations are hallmarks of meritocratic organizations where we might expect less gender bias in performance evaluations.

In our analysis we found no gender differences in objective measures (e.g., grades, fitness scores, class standing), which is consistent with prior research. However, the subjective evaluations provided a wealth of interesting findings.

For starters, in terms of sheer numbers of attributes, we found no gender difference in the number of positive attributes assigned, but women were assigned significantly more negative attributes.

We also looked at which specific attributes were more often assigned to men and to women. This gives us a better idea of how gendered language is employed in leader evaluations. The most commonly used positive term to describe men was analytical, while for women it was compassionate. At the other extreme, the most commonly used negative term to describe men was arrogant. For women, it was inept. We found statistically significant gender differences in how often these terms (and others) were used (relative to the other positive or negative terms available for selection) when describing men and women - even though men's and women's performances were the same by more objective measures.

So what? Both "analytical" and "compassionate" reflect positively on the individual being evaluated. However, could one characterization be more valuable from an organizational standpoint? The term analytical is task-oriented, speaking to an individual's ability to reason, to interpret, to strategize, and lending support to the objectives or mission of the business. Compassion is relationship-oriented, contributing to a positive work environment and culture, but perhaps of less value to accomplishing the work at hand. When considering who to hire, who to promote, or who to compensate, which person- with which attribute-takes the prize?

Likewise, who is retained and who is fired? An arrogant employee may have a character flaw-and a negative impact on his work environment-but may still be able to accomplish the task or job. An inept person, in contrast, is clearly not qualified and presumably on her way out.

Our research on leadership attributes found significant differences in the assignment of 28 leadership attributes when applied to men and women. While men were more often assigned attributes such as analytical, competent, athletic and dependable, women were more often assigned compassionate, enthusiastic, energetic and organized. Consistent with our results, societal attitudes suggest that women leaders are described as more compassionate (the most assigned attribute overall) and organized than men leaders. In contrast, women were more often evaluated as inept, frivolous, gossip, excitable, scattered, temperamental, panicky, and indecisive, while men were more often evaluated as arrogant and irresponsible.

These are not just words - they can have real-life implications for employees and organizations. Language in performance evaluations can tell us what is valued and what is not in an organization. Employees also know what is valued and make choices and decisions about how well they fit in an organization and their potential to advance.

Our research is in line with other studies that have found differences in formal feedback for men and women. Some studies have shown that women are more likely to receive vague feedback that is not connected to objectives or business outcomes, which is a disadvantage when women are competing for job opportunities, promotions, and rewards, and in terms of women's professional growth and identity. And women leaders often get conflicting feedback - told on the one hand that they're too bossy or aggressive, but on the other that they should be more confident and assertive. A huge body of work has found that when women are collaborative and communal, they are not perceived as competent-but when they emphasize their competence, they're seen as cold and unlikable, in a classic "double bind."

One of the things that's ironic about our findings is that many of the leadership traits that people say they most appreciate, want in a leader, or make a successful leader are the positive traits - such as compassion - that women leaders receive in their performance evaluations. So why isn't this translating into more women in these roles? It's one thing to describe an ideal leader, it's another to describe a real person's performance without being influenced by stereotypes about their gender, or stereotypes about what a leader should be.

Because of widely held societal beliefs about gender roles and leadership, when most people are asked to picture a leader, what they picture is a male leader. Even when women and men behave in leaderly ways among peers - speaking up with new ideas, for example - it's men who are seen as leaders by the group, not women. And as our study shows, even in this era of talent management and diversity and inclusion initiatives, our formal feedback mechanisms are still suffering from the same biases, sending subtle messages to women that they aren't "real leaders"- men are.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Different Words We Use to Describe Male and Female Leaders

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We know that men and women are often described differently in performance evaluations, and now we have more information on exactly what some of those differences are. Researchers analyzed a large-scale military dataset (over 4,000 participants and 81,000 evaluations) to examine objective and subjective performance measures.

# data[].attributes.body
The Different Words We Use to Describe Male and Female Leaders

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We like to think of ourselves as unbiased and objective in our employment decisions, but with two equal candidates, who are you going to promote? Someone who is described in their performance evaluations as analytical or someone who is described as compassionate? On the other end of the employment spectrum, if you're downsizing and have to fire someone and the two people in jeopardy are very similar, who are you going to fire? Someone perceived as arrogant or someone perceived as inept? Leadership attributions in performance evaluations are powerful.

A unique and fascinating data set allowed us to explore the language used to describe individuals in subjective performance evaluations and provides evidence that, as we suspected, language in performance evaluations is applied differently to describe men and women. We analyzed a large-scale military dataset (over 4,000 participants and 81,000 evaluations) to examine objective and subjective performance measures that included a list of 89 positive and negative leadership attributes that were used to assess leader performance in a military leadership setting.

The military provides an interesting and significant setting to evaluate gender bias as it is a long-standing and traditionally male profession that has, over several decades, worked to eliminate formal gender segregation and discrimination. For performance evaluations specifically, the military has long been predicated on meritocratic ideals of fairness and justice providing equal opportunity regardless of demographics. The top-down enforcement of equal employment opportunity policies, hierarchical organization by military rank and not social status characteristics, and recent total gender integration in all occupations are hallmarks of meritocratic organizations where we might expect less gender bias in performance evaluations.

In our analysis we found no gender differences in objective measures (e.g., grades, fitness scores, class standing), which is consistent with prior research. However, the subjective evaluations provided a wealth of interesting findings.

For starters, in terms of sheer numbers of attributes, we found no gender difference in the number of positive attributes assigned, but women were assigned significantly more negative attributes.

We also looked at which specific attributes were more often assigned to men and to women. This gives us a better idea of how gendered language is employed in leader evaluations. The most commonly used positive term to describe men was analytical, while for women it was compassionate. At the other extreme, the most commonly used negative term to describe men was arrogant. For women, it was inept. We found statistically significant gender differences in how often these terms (and others) were used (relative to the other positive or negative terms available for selection) when describing men and women - even though men's and women's performances were the same by more objective measures.

So what? Both "analytical" and "compassionate" reflect positively on the individual being evaluated. However, could one characterization be more valuable from an organizational standpoint? The term analytical is task-oriented, speaking to an individual's ability to reason, to interpret, to strategize, and lending support to the objectives or mission of the business. Compassion is relationship-oriented, contributing to a positive work environment and culture, but perhaps of less value to accomplishing the work at hand. When considering who to hire, who to promote, or who to compensate, which person- with which attribute-takes the prize?

Likewise, who is retained and who is fired? An arrogant employee may have a character flaw-and a negative impact on his work environment-but may still be able to accomplish the task or job. An inept person, in contrast, is clearly not qualified and presumably on her way out.

Our research on leadership attributes found significant differences in the assignment of 28 leadership attributes when applied to men and women. While men were more often assigned attributes such as analytical, competent, athletic and dependable, women were more often assigned compassionate, enthusiastic, energetic and organized. Consistent with our results, societal attitudes suggest that women leaders are described as more compassionate (the most assigned attribute overall) and organized than men leaders. In contrast, women were more often evaluated as inept, frivolous, gossip, excitable, scattered, temperamental, panicky, and indecisive, while men were more often evaluated as arrogant and irresponsible.

These are not just words - they can have real-life implications for employees and organizations. Language in performance evaluations can tell us what is valued and what is not in an organization. Employees also know what is valued and make choices and decisions about how well they fit in an organization and their potential to advance.

Our research is in line with other studies that have found differences in formal feedback for men and women. Some studies have shown that women are more likely to receive vague feedback that is not connected to objectives or business outcomes, which is a disadvantage when women are competing for job opportunities, promotions, and rewards, and in terms of women's professional growth and identity. And women leaders often get conflicting feedback - told on the one hand that they're too bossy or aggressive, but on the other that they should be more confident and assertive. A huge body of work has found that when women are collaborative and communal, they are not perceived as competent-but when they emphasize their competence, they're seen as cold and unlikable, in a classic "double bind."

One of the things that's ironic about our findings is that many of the leadership traits that people say they most appreciate, want in a leader, or make a successful leader are the positive traits - such as compassion - that women leaders receive in their performance evaluations. So why isn't this translating into more women in these roles? It's one thing to describe an ideal leader, it's another to describe a real person's performance without being influenced by stereotypes about their gender, or stereotypes about what a leader should be.

Because of widely held societal beliefs about gender roles and leadership, when most people are asked to picture a leader, what they picture is a male leader. Even when women and men behave in leaderly ways among peers - speaking up with new ideas, for example - it's men who are seen as leaders by the group, not women. And as our study shows, even in this era of talent management and diversity and inclusion initiatives, our formal feedback mechanisms are still suffering from the same biases, sending subtle messages to women that they aren't "real leaders"- men are.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Different Words We Use to Describe Male and Female Leaders

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We know that men and women are often described differently in performance evaluations, and now we have more information on exactly what some of those differences are. Researchers analyzed a large-scale military dataset (over 4,000 participants and 81,000 evaluations) to examine objective and subjective performance measures.

# data[].attributes.body
Sexism in dictionaries: why are 'hussy, baggage and filly' still used to describe a woman? | Women | The Guardian

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Show caption
Many entries define a woman as a man's possession or a prostitute. Illustration: Guardian Design

Think of the word "woman" and do you automatically think "bitch"? Or hussy, baggage or bit? These are, according to various traditional dictionaries, synonyms for "woman", which came as a bit of a shock to Maria Beatrice Giovanardi as she typed the word into a search engine one night in January. Giovanardi was seeking inspiration as she tried to name a new project for the women's rights group she was involved with and was looking for alternative words for "woman". What she discovered instead was a wealth of derogatory entries. "They are offensive and I don't believe they are synonyms for 'woman'," she says. "I don't understand why they are there."

Giovanardi started looking into it more deeply, using the default dictionaries on different search engines. And she began to explore whether men were given similar treatment. They weren't - the most derogatory synonym for "man" given by dictionaries she found were "bozo" and "geezer". She was alarmed, too, by the example sentences given below the definitions. Many, she noticed, were themselves sexist, involving stereotypes and centring men. "I told you to be home when I get home, little woman," is one from Oxford Dictionaries.

Last week, Giovanardi launched a petition to get dictionary makers - particularly Oxford University Press (OUP), which publishes the Oxford English Dictionary, as well as Oxford Dictionaries, the source used by Apple and Google - to cut sexist illustrative sentences and derogatory words. "Not to remove them from the dictionary, but remove them from under 'woman'," she says. "History is important, but these are just not synonyms of woman. Bitch can be in the dictionary, but it shouldn't be under woman in my opinion."

Her call was shared on Twitter by the Fawcett Society. "The language we use is fundamentally framed and determined by the patriarchal society in which we live," says Sam Smethers, the organisation's chief executive. "The fact that derogatory terms are associated with the word 'woman' indicates how biased our language can be." We need to change, she says, "the way we think of something as important and as fundamental as the word woman".

On Lexico, the site run by Oxford Dictionaries and Dictionary.com, synonyms for women include bitch, baggage, piece and filly. The example sentences chosen to illustrate usage are bizarre. "One of his sophisticated London women" is one, as if the woman exists solely in relation to, and as a possession of, the man. Another reads: "The idea that women are real human beings with thoughts and emotions is played down."

For "man", the examples are far more impressive. "I'm as ambitious as the next man"; "A battle for power between a union man and an intellectual is looming". Other examples under "man" make unnecessarily sexist points about women. "She was more of a man than any of them," is one; "It should be the sort of manly thing I get my man to do, but he leaves computers to me" is another - both implying that women are the weaker, more cowardly, more stupid gender.

The examples of usage are better on the Collins dictionary site (the dictionary used by the Guardian), including "she was a senior BBC woman", but it also offers offensive slang names including "ho" as a synonym for "woman". The worst synonym for "man" Collins could come up with is dude or geezer.

On the Merriam-Webster dictionary site, the fourth definition of "woman" is a servant and the fifth is a wife or mistress. The definitions of man include "an alumnus of or student at a college or university" - as in a Cambridge man - though this is not a definition that is extended to women.

Giovanardi says "the dictionary is the most basic foundation of language", but Deborah Cameron, a professor of language and communication at Worcester College, Oxford, takes issue with this. "It isn't, it's a record of the language, what we have said and written over the years, or more particularly what men have said and written over the years," she says. The OUP is not going to take much notice of the petition, "or at least they're not going to listen to the [idea that] you should use the dictionary to eliminate sexism. They're going to say: if there's sexism in the world, in history, it's our job to record that."

"If you look at the entry in the Oxford English Dictionary," says Cameron, "one sense of 'woman' that has quite a lot of illustrative quotes is as a man's possession. And that reflected the law - men did own women and so usage grew from that. There are a huge load of entries that basically mean prostitute."

However, she says, there is a difference between a dictionary used as a scholarly reference - the OED being the prime example - and a casual dictionary and thesaurus installed as a default on your phone or laptop, or the ones used by Google. "I can't see any reason at all why that particular list of synonyms should appear in a dictionary that people are not using to research the history of culture, which is what they would use the big OED for. If it's going to contain synonyms, including out-of-date and derogatory ones, I don't know what purpose they serve in that context." In more comprehensive works, sensitive words are marked as offensive. On the definitions of "woman" that Google and Yahoo throw up, "We've got no guidance on usage at all. Anyone who does think bitch is a straight synonym for woman is going to find themselves getting into fights."

Where serious reference dictionary editors do have power, she says, is in the choice of example sentences. "[The entry for 'woman'] was revised in 2011, and I did think that some of the choices they made of illustrative examples from recent years were a bit odd," she says. The example the OED has for the broad definition of woman, taken from a 2009 New Yorker article, is: "A solitary middle-aged woman ... was watering her lawn in hip-hugging Capri jeans."

In 2016, Michael Oman-Reagan, an anthropologist, highlighted sexist example sentences used in Oxford Dictionaries for words that had nothing to do with women - under "rabid", for instance, was "rabid feminist". At the time, a spokesperson for OUP said they would review the examples. OUP, Merriam-Webster and Collins had not responded to requests to comment on this article by the time of going to press.

A dictionary is never neutral, says Lindsay Rose Russell, an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois and the author of Women and Dictionary Making. "At best, it is a snapshot of a language in a given moment, from a given perspective. Dictionary makers bring personal, social and professional ideologies to their projects. Historically, a great many English dictionaries had strong Christian perspectives ... often with strong doses of misogyny, androcentrism, racism, Anglocentrism, homophobia and so on."

Yet women have long been involved in creating dictionaries, she says. "In the history of English lexicography, you will find a 15th-century abbess credited with a glossary of hawking and hunting, a 17th-century teenage girl who penned a dictionary of women's fashion, an 18th-century bluestocking who published one of the first and most influential thesauruses [British Synonymy], and 20th-century feminists who reinvented lexicography not only by avoiding androcentric and sexist definitions, but by centring dictionaries as a scene of social conflict and political potential."

In the 1970s and 80s, says Cameron, "there was this whole movement to de-authorise the dictionary" - or "dick-tionary", as the radical feminist Mary Daly described it (n. "any patriarchal dictionary") in her dictionary, Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. "Now what people do is lobby the authority," says Cameron. "They don't question the authority at all. Whereas the old feminist way was to try to deconstruct the whole authority of the dictionary."

Cheris Kramarae was one of the creators of A Feminist Dictionary, which, although published in 1985, came out of women's group meetings she was attending in the late 60s and 70s. "Women were meeting in conscious-raising groups and working in women's studies and realising that men seemed to have the monopoly on the supposedly one true view of the world," says Kramarae, a visiting professor at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. "Rather than thinking there was one true view of the world, [we thought] men have no monopoly on that and neither do women. That's the reason we included a variety of definitions. These days, we'd be more likely to challenge not only the so-called male 'truth', but also the white 'truth', and the roles of black studies, and LGBTQ activism [around] the binary and the critique of that." Language is not, she says, "a neutral carrier of our ideas - our understanding is our language and word choices are our ideas".

Her and her colleagues' intention was to challenge the traditional dictionaries' content and authority. "We were concerned about the very widespread, damaging belief that traditional dictionaries are the primary records of language use," she says. "And they are inhospitable to women. We worked on A Feminist Dictionary because we knew that traditional dictionaries are far from being accurate and representational records of the language usage of most of us. Yet they are handbooks sanctioned by every level of schooling. They are, in fact, instruments of social control which disguise and depress the linguistic confidence and creativity of most speakers and writers." What was the response? She laughs. "All over the place. Anthony Burgess wrote a really damning review, which we were delighted with because he was one of the people we would want to engage and call attention to our work."

What good do feminist dictionaries and campaigns do? Can society be changed by changing the language? "I think they happen together," says Cameron. "I don't think changing language on its own usually works, but I wouldn't say language is unimportant. Language is a way in which new meanings or objections to old meanings are transmitted, so it does matter." Russell says: "I do think that using language conscientiously can be a means to improving our own thinking about the world and our interactions in it."

Dictionaries are no longer dusty reference books - we carry them on our phones in our pockets; search engines tacitly endorse whatever definition they serve up from whatever source they have licensed (presumably the most cost-effective one). As Kramarae points out, "Now the faulty and hurtful definitions and categories are being built into artificial intelligence systems that separate, classify and rank people through automated and unaccessible processes."

We should, says Russell, "be more ambitious in our dictionary criticism. I do think that campaigns such as this one start productive discussions about words and their meanings. We ought to care what definitions are made most readily available and why."
Women

From the Oxford English Dictionary to Google's own, the synonyms given for woman are shockingly derogatory - while the entries for 'man' are almost universally positive. Now one campaign is trying to take sexism out of the dictionary

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Sexism in dictionaries: why are 'hussy, baggage and filly' still used to describe a woman?

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Think of the word "woman" and do you automatically think "bitch"? Or hussy, baggage or bit? These are, according to various traditional dictionaries, synonyms for "woman", which came as a bit of a shock to Maria Beatrice Giovanardi as she typed the word into a search engine one night in January.

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A baby's first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person's first expression of self, even if it's just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi. First words are more than cute; they're existentially profound. They represent the threshold where noise becomes signal, the moment that interiority breaks its confines to greet the outside world.

And yet, for much of history, infant language wasn't regarded as worthy of attention, and in many contemporary cultures it still isn't. All babies, across time and space, transition from babbling to language at about twelve months of age, in spoken languages as well as signed ones, but not all parents and caregivers pay attention to that transition. That supposedly irresistible thing we call a "baby's first word" is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent. The natural state of first words is to be disregarded, misheard, or entirely overlooked. Doting over them isn't perverse-it's just a modern, underappreciated luxury.

I was inspired to attempt a cultural history of "first words" by Germanist Karl Guthke, who wrote a definitive book about last words in the early nineties. He saw them as artifacts of each era's conception of death. "There are styles of dying," he noted, "so are there corresponding styles and fashions of last words?" In an aside, he dismissed first words, arguing they couldn't tell us much about individual lives. They belong, he wrote, "with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm." He had been musing on 1988 U.S. presidential candidate Michael Dukakis whose reputation as a cold fish technocrat seemed to have been predicted by his alleged first words, in Greek: monos mou, or "all by myself."

But first words, from the semiformed babble to the perfectly adult, have a tremendous amount to tell us about society. There are "styles and fashions" to first words, just as there are of last words, in the sense of what gets heard, recorded, or passed down. More importantly, the emergence of an interest in first words tracks closely with how Western industrialized societies became what anthropologist David Lancy calls "neontocracies," or societies organized around the imperatives of caring for the very young. If you want to know how and why babies became their parents' cognitive projects, tracking what those parents made of first words is a good metric.

In the cultural history of first words, we can say with confidence that they've always existed. But early utterances are rarely mentioned in historical materials. When they are recorded, it's mainly been in more modern media, such as baby books, diaries, and scientific observations. By contrast, last words appear as far back as the Old Testament. The first recorded first word, were it to be found, would be a marker of modernity's dawn.

In the eighties, Linda Pollock, now a professor at Tulane, examined dozens of English-language diaries from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries for evidence of how adults thought about their offspring. She found that only nineteen out of ninety-one diaries noted infant and child speech at all, and only nine diaries mentioned first words.

The earliest came from a Puritan judge in Massachusetts, Samuel Sewall, in early 1686, who recorded in his diary that his eighteen-month-old son, Hull, "speaks Apple plainly." The father may have shown interest because for the sickly son to say anything at all was remarkable. The boy died three weeks shy of his second birthday. His first word was one of his last.

Sewall's record of Hull's "Apple" isn't the oldest one I've found. The oldest comes from 1602, when a French physician named Jean Héroard was assigned to keep a diary about the growth and development of the first legitimate heir to the French throne in eighty years, the dauphin who would become Louis XIII. That first word, as Héroard wrote it, was hé, or, as we'd translate it into English today, "hey." After Héroard, we have no record of another first word for another eighty-four years.

More than half of the mentions of children's speech in Pollock's diaries date from the nineteenth century. After the dauphin's hé and Sewall's "Apple," the next first word was recorded in 1839, when Charles Darwin recorded his first son's development, including his first word, "mum." It meant "food" or "give me food," Darwin tells us.

Such a banality was more significant for what Darwin made of it. He published his notes in 1877, and their appearance in German, Russian, and French simultaneously created a fad of diary-keeping among other natural historians, suddenly making the study of child development "a respectable branch of human biology," as Dutch psycholinguist Willem Levelt put it. Many, if not most, of the diarists were men. "This new zeal for psychological knowledge has taken possession of a number of my acquaintances," wrote British psychologist James Sully in 1881. "These are mostly young married men to whom the phenomenon of babyhood has all the charm of newness, and who import a youthful enthusiasm into their scientific pursuits." Their diary studies fed the argument that the development of the individual follows a path along which the species had evolved. Thus first words provided a window into the minds and abilities of human ancestors in evolutionary time. "Mum" was, in a sense, a living fossil.

Darwin's account was a response to one published a year earlier by French historian Hippolyte Taine about one of his daughters, including detailed notes about her early vocalizations. Taine wrote that her first words were "papa" and "tem," which he took as her attempt to say tiens. He unpacked this word lovingly, considering it a "remarkable" word. It meant many things-"give, take, look." "In fact," Taine wrote, "she says it very decidedly several times together in an urgent fashion, sometimes that she may have some new object that she sees, sometimes to get us to take it, sometimes to draw attention to herself. All these meanings are mixed up in the word tem. " Taine's delight is matched by his sadness when she stops saying it. "This is no doubt because we did not choose to learn it, for it did not correspond to any one of our ideas ... we did not use it with her and therefore she left off using it herself." Yet for a time, the word marked the arrival of an "outbreak of volition," which the father reveled in.

Both Darwin and Taine granted firstness to certain phonetic strings that (they decided) the child invented rather than imitated. Darwin was sure that Doddy (as he called his son) "invented" his "mum." They believed the first words of a child mirrored the emergence of language in our distant ancestors. "Speaking generally," Taine wrote, "the child presents in a passing state the mental characteristics that are found in a fixed state in primitive civilizations, very much as the human embryo presents in a passing state the physical characteristics that are found in a fixed state in the classes of inferior animals."

Around the same time that Darwin, Taine, and other Europeans were grappling with children and the evolutionary history of language, the first commercial baby books for recording important moments, including first words, began to appear in America. This is where noticing first words really began to take off. Where for Darwin and Taine the first word marked the baby's transition into a human, in the baby book age it marked the arrival of an individual, not just a creature distinct among animals but a singular personality distinct from other selves.

At the time, an estimated one in four or five babies died before they reached twelve months old. Capturing various firsts, including words, encouraged parents to invest more in their children, who were now emotionally more valuable. At first, the baby books were aimed at upper-class women, descended from the tradition of recording baby gifts from family and friends. As their popularity grew among middle- and working-class families, they made it easier to think that individual babies and children mattered. At the turn of the century, local health departments began to offer their own versions of baby books. First words became one important moment in a baby's development, which could only happen when infants had a good chance of surviving into childhood.

Online library records for about twenty baby books from the early twentieth century in a UCLA special collection showed that about two-thirds of them provided space for a "first word" or "first words." The most effusive, a book from 1910, asked, "What were the first wonderful words?" One asks for "baby's sayings" and another asks for "speech" and "vocabulary at 18 months." About a third of the books prompted nothing of the sort, asking instead about first pictures, birthdays, Christmases, teeth, and trips. For example, The Biography of a Better Baby, published in 1910, figures that "better babies" eat, grow, wear clothes, get fresh air, and walk. (Note the absence of "talk.") A French book from 1906, Le Livret de L'enfant, merely asks when the baby started to speak (" a quel age l'enfant a-t-il commencé a parler?), and The Edwardian Baby from 1908 gives language milestones ("should use syllables, such as ma, pa, na, ta, without any distinct meaning), but says nothing about first words.

This was also the apparent beginning of the belief that a baby's first words could foretell their lives. In Babies Made Us Modern, a history of babies in America from the 1890s to the end of the baby boom, historian Janet Golden relates the various cues, both scientific and folkloric, which parents used to tell their babies' futures. A baby book from 1912 tracked "first definitive signs of emotion at visible things," "first attempt to reach for something," and "first signs of reason." Some other books mentioned the popular belief that if a child's first movements were upward in space, it would ensure a rise in social station, which led to the practice of carrying newborns up the stairs. If the house had only one floor, the baby was carried up a ladder.

In the late sixties, my mother, on noting that my first words were "money" and "dubbaday" (after the defunct publishing house, Doubleday), erroneously predicted I would have a lucrative career in publishing. She remembered these words without writing them down-my baby book was Catholic and asked, instead, for my "first prayer," "first Christmas," and "first Mass." I suppose that putting prayers in children's mouths was better than letting them spontaneously jabber their unsocialized, profane thoughts. Though my first words were perhaps not prophetic, Picasso's first word was "piz" (for the Spanish word for "pencil") and Julie Andrews's was "home."

In some cultures, first words are prescribed-no matter what else the baby might be able to say, they're not considered to be speaking until they say certain things. In American and Western Samoa, the first word is said to be tae, meaning "shit." In Samoan culture, children are seen as, "cheeky, mischevious, and willfull," as anthropologists Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin put it, and such a word seems apt. Elsewhere, early utterances reflect a child's otherworldly status. Anthropologist Nigel Barley notes that the Chamba of Cameroon and Nigeria believe that the babbling of infants and the very old is the language of the spirit world. "The former have not yet forgotten it, the latter are resuming it, hence their affinity with each other," he writes. Meanwhile, the Baule of Ivory Coast maintain that babies babbling the ancestral language should be kept apart lest they use it to plot against the living.

In the well-loved children's book Knuffle Bunny, by Mo Willems, a little girl, Trixie, loses her stuffed rabbit and then gets it back. When she's reunited with her toy, she blurts out something she's never said before, which her father considers to be her first words. Spoiler alert: they are "knuffle bunny."

The book is a reminder that a "first word" is a product of the intersection between a baby's intention to mean with an adult's willingness to comprehend. "Knuffle bunny" isn't actually the first thing Trixie says in the book. She had already tried to tell her father that her bunny has been left behind. "Aggle flaggle klabble!" she cried. "That's right," replied her father. "We're going home."

What's true for "knuffle bunny" was also true with Darwin's "mum," Taine's "tem," Sewall's "Apple," and maybe even Héroard's "hé." The status of a first word as "first" is always somewhat arbitrary, dependent on an adult's willingness to bestow meaning on the utterance. As linguist Catherine Snow noted in 1980, "The first word is a reflection of the culture's decisions about many matters-the status of child versus parent, the attribution of intentionality, language socialization beliefs and practices, and beliefs about the social and communicative capacities of prelinguistic members, as well as theories of language and of meaning."

She and other linguists solved this problem in a variety of ways: some ignored the single first word and counted instead the first four, ten, or fifty words (which the average child achieves by eighteen months), while others marked a first word stage. What became de rigueur were checklists of words given to parents to fill out. What that approach sacrificed in idiosyncratic detail (you would not be able to record that your child's first word was "hé" or "tem," for example), it made up for in scientific usefulness, because interesting patterns emerged nevertheless from the banalities.

Most early words are nouns, for instance, and girls appear to say more words than boys, no matter the language they are speaking or the culture they're in. And we can venture to say that first words throughout time, whether they've been heard or not, have probably not differed much from the ones that contemporary babies say: animal sounds, names of pets and family members, food items, and greetings. Your first words were everyone's first words, spoken over and over by endless generations of babies trying to break through.

Michael Erard is an author, linguist, and consultant. He is the author of Um..: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean and Babel No More: The Search for the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners.

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A baby's first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person's first expression of self, even if it's just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi.

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He, she, or ... ? Gender-neutral pronouns reduce biases – study | Language | The Guardian

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More than 100 failures litter the battleground that is the hunt for an English gender-neutral singular pronoun. From thon, ip and hiser to hem, ons and lers, the discarded terms have piled up since the mid-19th century.

But the quest for the right word is not in vain, a new study suggests. Using a gender-neutral pronoun, it found, reduces mental biases that favour men, and boosts positive feelings towards women and LGBT people.

The finding marks an easy win, the researchers believe, and shows how a minor change in language can help chip away at long-standing gender inequities.

"Let's assume there are societies that generally agree on being more inclusive of women and LGBT individuals, and there are more than a few," said Efrén Pérez at the University of California in Los Angeles. "Our findings suggest that the words we choose to use can matter in getting us a little bit closer toward reaching that ideal."

Pérez and Margit Tavits at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, explored the impact of gender-neutral pronouns on the views of more than 3,000 Swedes. In 2015, the country adopted the gender-neutral term "hen" to sit alongside the existing terms "hon" and "han", the English equivalents of "she" and "he".

Before the study began in earnest, those taking part were handed a cartoon of an androgynous figure walking a dog. They were then randomly split into three groups and asked to write down what was happening in the picture. One group was told to use only neutral pronouns, another only female pronouns, and the third only male pronouns.

The researchers then asked the volunteers to complete a short story about a person, given no name or gender, running for political office. Next they answered questions that examined their views on women and LGBT people.

According to the report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those who used gender-neutral pronouns for the cartoon task were more likely to use non-male names in their short story. The gender-neutral pronoun also appeared to improve positive feelings towards LGBT people. The word hen, the researchers believe, helped to combat mental biases that favoured men, and raise awareness of other genders.

Sabine Sczesny, a professor of social psychology at the University of Bern, said the research was further evidence that gender-inclusive language could reduce gender-biases and "contribute to the promotion of gender and LGBT equality and tolerance".

Laura Russell, director of research, policy and campaigns at Stonewall said: "The language we use is important, especially when it comes to describing or referencing someone's identity.

"This study adds to the evidence showing that when we use language that actively includes women and LGBT people, it makes a real difference in reducing gender stereotyping. Using gender-neutral language is a positive step towards creating a world where everyone is accepted without exception."

In English, the word "they" is used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. And while some grammarians claim it is unacceptable, such usage has a long history. As the Oxford English Dictionary notes, "they" appears in singular form as far back as 1375 in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.

"From at least the mid-nineteenth century onwards, new coinages have attempted to provide English with a grammatically uncontroversial gender-neutral singular pronoun and related adjectives," said Jonathan Dent, senior assistant editor at the OED. "American writers of the 1860s and 1870s gave us (s)he or s/he and ze, while hir, first suggested in the form hier in 1910, was embraced by the Californian Sacramento Bee newspaper, which used it as an alternative to him or her and his or her between 1920 and the late 1940s.

"In recent years, growing recognition of non-binary gender identities has made use of he or she seem increasingly exclusionary in many contexts, and they, ze and zir, and hir have all been used with reference back to a single, named individual, and chosen by some people as their preferred pronouns," he added.

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He, she, or ... ? Gender-neutral pronouns reduce biases - study

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More than 100 failures litter the battleground that is the hunt for an English gender-neutral singular pronoun. From thon, ip and hiser to hem, ons and lers, the discarded terms have piled up since the mid-19th century. But the quest for the right word is not in vain, a new study suggests.

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In praise of strident women – language: a feminist guide

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Here's why it's OK for Taylor Swift to use literally, figuratively | Taylor Swift | The Guardian

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Here’s why it’s ok for Taylor Swift to use literally, figuratively | David Shariatmadari

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Linguist Stephen Pinker is among those who have implied the singer was wrong, says Guardian writer and editor David Shariatmadari

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My National Trust work has prompted a prescriptivist rant in today’s Daily Express #HappyMonday

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My National Trust work has prompted a prescriptivist rant in today’s Daily Express #HappyMonday https://t.co/DdCr83ooI7

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My National Trust work has prompted a prescriptivist rant in today’s Daily Express #HappyMonday pic.twitter.com/DdCr83ooI7
— Dr Robbie Love (@lovermob) August 5, 2019

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My National Trust work has prompted a prescriptivist rant in today’s Daily Express #HappyMonday https://t.co/DdCr83ooI7

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My National Trust work has prompted a prescriptivist rant in today’s Daily Express #HappyMonday https://t.co/DdCr83ooI7

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My National Trust work has prompted a prescriptivist rant in today’s Daily Express #HappyMonday

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What Jacob Rees-Mogg's language rules reveal about him | Language | The Guardian

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Jacob Rees-Mogg must be in seventh heaven right now. His obsession with anachronistic rules and rituals finally has a professional justification. Boris Johnson has made him leader of the House of Commons, a British institution more steeped in arcane ritual than almost any other. He even has a bonus title, Lord President of the Council, complete, no doubt, with complicated modes of address. I'm sure he's checked the entry in Debrett's and will be correcting anyone who gets it wrong.

Because he's a stickler for that kind of thing: it emerged at the end of last week that he has a list of banned words and style rules that he asks members of staff to apply in written communication. (How he polices oral communication is unknown. One thing I would say: it's probably best to avoid asking him where the toilet is.)

We all have style preferences, and there's nothing wrong with expressing them - as long as you don't claim they're the only "correct" way of doing things. But the words and phrases Rees-Mogg has singled out are revealing, if not exactly surprising.

Esq.

Among his recommendations, Rees-Mogg asks that "all non-titled males" are given the abbreviation Esq., for esquire, after their name. Esquire is a pretty outmoded honorific that technically designates a man below the rank of a knight. It derives from the Latin scutarius, meaning "shield bearer", and entered English via the Old French es cuier. There's almost something egalitarian about the fact that Rees-Mogg wants everyone to get a whiff of aristocracy, even if they don't have a dukedom or whatnot. But then you remember that there is, of course, no female equivalent.

Hopefully

And now for the banned words. Since the 17th century "hopefully" has been used as an adverb, modifying a verb to suggest that the action is done "in a hopeful way". For example, you might say: "He asked for some more food, hopefully." Since roughly the second half of the 20th century more and more people have used it to modify whole sentences, to mean "it is hoped that". So, "hopefully it won't rain tomorrow" (though there's evidence that this goes back to at least the 18th century). In any case, it's now completely normal. Rees-Mogg is evidently one of those who detests this hopefully as a hideous innovation. But the fact he doesn't specify that it's sentential "hopefully" he's worried about shows he already recognises it is the standard usage. As elsewhere, the world has moved on but he hasn't.

Equal

This is a bit mystifying, as it's not a word generally disparaged in old-fashioned style guides. Could it be that Rees-Mogg sees it as redolent of various politically correct catchphrases, like equal opportunities, equal rights or (probably his biggest bugbear) equal marriage, which he voted against on seven separate occasions?

Got

There are a couple of ways of indicating possession in English, namely "have" and "have got": "I have a cat" vs "I've got a cat". The latter is usually judged to be slightly less formal, which is presumably why Rees-Mogg hates it. But the ban appears to be a blanket one: got is cast out even where it's just the past tense of the innocent verb get (as in "he got me a present"). This is strange, since get, as the linguist John McWhorter pointed out in a recent episode of his podcast, is a hugely important part of the lexical scaffolding of English. Does Rees-Mogg feel it's been contaminated by association with the informal "have got" construction? Does it just sound a bit too "common"?

Meet with

The usual objection to "meet with" is that the preposition is redundant. "I met with Juncker" and "I met Juncker", is it argued, mean the same thing, so it's foolish to add the "with" (god help you if you say "met up with"). Except that redundancy is a natural and ubiquitous feature of English and of most languages. Does Rees-Mogg also object to "sit down"?

Due to

Some believe that "due to" should only modify a noun, behaving in the same way as "attributable to" would. Thus, you can say "the loss was due to his poor performance" but not "he lost due to his poor performance". In the latter case, traditionalists say, you must use "because of". But because of and due to are used interchangeably by the vast majority of native speakers of English. And our only meaningful guide to how words work is how most people use them (ask the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary). In what sense is a distinction a distinction if hardly anyone recognises it?

The comma touch: Jacob Rees-Mogg's aides send language rules to staff

It's interesting to ponder why Rees-Mogg feels the sting of these "mistakes" so keenly. In fact, some work has been done on the personality traits of people who get irritated by what they perceive to be grammatical errors. They score highly on measures of conscientiousness. What does that mean? As one researcher puts it: "A high score on conscientious implies strong industriousness, impulse control, dutifulness, sense of organisation, adherence to norms and rules and a preference for order and dependability." Although that doesn't predict a highly conservative outlook, it's certainly compatible with it. It also squares with the so-called authoritarian personality type that was most likely to vote Brexit and features "a strong desire for order, obedience, conformity".

So Rees-Mogg's hidebound rules are exactly what you'd expect from a man on the rightmost reaches of a rightwing party. The only question is whether his love of order is compatible with the no-deal Brexit he's pushing. Hopefully, we won't have to find out.

* David Shariatmadari is a Guardian editor and writer. His book Don't Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language is out in August
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What Jacob Rees-Mogg's language rules reveal about him | David Shariatmadari

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Jacob Rees-Mogg must be in seventh heaven right now. His obsession with anachronistic rules and rituals finally has a professional justification. Boris Johnson has made him leader of the House of Commons, a British institution more steeped in arcane ritual than almost any other.

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Malaphors and eggcorns: The art of mangling your words - BBC Ideas

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What is a malaphor? It's not rocket surgery! - BBC Ideas

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Watch the "What is a malaphor? It's not rocket surgery!" video at BBC Ideas. Explore other related content via our curated "The wonderful world of words" playlist.

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Why The Guardian changed the language it uses to write about the environment

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Why The Guardian changed the language it uses to write about the environment

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The Guardian changed its style guide in May to "introduce terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world". Language is never neutral!

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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", although the original terms are not banned.

"We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue," said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. "The phrase 'climate change', for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity."

"Increasingly, climate scientists and organisations from the UN to the Met Office are changing their terminology, and using stronger language to describe the situation we're in," she said.

The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, talked of the "climate crisis" in September, adding: "We face a direct existential threat." The climate scientist Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a former adviser to Angela Merkel, the EU and the pope, also uses "climate crisis".

In December, Prof Richard Betts, who leads the Met Office's climate research, said "global heating" was a more accurate term than "global warming" to describe the changes taking place to the world's climate. In the political world, UK MPs recently endorsed the Labour party's declaration of a "climate emergency".

The scale of the climate and wildlife crises has been laid bare by two landmark reports from the world's scientists. In October, 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, 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.

Other terms that have been updated, including the use of "wildlife" rather than "biodiversity", "fish populations" instead of "fish stocks" and "climate science denier" rather than "climate sceptic". In September, the BBC accepted it gets coverage of climate change "wrong too often" and told staff: "You do not need a 'denier' to balance the debate."

Earlier in May, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has inspired school strikes for climate around the globe, said: "It's 2019. Can we all now call it what it is: climate breakdown, climate crisis, climate emergency, ecological breakdown, ecological crisis and ecological emergency?"

The update to the Guardian's style guide follows the addition of the global carbon dioxide level to the Guardian's daily weather pages. "Levels of CO ₂ in the atmosphere have risen so dramatically - including a measure of that in our daily weather report is symbolic of what human activity is doing to our climate," said Viner in April. "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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Why the Guardian is changing the language it uses about the environment

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From now, house style guide recommends terms such as 'climate crisis' and 'global heating'

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Excellent podcast about language. Also hilarious

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Funny and interesting introduction to English etymology (for more, see The Allusionist - there’s a link elsewhere in this Padlet).
Some slight rudeness but nothing scandalous.

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The brilliant and dazzling Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast and person who technically for a living researches the origins of language and thus is an etymologist, visits Alie's apartment to chat about various word origins, gender in language, the Bible a.k.a. The Oxford English Dictionary, origins of the filthiest slang, emoji decoding, mediocrity, step parents, babies wearing glasses, Greek kimonos, the romance of languages and the fundamental truth that language is always changing whether you want it to or not. Also tomatoes, pliable boobs, avocados, and fish trails.

The Allusionist Podcast, HelenZaltzman.com

Follow Helen on Twitter & Instagram

Sponsor links: TrueandCo.com/ologies (code: ologies) & Amazon.com/popchips (code: 20ologies)

This week's donation was made to POPStheclub.com

More links at alieward.com/ologies/etymology

Become a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologies

OlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!

Follow @Ologies on Twitter or Instagram

Follow @AlieWard on Twitter or Instagram

Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray Morris

Theme song by Nick Thorburn

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etymology (word origins) with helen zaltzman of the allusionist podcast

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‎Ologies with Alie Ward: Etymology (WORD ORIGINS) with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist Podcast on Apple Podcasts

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‎The brilliant and dazzling Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast and person who technically for a living researches the origins of language and thus is an etymologist, visits Alie's apartment to chat about various word origins, gender in language, the Bible a.k.a. The Oxford English Dictio...

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The risk that politicians, other public figures or ordinary people taking part in political activities could be physically attacked is the most urgent but not the only reason to be alarmed by the divisive stance adopted by the prime minister following the supreme court ruling against him. With every contemptuous act or incendiary choice of words, Boris Johnson inflicts further damage on our democracy and makes it harder to see how the divisions of Brexit can ever be healed.

He and his party have now sunk to a new low. Care must always be taken in linking words with actions. But the murder of Jo Cox in 2016, police warnings about the rising far-right threat, and the huge increase in online and other abuse, would lead any responsible leader to treat people's fears with respect. Anti-Brexit lawyer Jolyon Maugham revealed on Thursday that, on police advice, he has installed a panic button and bought a stab vest. Yet Mr Johnson appears intent on sowing further discord, repeatedly referring to the Brexit extension sought by parliament as a "surrender bill" - a phrase that appears calculated to provoke English nationalists to fury. When MPs urged him to moderate his language, pointing out that such phrases appear in the death threats and abuse they receive, he dismissed their concerns as "humbug". On Thursday he failed to turn up to answer questions about these exchanges.

The difficulties now confronting the UK are enormous, and disagreements about the best way forward are fierce. But to reject Mr Johnson's demagoguery, as MPs including his former cabinet colleague Justine Greening did on Thursday, is not to place style over substance. It is to recognise that rhetoric can be dangerous, and one of a prime minister's tasks is to set the tone.

Politicians of all parties, commentators and others have their part to play. Prorogation was an outrage, but it was not a coup, and Mr Johnson is not a dictator. In such conflicted times, metaphors such as "drive-by shooting", "pull the trigger" or "decapitation" can take on disturbing connotations. At the extreme, abuse and threats, online and in real life, come from the left as well as the Brexit-supporting right.

Given the political and constitutional impasse, with the Queen and supreme court drawn into politics in a way that few people would have imagined, it is not hard to see how things could get worse. Mr Johnson's populist posture, and particularly his embrace of a strongman persona that is toxic to many female parliamentarians, makes comparisons with President Trump inevitable. We don't yet know how the public views the reversal of the prorogation, but we know how the prime minister is trying to portray it. Thankfully, British broadcasters bear little resemblance to the highly partisan US networks.

Britain is in the midst of a crisis. The vote for Brexit exposed and deepened social divisions, but also revealed flaws in our institutions. Electoral reformers have long argued for changes that would see us move towards a more consensual and less tribal politics, as well as introducing democracy to the House of Lords. Female politicians in particular have argued that the adversarial, debating-society aspect of the House of Commons is out of date, and contributes to the sense of alienation from Westminster by sections of the public.

Consideration of such questions lies in the future. For now, the priority must be to stop Mr Johnson from causing more harm. Those Conservative colleagues who have stood by him so far must now speak up against a slide into antagonism that appears as calculated as it is reckless.
Topics

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The Guardian view on language in politics: playing with fire | Editorial

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The risk that politicians, other public figures or ordinary people taking part in political activities could be physically attacked is the most urgent but not the only reason to be alarmed by the divisive stance adopted by the prime minister following the supreme court ruling against him.

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Eye-opening Twitter thread on the gendered messages we send to/about young children through the language printed on their clothing

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Here's another thread about the way we label baby girls and baby boys differently from birth, well before they can express any preferences. Let's start with the messages we drill into girls.

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Here's another thread about the way we label baby girls and baby boys differently from birth, well before they can express any preferences. Let's start with the messages we drill into girls. https://t.co/6fJkpQKUx1

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Here's another thread about the way we label baby girls and baby boys differently from birth, well before they can express any preferences. Let's start with the messages we drill into girls. pic.twitter.com/6fJkpQKUx1
— Kate Long (@volewriter) November 2, 2019

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Here's another thread about the way we label baby girls and baby boys differently from birth, well before they can express any preferences. Let's start with the messages we drill into girls. https://t.co/6fJkpQKUx1

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Here's another thread about the way we label baby girls and baby boys differently from birth, well before they can express any preferences. Let's start with the messages we drill into girls. https://t.co/6fJkpQKUx1

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Here's another thread about the way we label baby girls and baby boys differently from birth, well before they can express any preferences. Let's start with the messages we drill into girls.

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Collins dictionary released its ‘Brexicon’ today - 10 words it says define Brexit (listed below) and The Guardian responded with 10 words it thinks should have made the list.
Collins’ ‘Brexicon’:
- Brexiteer - noun - a supporter or architect of the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union

- Brexiety - noun - a state of heightened anxiety triggered by concerns about the imminent withdrawal of Britain from the European Union

- Cakeism - noun - a wish to enjoy two desirable but incompatible alternatives

- Flextension - noun - An informal agreement to extend the time allowed for payment of a debt or completion of a contract, setting a new date that can be altered depending on future events

- Milkshake - verb - to throw a milkshake or similar drink over a public figure to humiliate him or her

No-deal - adjective - denoting a situation in which two parties fail to reach an agreement about how to proceed

- Project Fear - noun - a name given to any political campaign that seeks to arouse public alarm about proposed changes to the status quo

- Prorogue - verb - to discontinue the meetings of (a legislative body) without dissolving it

- Stockpiling - noun - the activity of acquiring and storing large quantities of goods

- Remainer - noun - a person who believes Britain should remain in the European Union

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It turns out there is one British industry that has been boosted by Brexit. Unfortunately, lexicography - that is compiling dictionaries to you and me - doesn't employ quite as many people as, say, making cars. Never mind. The tortuous process of leaving the EU has created a mini word-boom, and at least the people at Collins have been capitalising on it. On Thursday the dictionary company released its Brexicon: 10 words that it says define Brexit, from cakeism to flextension. But what did they miss out?

Brino

If you're a Brexit purist, then anything short of sealing off the channel tunnel and daubing a "v" sign on the white cliffs of Dover is "Brino", or Brexit in name only. But how do you pronounce it? I'm tempted to go with "bree-no", but it must have been inspired by the US political slur "Rino" - Republican in name only - which sounds like "rhino". Answers on a postcard, please.

FBPE

An acronym that has come to define a certain type of obsessive remainer, does anyone now remember what the label tacked on to thousands of Twitter profiles stands for? Well, it's "follow back, pro-EU", and started out as a project to build a network of like-minded users on social media. For what exactly? It isn't clear that the FBPE "movement" has achieved anything very concrete. But who knows? Perhaps the hashtag aimed at connecting people has in fact spawned the odd Euro-romance. Let us know if that's you.

Yellowhammer

I thought it was a city in Canada (oops, that's Yellowknife), but apparently it's a songbird. Oh, and the codename for the civil service plan to deal with a no-deal Brexit. That possibility may have receded for the time being, but personally I find it reassuring that the country has spent £2.1bn preparing for something entirely avoidable that now probably isn't going to happen. Don't you?

Releaver

Whatever happened to the releavers? Up until the 2017 election they seemed to be all the rage - a cohort of people who had voted remain but were resigned to Brexit. They just wanted the government to get on with it. Then Theresa May lost her majority and it began to seem as if there was every possibility we might not leave the EU at all. With Boris Johnson having secured a new deal, and staying in looking less likely again, will the releavers roar back to life? This December's election may depend on it.

Brexodus

An appropriately biblical-sounding word for the fact that Brexit has made a lot of people want to get out of here. According to Full Fact, the number of EU citizens leaving the UK increased from around 95,000 in the year before the referendum to 145,000 by September 2018. Companies have been relocating, too: more than 330 City firms have moved or are moving parts of their businesses to places such as Dublin and Luxembourg. More worrying still is the fact that EU nurses - which in London account for 20% of all staff - are upping sticks in greater numbers than ever before.

BOB

At this point BOB - bored of Brexit - describes approximately 100% of the UK population and everyone in the rest of the EU, too. Some Americans may still be interested, but mainly because they enjoyed hearing the former speaker shouting "Order!" and " Bambos Charalambous " and don't realise he has gone now. Even the most fervent Moggite or Faragist will admit to feeling slightly jaded about the whole process, surely? Those sunlit uplands do seem rather a long time coming. At least we will have a steady stream of new words to console us: can I nominate perma-transition, neverendexit and perpetugotiation?
David Shariatmadari is the author of Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language Topics

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The Brexicon: how well do you know your Brexit jargon?

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It turns out there is one British industry that has been boosted by Brexit. Unfortunately, lexicography - that is compiling dictionaries to you and me - doesn't employ quite as many people as, say, making cars. Never mind. The tortuous process of leaving the EU has created a mini word-boom, and at least the people at Collins have been capitalising on it.

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Collins dictionary released its ‘Brexicon’ today - 10 words it says define Brexit (listed below) and The Guardian responded with 10 words it thinks should have made the list.
Collins’ ‘Brexicon’:
- Brexiteer - noun - a supporter or architect of the withdrawal of Britain from the European Union

- Brexiety - noun - a state of heightened anxiety triggered by concerns about the imminent withdrawal of Britain from the European Union

- Cakeism - noun - a wish to enjoy two desirable but incompatible alternatives

- Flextension - noun - An informal agreement to extend the time allowed for payment of a debt or completion of a contract, setting a new date that can be altered depending on future events

- Milkshake - verb - to throw a milkshake or similar drink over a public figure to humiliate him or her

No-deal - adjective - denoting a situation in which two parties fail to reach an agreement about how to proceed

- Project Fear - noun - a name given to any political campaign that seeks to arouse public alarm about proposed changes to the status quo

- Prorogue - verb - to discontinue the meetings of (a legislative body) without dissolving it

- Stockpiling - noun - the activity of acquiring and storing large quantities of goods

- Remainer - noun - a person who believes Britain should remain in the European Union

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It turns out there is one British industry that has been boosted by Brexit. Unfortunately, lexicography - that is compiling dictionaries to you and me - doesn't employ quite as many people as, say, making cars. Never mind. The tortuous process of leaving the EU has created a mini word-boom, and at least the people at Collins have been capitalising on it. On Thursday the dictionary company released its Brexicon: 10 words that it says define Brexit, from cakeism to flextension. But what did they miss out?

Brino

If you're a Brexit purist, then anything short of sealing off the channel tunnel and daubing a "v" sign on the white cliffs of Dover is "Brino", or Brexit in name only. But how do you pronounce it? I'm tempted to go with "bree-no", but it must have been inspired by the US political slur "Rino" - Republican in name only - which sounds like "rhino". Answers on a postcard, please.

FBPE

An acronym that has come to define a certain type of obsessive remainer, does anyone now remember what the label tacked on to thousands of Twitter profiles stands for? Well, it's "follow back, pro-EU", and started out as a project to build a network of like-minded users on social media. For what exactly? It isn't clear that the FBPE "movement" has achieved anything very concrete. But who knows? Perhaps the hashtag aimed at connecting people has in fact spawned the odd Euro-romance. Let us know if that's you.

Yellowhammer

I thought it was a city in Canada (oops, that's Yellowknife), but apparently it's a songbird. Oh, and the codename for the civil service plan to deal with a no-deal Brexit. That possibility may have receded for the time being, but personally I find it reassuring that the country has spent £2.1bn preparing for something entirely avoidable that now probably isn't going to happen. Don't you?

Releaver

Whatever happened to the releavers? Up until the 2017 election they seemed to be all the rage - a cohort of people who had voted remain but were resigned to Brexit. They just wanted the government to get on with it. Then Theresa May lost her majority and it began to seem as if there was every possibility we might not leave the EU at all. With Boris Johnson having secured a new deal, and staying in looking less likely again, will the releavers roar back to life? This December's election may depend on it.

Brexodus

An appropriately biblical-sounding word for the fact that Brexit has made a lot of people want to get out of here. According to Full Fact, the number of EU citizens leaving the UK increased from around 95,000 in the year before the referendum to 145,000 by September 2018. Companies have been relocating, too: more than 330 City firms have moved or are moving parts of their businesses to places such as Dublin and Luxembourg. More worrying still is the fact that EU nurses - which in London account for 20% of all staff - are upping sticks in greater numbers than ever before.

BOB

At this point BOB - bored of Brexit - describes approximately 100% of the UK population and everyone in the rest of the EU, too. Some Americans may still be interested, but mainly because they enjoyed hearing the former speaker shouting "Order!" and " Bambos Charalambous " and don't realise he has gone now. Even the most fervent Moggite or Faragist will admit to feeling slightly jaded about the whole process, surely? Those sunlit uplands do seem rather a long time coming. At least we will have a steady stream of new words to console us: can I nominate perma-transition, neverendexit and perpetugotiation?
David Shariatmadari is the author of Don't Believe a Word: The Surprising Truth About Language Topics

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The Brexicon: how well do you know your Brexit jargon?

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It turns out there is one British industry that has been boosted by Brexit. Unfortunately, lexicography - that is compiling dictionaries to you and me - doesn't employ quite as many people as, say, making cars. Never mind. The tortuous process of leaving the EU has created a mini word-boom, and at least the people at Collins have been capitalising on it.

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A small army of volunteers is to be recruited to help update the most comprehensive survey of England's dialects ever undertaken, thanks to an injection of funding.

The University's Dialect and Heritage project has been awarded £530,500 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to open up the extensive Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) to the public.

The archive includes the ground-breaking work of the Survey of English Dialects, carried out by nine intrepid fieldworkers in the 1950s and is held in Leeds University Library's Special Collections.

The survey will now be updated and made available online for the first time, with the help of volunteers recruited and trained as oral history and dialect fieldworkers and transcribers.

They will follow in the footsteps of the dialect pioneers who set out from Leeds 70 years ago to record and map dialects from all corners of the country. But unlike the original survey, they won't only be looking for "old men with good teeth".

"The project will preserve this invaluable cultural legacy for future generations. "

Dr Fiona Douglas

Through a series of local community outreach events and working with five partner museums from across the country, the Dialect and Heritage project will invite people to get involved as a volunteer or by sharing their dialect – regardless of location, background, age or gender.

Researchers are also looking for descendants of the people who took part in the original Survey of English Dialects, which ran from 1946-1978, or with connections to the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, which was in operation between 1963 and 1983.

"If you, your parents, grandparents or other relatives have a connection to these historical dialect studies, the project would like to hear from you," said Dr Fiona Douglas, from Leeds' School of English, who is leading the project.

From January, a year will be spent digitising the notebooks, photographs, word maps and audio recordings from the original fieldwork. Further extensive fieldwork will then be undertaken from 2021-23, making new oral history recordings – some of them including descendants of the original survey interviewees.

Dr Douglas has already tracked down three of the original fieldworkers who travelled the country to painstakingly record dialect variations – initially in handwritten notebooks, later with cumbersome reel-to-reel audio recorders that were sometimes hooked up to car batteries because of a lack of mains electricity.

Others to have come forward include the children and grandchildren of original survey respondents, and those who remember Werner Kissling, the famous ethnographic photographer who worked for the project during the 1960s, capturing everything from sheep washing and wallops (a variant of skittles, pictured above), to luck stones and Bartle burning.

"These amazing memories allow us to touch history and reach into the past," added Dr Douglas.

"We have loved hearing from people with family or personal connections to the Survey of English Dialects or the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, and can't wait to speak to more of them.

"They give us fascinating first-hand accounts of what life was like and how these surveys were done. I've heard tell of fieldwork done in fishing boats in the middle of the night and dialect caravans touring the country.

"And stories told by survey interviewees who had seen Brunel's SS Great Eastern sail out of the Thames, and the hulks of old sailing ships used to house convicts before transportation to Australia."

One of the original dialect maps showing geographical variants for 'freckles'

What's in a name?

Depending on where you live, do you have 'ferntickles', 'murfles', 'brannyspreckles', 'brunny-spots', 'vrackles' or 'frantittles' on your face, or freckles?

Are you 'cack-handed', 'cat-handed', 'coochy-pawed', 'gibble-fisted', 'left-kaggy, 'squippy' – or is it simply that you write with your left hand?

Do you call it a 'spelk', 'spell', 'shive', 'spill' or 'splinter'?

And would you take a 'bait', a 'jock', a 'snap' or a 'packed lunch' when going out for the day?

A roadshow, complete with pop-up dialect kit, will go on tour as part of the project's ongoing work with five partner museums – Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings in Worcestershire, Dales Countryside Museum and Ryedale Folk Museum in North Yorkshire, Suffolk's Museum of East Anglian Life, and Weald and Downland Living Museum in West Sussex.

Material from the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture will enrich these museums' important collections and bring together a rich national inheritance of dialect and vernacular heritage, the pieces of which are currently scattered.

The project was awarded initial development funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund in 2017 to lay the ground work for the project's next, three-year phase.

"The first phase of Dialect and Heritage proved there is a huge appetite in the country to preserve an understanding of dialect," said Dr Douglas "The enthusiasm of visitors and volunteers at our museum partners is testament to that.

"The project will preserve this invaluable cultural legacy for future generations."

What the project will achieve:

Index, digitise and make publicly available the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture

Develop interpretation for permanent and temporary exhibition in partner museums

Create a pop-up dialect kit, complementary workshop materials and activities

Create a website specifically designed to engage a wide range of non-specialist users

Recruit and train up to 150 volunteers as oral history and dialect fieldworkers

Develop downloadable online learning resources for schools

Collect and transcribe new oral history/dialect recordings

The 21st century update of the survey will include input from everyone. The project team does not mind whether people can trace their ancestry to a particular place back for generations, if they have moved around from place to place, or settled in the UK more recently. The aim is to capture a snapshot of present-day dialect, in all its exciting diversity.

And where the focus of the original survey was on older participants, because they were thought most likely to provide a linguistic bridge to the past, the new project aims to reach younger participants too, through activities with families and schools.

"These amazing memories allow us to touch history and reach into the past. "

Dr Fiona Douglas

As well as the National Lottery Heritage Fund £530,500 grant, the University of Leeds' Footsteps Fund and other alumni donations have contributed almost £110,000 to the project, plus up to £23,000 from the partner museums.

The University's Special Collections will be home to the new archive materials – just as it hosts the original Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture.
Further information

For interview requests and enquiries about the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture, contact Gareth Dant, University of Leeds Communications Office, on 0113 343 3996 or g.j.dant@leeds.ac.uk.

Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture contains records and artefacts relating to more than 300 English dialects and the traditions and lifestyles of their speakers. They were collected through some of the most extensive and detailed dialect work ever conducted.

The Survey of English Dialects was conducted between 1946 and 1978, with fieldworkers travelling the country and recording the language and lifestyles of hundreds of different people. Some of this took place before portable recording equipment was available, so evidence was meticulously recorded in notebooks, which still sit in the University's Special Collections.

Other gems held in the LAVC include audio recordings, photographs, newspaper cuttings, hand-drawn diagrams of tools and farming devices, pronunciations for thousands of dialectal terms, and word maps tracking boundaries for the use of different words.

The new project is continuing the work begun by Harold Orton and Eugen Dieth in the 1940s, recording present-day dialects, memories and cultural information from descendants of participants in the original survey.

Leeds University Library Special Collectionsholds more than 250,000 rare books and hundreds of thousands of manuscripts and archives. Five of the collections hold Arts Council England Designation status for outstanding national and international importance. Special Collections is also home to the Institutional Archive of the University.

About The National Lottery Heritage Fund
Using money raised by the National Lottery, we inspire, lead and resource the UK's heritage to create positive and lasting change for people and communities, now and in the future. www.heritagefund.org.uk .

Follow @HeritageFundUK on , and and use #NationalLotteryHeritageFund

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Network of volunteers will help update dialect survey

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A small army of volunteers is to be recruited to help update the most comprehensive survey of England's dialects ever undertaken, thanks to an injection of funding. The University's Dialect and Heritage project has been awarded £530,500 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund to open up the extensive Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) to the public.

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In addition to The Allusionist, consider trying:
- Word of Mouth (BBC Radio 4 programme, podcast available)
- Something Rhymes With Purple
- Lingthusiasm
- Vocal Fries
- Lexicon Valley

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The marvellous Jean Aitchison’s Reith Lecture on why language change is nothing to fear

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Is our language sick? You might think so, judging from the complaints: "The standard of speech and pronunciation in England has declined so much ... that one is almost ashamed to let foreigners hear it," moaned a writer in a daily newspaper. "The language the world is crying out to learn is diseased in its own country" ranted another.

But why? English is a major world language: is it really in need of hospital treatment? A cobweb of old ideas ensnares people as they think about language - any language, and this must be swept away. Webs, especially cobwebs, may entangle. But webs themselves are not a tangle. They have a pattern. Nature forces humans to weave the language web in a particular way, whatever language they speak. We are free only within a preset framework. I'll be looking at some key topics, how language changes, how it began, how children learn it, and how we remember words.

But first, the cobweb of worries must be removed. This envelopes all of language, though especially language change. Change is one thing. Decay is another. Is British English really changing for the worse, as some people argue?

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

As the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure said over 75 years ago: "No other subject has spawned more absurd ideas, more prejudices, more illusions or more myths". Things haven't changed very much since then. On inspection, the web of worries surrounding change turns out to be largely traditional, somewhat like the worries each new generation of parents has about its offspring. Laments about language go back for centuries.

A 14th-century monk complained that the English practised strange "wlaffyng, chytering, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng" (strange stammering, chattering, snarling and grating tooth-gnashing). And the complaints continued. "Tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration," wrote the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, in the preface to his famous Dictionary of the English Language published in 1755.

Eighteenth-century worries are perhaps understandable. Around 1700, the seemingly fixed grammar of Latin aroused great admiration, at a time when English was in a fairly fluid state. Many people hoped to lay down similar firm precepts for English, and assumed that somebody, somewhere, knew what "correct" English was. Jonathan Swift wrote a famous letter to the Lord Treasurer in 1712 urging the formation of an academy to regulate language usage. But "correct English" was as hard to define then as it is now. In practice upper and middle class speech was often praised as "good", artificially supplemented by precepts from logic and imitations of various Latin usages.

All languages have their "rules" in the sense of recurring subconscious patterns. In English, we usually place the verb inside the sentence, and say: "The spider caught the fly". In Welsh, the verb comes first: "Caught the spider the fly" (Daliodd y pryf copyn y gleren), and in Turkish it comes last, "The spider the fly caught". Without these rules, communication would break down. But real "rules" need to be distinguished from artifically imposed ones. For example, an old and illogical belief that logic should govern language has led in English to a ban on the double negative, as in I don't know nothing, which is now standardly: "I don't know anything". This is odd, because in most languages of the world, the more negatives, the stronger the negation.

Another artificially imposed rule involves "different to". "I am irritated by the frequent use of the words 'different to' on radio and other programmes," ran a letter to a daily newspaper. "In my schooldays of 50 years ago we were taught that things were alike to and different from. Were our teachers so terribly ignorant?" Well, different to is found even in the 17th century. "How much different art thou to this curs'd spirit here," said the dramatist Thomas Dekker in 1603. The imposition of "different from" is a misguided attempt to make English behave more like Latin. But it's pointless to judge one language by the standards of another. Some of these artificial rules have been passed down from generation to generation. Their main effect is to make people insecure, to worry that they might not be using the right phrase, just as they might get anxious that they are not using the right type of spoon for soup.

In 1985, bad English, whatever that might be, was even linked to crime by Lord Tebbit, then a key government figure. He said: "If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy ... at school ... all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards then there's no imperative to stay out of crime."

This tangled web of worries around language show that many people, including some of those who rule our country, are back in the dark ages over understanding how it works.

But it would be oversimple to lump all language worries together, and just dismiss them. The different strands of worry need to be teased out. Three overlapping accusations recur, which can be called the "damp spoon" syndrome, the "crumbling castle" view, and the "infectious disease" assumption.

The "damp spoon" image comes from a newspaper writer, who has a "queasy distaste" for the "vulgarity" of some current usages, "precisely the kind of distaste I feel at seeing a damp spoon dipped in the sugar bowl or butter spread with the bread-knife". She implies that sloppiness and laziness cause much of language change.

The notion that change is due to laziness has been around a long time. The only truly lazy speech is drunken speech, where alcohol affects co- ordination. The omission in spoken speech of past tense endings is sometimes claimed to be laziness, as in "Pamela jump back" rather than "Pamela jumpED back". But these omissions enable speech to be speeded up, and are unlikely to destroy the meaning. Informal speech is not intrinsically "worse" than formal speech, it's just different. Humans adapt their speech to suit the situation: they slow it down for babies and strangers, and they speed it up for friends. Eventually, some of these fast speech changes will creep into all types of speech. Only actors pronounce handbag as it is written. Almost everybody else says "hambag".

Let's move on to the "crumbling castle" view. This treats the English language as a beautiful old building with gargoyles and pinnacles which need to be preserved intact, as implied in statements by the writer John Simon: Language, he argues, should be treated like "parks, national forests, monuments, and public utilities ... available for properly respectful use but not for defacement or destruction".

This view itself crumbles when examined carefully. It implies that the castle of English was gradually and lovingly assembled until it reached a point of maximum splendour at some unspecified time in the past. Yet no year can be found when language achieved some peak of perfection, like a vintage wine. The "beautiful building" notion presupposes that rigid systems, once assembled, are better than changing ones. This is untrue. In the animal world, flexibility is a great advantage, and animals that adhere to fixed systems often lose out.

The ever-shifting nature of language keeps it flexible, so it can cope with changing social circumstances, as with the rush of new words relating to cars in the 20th century, such as the recent "autochondria" - from "automobile" and "hypochondria" - someone with excessive concern for the health of their car.

Neatening up also happens with nouns. Houses was once housen and shoes were shooen, parallel to oxen. Imported words get tidied up, too. The Italian word graffito, "scratch", has been in use in English for well over a century, usually in the plural graffiti, meaning "scratches or scribbles on walls".

The "infectious disease" view is that we somehow "catch" changes from those around us, and that we ought to fight such diseases. Change is indeed brought about through social contact, so the catching notion is not wrong. But the disease metaphor falls down. People pick up changes because they want to. They want to fit in with social groups, and they adapt their hairstyle, clothes, and language, to those of people they admire, as with the Jocks and Burnouts, teenagers in a suburban high school in Detroit. Adapting to those around is normal human behaviour. In Nothern Ireland, east Belfast men and west Belfast women both showed a tendency to pronounce "grass" as "grawss" at a time when in theory, the two halves of Belfast barely talked to one another. What could have been happening? The mind boggles. But the explanation was quite simple. East Belfast men sometimes visited a city-centre store staffed by mainly west Belfast women. It's well known that shop assistants match their speech to that of their customers, and this is what was happening. The shop assistants were then transferring the pronunciation to their friends.

Changes aren't random. They take hold only if the language is predisposed to move in a particular direction. Social contact can trigger a change only if it was already likely to happen. At any time, in any language, a number of potential change-points exist. Consonants at the end of words are a recurring weak spot in languages, since ends of words are pronounced with less force than beginnings: it's Kick, not kiCK. In British English, "t" at the end of words is eroding, moving from street to stree(t) and in the long run, it'll be stree.

Over time, end-of-word consonants may largely disappear, as has happened in some dialects of Chinese, several Polynesian languages, and nearer at hand, in French and Italian, where most words now end in vowels: Una bottiglia di vino bianco, "a bottle of white wine". Oddly, people who dislike this change often praise languages such as Italian as being "beautiful" even though many Italian words are simply Latin without their endings: Italian vino, "wine", was once Latin vinum.

The media are often blamed for change, but their role is indirect. Newspapers can popularise new words such as "bonk", "yomp" and "wimp", and radio and television can influence attitudes towards language. These days, they send the sensible but indirect message that it's all right to talk in different ways: Lenny Henry, Janet Street-Porter, Cilla Black and others show that variety is the spice of linguistic life. Variety is the key to language change. Earlier in the century, an old mutation viewpoint prevailed, that some sounds slowly turned into others, like tadpoles gradually changing into frogs. According to a newer view, variant forms arise, each used in a different area or speech style. Then one of the newcomers gets used more and more and gradually ousts the older form, like a young cuckoo heaving an existing bird out of the nest.

In some situations, a whole nestful of young cuckoos compete with each other and with older forms. They may squabble for a long time until one wins out. This process is clearest in the case of vocabulary. It happened with the word "partner", which is now the standard word for life-companion. But at one time numerous words competed: live-in lover, mate, and for heterosexuals, posslq, an acronym for "persons of opposite sex sharing living quarters".

Variation in speech is the norm. Our linguistic wardrobe contains a range of speech styles, which we suit to the occasion. Bus-conductors, bosses and babies need to be addressed in different ways. Change often happens when one particular variant expands its usage.

But which variants should be used where and when still causes arguments as sharp as barbed-wire, especially as nowadays being matey is often more important than being "proper", resulting in increasing approval of informal styles of speech, including swearing.

Meanwhile, the tangled web of worries around language shows how little most people know about it. Next week I'll go right back to the beginning and discuss the origin of language in the human species.

Jean Aitchison is Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication, University of Oxford.

The 'Independent' will be publishing edited extracts from all the Reith Lectures, on Wednesdays.

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Reith Lectures: Is our language in decay?

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Is our language sick? You might think so, judging from the complaints: "The standard of speech and pronunciation in England has declined so much ... that one is almost ashamed to let foreigners hear it," moaned a writer in a daily newspaper.

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The spinster returns? – language: a feminist guide

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'Laziness has won': apostrophe society admits its defeat | UK news | The Guardian

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A society dedicated to preserving the "much-abused" apostrophe is to be shut down as its chairman said "ignorance and laziness" had won.

John Richards, who worked in journalism for much of his career, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 after he retired.

Now 96, Richards is calling time on the society, which lists the three simple rules for correct use of the punctuation mark.

Writing on the society's website, he said: "Fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English language.

"We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!"

Richards started the society after seeing the "same mistakes over and over again" and hoped he would find half a dozen people who felt the same way.

He said: "I didn't find half a dozen people.

"Instead, within a month of my plaint appearing in a national newspaper, I received over 500 letters of support, not only from all corners of the United Kingdom, but also from America, Australia, France, Sweden, Hong Kong and Canada."
Topics

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'Laziness has won': apostrophe society admits its defeat

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A society dedicated to preserving the "much-abused" apostrophe is to be shut down as its chairman said "ignorance and laziness" had won. John Richards, who worked in journalism for much of his career, started the Apostrophe Protection Society in 2001 after he retired.

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ow that we know that Boris Johnson will "get Brexit done" by the end of January 2020, what are the implications for English as an official language of the European Union and in the European parliament? Could it stop being used when Britain leaves?

In 2016 Danuta Hübner, an MEP and chair of the European parliament's constitutional affairs committee, was quoted as saying, "If we don't have the UK, we don't have English." But is it as simple as that?

Until the 1990s, the dominant language of the EU was French. When the EU was the EC (European Community) and the official language policy was defined, Dutch, French, German and Italian were identified as the working languages. However, as more countries joined, many of which had English as a second or additional language, the number of English speakers grew until English became the majority common language.

Currently, the EU lists 24 official and working languages. The UK is the only member country that gives English as its official language. There are a few member countries that commonly use English but have nominated a different language as their EU official language. For instance, the Republic of Ireland gives Irish Gaelic as its official language, and Malta gives Maltese.

When Britain withdraws from the EU (and leaving aside possible negotiations with Scotland or other territories), in order to remove English as an official language, as clarified in a statement on behalf of the European commission in Ireland dated 27 June 2016, there would have to be a unanimous vote in the European parliament in favour of doing so. Speaking at the time of the referendum, in 2016, the German EU commissioner Günther Oettinger explained, "We have a series of member states that speak English, and English is the world language which we all accept." So, even if there was the will to do so, getting rid of English wouldn't be straightfoward.

Even if it did come to that, would it be a knock-down blow for the language? Historically, English has weathered a number of storms. When colonies of the British empire sought to gain their independence, it may have seemed logical for English - the language of the oppressors - to be rejected at the same time. The fact that this did not happen, and that English is used as an official first or second language in more than 70 countries worldwide, points in part to its developing socioeconomic and political status during the 20th century. The number of speakers for whom English is an unofficial second or foreign language is greater than all other English language speakers, and continues to grow. With the decline of the British empire came the rise of the United States, which has English as its official language. Prof Lynne Murphy from the University of Sussex believes the US saved the English language. From the perspective of its use as a global lingua franca, she has got a point.

In fact, in some postcolonial situations, English is regarded as a more or less neutral language. In India, for example, English was supposed to be phased out post-independence in 1947 in favour of Hindi. However, as not everyone in India speaks Hindi, and many do not want to for various cultural and political reasons, English continued to be used, and is now an official language of India. In Hong Kong, English is still an official language despite the return of the territory to the People's Republic of China in 1997. As Hong Kong is an international hub for trade and finance, this makes pragmatic sense, but there is also evidence that Hong Kong people feel that the English language is part of their identity - something that makes Hong Kong distinctive from mainland China. Singapore has speakers of Malay, Chinese (various dialects) and Tamil, among others; in this context, English is a unifying language.

But these Englishes are not "British English", or even "American English". The Englishes spoken around the world have developed their own vocabulary and grammar; Euro-English is no exception. English simply does not belong to traditional "native" English speakers any more: it belongs to everyone who speaks it, and it will develop and change depending on the communicative needs of speech communities. Brits and Americans need to bear this in mind when using English in international settings, as they cannot assume they will be understood by every English speaker.

So, will English cease to be a language of the EU? Probably not in the short to medium term, either in conversations between EU member countries, MEPs, or in EU interaction with other countries around the world. One Swedish MEP even suggested that communications in the EU could be fairer in English, as it will be everyone's second language.

In the long term, however, the continued dominance of English as a global language may depend on its political and socioeconomic fortunes. As it is so well-established and widespread, I believe it is likely to be used as a global lingua franca for some time. But situations and languages change. I think it was Andy Hamilton who pointed out that, once Latin was everyone's second language, it was no longer anyone's first.

* Jane Setter is professor of phonetics at the University of Reading

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Will Brexit spell the end of English as an official EU language? | Jane Setter

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ow that we know that Boris Johnson will "get Brexit done" by the end of January 2020, what are the implications for English as an official language of the European Union and in the European parliament? Could it stop being used when Britain leaves?

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US linguists have chosen "they" as their word of the decade, recognising the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their gender as neither entirely male nor entirely female.

The American Dialect Society also bestowed its word of the year honours on the increasingly common practice of introducing oneself in correspondence or socially by the set of pronouns one prefers to be called by - declaring in an email, for example, "pronouns: she/her".

The two awards were decided on Friday in New Orleans by about 350 member of the society at its annual meeting of academics, graduate students and word lovers who voted by a show of hands, said Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer who chairs the group's new words committee.
Trans reforms will not diminish cis women's rights, says Holyrood
The most popular pick for word of the year was "(my) pronouns", a reflection of "how the personal expression of gender identity has become an increasing part of our shared discourse", the society said in a statement announcing the outcome.

The same trend was behind the selection of "they" as the word of the decade, recognising its growing use to refer to a person whose gender identity is non-binary. The singular use of "they" was previously designated as the 2015 word of the year.

"People want to choose something that stands the test of time and sums up the decade as a whole," said Zimmer, who writes a language column for the Wall Street Journal.

Social media has turbo-charged the way words or phrases become popular, leading to some recent multi-word champions for word of the year, including "tender-age shelter" (a detention facility for young, undocumented migrant children separated from their parents) in 2018 and "fake news" in 2017.

Other decade nominees considered on Friday included:

"#BlackLivesMatter", the hashtag used to protest against alleged disparities in police use of force against African Americans.

"Climate", reflecting increased interest in the impact of climate change.

"#MeToo", the movement that has highlighted widespread patterns of sexual abuse and harassment that women have faced at the hands of men across many spheres of life, including business, politics and entertainment.

The society, founded in 1889 and dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, started selecting its word of the year in 1991 and since then has picked only two other winners of word of the decade. Top choices were "web" for the 1990s and "Google" as a verb for the 2000s.

Other word of the year nominations for 2019 included:

"OK Boomer", described as a retort to someone older, typically a member of the baby boom generation, who expresses views that are out-of-touch or condescending to young people and their concerns.

"Cancel", meaning to withdraw support from someone or something that is considered problematic or unacceptable, used in the phrase "cancel culture".

"Karen", the stereotype of a complaining, self-important, demanding white woman, typically a member of Generation X or "Generation Karen".

Topics

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Singular 'they' voted word of the decade by US linguists

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US linguists have chosen "they" as their word of the decade, recognising the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their gender as neither entirely male nor entirely female.

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US linguists have chosen "they" as their word of the decade, recognising the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their gender as neither entirely male nor entirely female.

The American Dialect Society also bestowed its word of the year honours on the increasingly common practice of introducing oneself in correspondence or socially by the set of pronouns one prefers to be called by - declaring in an email, for example, "pronouns: she/her".

The two awards were decided on Friday in New Orleans by about 350 member of the society at its annual meeting of academics, graduate students and word lovers who voted by a show of hands, said Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicographer who chairs the group's new words committee.
Trans reforms will not diminish cis women's rights, says Holyrood
The most popular pick for word of the year was "(my) pronouns", a reflection of "how the personal expression of gender identity has become an increasing part of our shared discourse", the society said in a statement announcing the outcome.

The same trend was behind the selection of "they" as the word of the decade, recognising its growing use to refer to a person whose gender identity is non-binary. The singular use of "they" was previously designated as the 2015 word of the year.

"People want to choose something that stands the test of time and sums up the decade as a whole," said Zimmer, who writes a language column for the Wall Street Journal.

Social media has turbo-charged the way words or phrases become popular, leading to some recent multi-word champions for word of the year, including "tender-age shelter" (a detention facility for young, undocumented migrant children separated from their parents) in 2018 and "fake news" in 2017.

Other decade nominees considered on Friday included:

"#BlackLivesMatter", the hashtag used to protest against alleged disparities in police use of force against African Americans.

"Climate", reflecting increased interest in the impact of climate change.

"#MeToo", the movement that has highlighted widespread patterns of sexual abuse and harassment that women have faced at the hands of men across many spheres of life, including business, politics and entertainment.

The society, founded in 1889 and dedicated to the study of the English language in North America, started selecting its word of the year in 1991 and since then has picked only two other winners of word of the decade. Top choices were "web" for the 1990s and "Google" as a verb for the 2000s.

Other word of the year nominations for 2019 included:

"OK Boomer", described as a retort to someone older, typically a member of the baby boom generation, who expresses views that are out-of-touch or condescending to young people and their concerns.

"Cancel", meaning to withdraw support from someone or something that is considered problematic or unacceptable, used in the phrase "cancel culture".

"Karen", the stereotype of a complaining, self-important, demanding white woman, typically a member of Generation X or "Generation Karen".

Topics

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Singular 'they' voted word of the decade by US linguists

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US linguists have chosen "they" as their word of the decade, recognising the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their gender as neither entirely male nor entirely female.

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The most powerful word in the English language?

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The most powerful word in the English language?

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'The'. It's omnipresent; we can't imagine English without it. But it's not much to look at. It isn't descriptive, evocative or inspiring. Technically, it's meaningless. And yet this bland and innocuous-seeming word could be one of the most potent in the English language.
This story was originally published in January 2020.
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'The' tops the league tables of most frequently used words in English, accounting for 5% of every 100 words used. "'The' really is miles above everything else," says Jonathan Culpeper, professor of linguistics at Lancaster University. But why is this? The answer is two-fold, according to the BBC Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth. George Zipf, a 20th-Century US linguist and philologist, expounded the principle of least effort. He predicted that short and simple words would be the most frequent - and he was right.

The second reason is that 'the' lies at the heart of English grammar, having a function rather than a meaning. Words are split into two categories: expressions with a semantic meaning and functional words like 'the', 'to', 'for', with a job to do. 'The' can function in multiple ways. This is typical, explains Gary Thoms, assistant professor in linguistics at New York University: "a super high-usage word will often develop a real flexibility", with different subtle uses that make it hard to define. Helping us understand what is being referred to, 'the' makes sense of nouns as a subject or an object. So even someone with a rudimentary grasp of English can tell the difference between 'I ate an apple' and 'I ate the apple'.

'Scoring the goal' seems more important than 'scoring a goal' (Credit: Alamy)

But although 'the' has no meaning in itself, "it seems to be able to do things in subtle and miraculous ways," says Michael Rosen, poet and author. Consider the difference between 'he scored a goal' and 'he scored the goal'. The inclusion of 'the' immediately signals something important about that goal. Perhaps it was the only one of the match? Or maybe it was the clincher that won the league? Context very often determines sense.

There are many exceptions regarding the use of the definite article, for example in relation to proper nouns. We wouldn't expect someone to say 'the Jonathan' but it's not incorrect to say 'you're not the Jonathan I thought you were'. And a football commentator might deliberately create a generic vibe by saying, 'you've got the Lampards in midfield' to mean players like Lampard.

The use of 'the' could have increased as trade and manufacture grew in the run-up to the industrial revolution, when we needed to be referential about things and processes. 'The' helped distinguish clearly and could act as a quantifier, for example, 'the slab of butter'.

This could lead to a belief that 'the' is a workhorse of English; functional but boring. Yet Rosen rejects that view. While primary school children are taught to use 'wow' words, choosing 'exclaimed' rather than 'said', he doesn't think any word has more or less 'wow' factor than any other; it all depends on how it's used. "Power in language comes from context... 'the' can be a wow word," he says.

This simplest of words can be used for dramatic effect. At the start of Hamlet, a guard's utterance of 'Long live the King' is soon followed by the apparition of the ghost: 'Looks it not like the King?' Who, the audience wonders, does 'the' refer to? The living King or a dead King? This kind of ambiguity is the kind of 'hook' that writers use to make us quizzical, a bit uneasy even. "'The' is doing a lot of work here," says Rosen.
Deeper meaning
'The' can even have philosophical implications. The Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong said a denoting phrase like 'the round square' introduced that object; there was now such a thing. According to Meinong, the word itself created non-existent objects, arguing that there are objects that exist and ones that don't - but they are all created by language. "'The' has a kind of magical property in philosophy," says Barry C Smith, director of the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.

'The' adds substance to phrases like 'the man in the Moon', implying that he exists (Credit: Alamy)

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a paper in 1905 called On Denoting, all about the definite article. Russell put forward a theory of definite descriptions. He thought it intolerable that phrases like 'the man in the Moon' were used as though they actually existed. He wanted to revise the surface grammar of English, as it was misleading and "not a good guide to the logic of the language", explains Smith. This topic has been argued about, in a philosophical context, ever since. "Despite the simplicity of the word," observes Thoms, "it's been evading definition in a very precise way for a long time."

Lynne Murphy, professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, spoke at the Boring Conference in 2019, an event celebrating topics that are mundane, ordinary and overlooked, but are revealed to be fascinating. She pointed out how strange it is that our most commonly used word is one that many of the world's languages don't have. And how amazing English speakers are for getting to grips with the myriad ways in which it's used.

Scandinavian languages such as Danish or Norwegian and some Semitic languages like Hebrew or Arabic use an affix (or a short addition to the end of a word) to determine whether the speaker is referring to a particular object or using a more general term. Latvian or Indonesian deploy a demonstrative - words like 'this' and 'that' - to do the job of 'the'. There's another group of languages that don't use any of those resources, such as Urdu or Japanese.

Function words are very specific to each language.

So, someone who is a native Hindi or Russian speaker is going to have to think very differently when constructing a sentence in English. Murphy says that she has noticed, for instance, that sometimes her Chinese students hedge their bets and include 'the' where it is not required. Conversely, Smith describes Russian friends who are so unsure when to use 'the' that they sometimes leave a little pause: 'I went into... bank. I picked up... pen.' English speakers learning a language with no equivalent of 'the' also struggle and might overcompensate by using words like 'this' and 'that' instead.
Atlantic divide
Even within the language, there are subtle differences in how 'the' is used in British and American English, such as when talking about playing a musical instrument. An American might be more likely to say 'I play guitar' whereas a British person might opt for 'I play the guitar'. But there are some instruments where both nationalities might happily omit 'the', such as 'I play drums'. Equally the same person might interchangeably refer to their playing of any given instrument with or without the definite article - because both are correct and both make sense.

Americans are more likely to say 'I play piano', whereas a Brit would probably say 'I play the piano' (Credit: Alamy)

And yet, keeping with the musical vibe, there's a subtle difference in meaning of 'the' in the phrases 'I play the piano' and 'I clean the piano'. We instinctively understand the former to mean the piano playing is general and not restricted to one instrument, and yet in the latter we know that it is one specific piano that is being rendered spick and span.

Culpeper says 'the' occurs about a third less in spoken language. Though of course whether it is used more frequently in text or speech depends on the subject in question. A more personal, emotional topic might have fewer instances of 'the' than something more formal. 'The' appears most frequently in academic prose, offering a useful word when imparting information - whether it's scientific papers, legal contracts or the news. Novels use 'the' least, partly because they have conversation embedded in them.

According to Culpeper, men say 'the' significantly more frequently. Deborah Tannen, an American linguist, has a hypothesis that men deal more in report and women more in rapport - this could explain why men use 'the' more often. Depending on context and background, in more traditional power structures, a woman may also have been socialised not to take the voice of authority so might use 'the' less frequently. Though any such gender-based generalisations also depend on the nature of the topic being studied.

Those in higher status positions also use 'the' more - it can be a signal of their prestige and (self) importance. And when we talk about 'the prime minister' or 'the president' it gives more power and authority to that role. It can also give a concept credibility or push an agenda. Talking about 'the greenhouse effect' or 'the migration problem' makes those ideas definite and presupposes their existence.

'The' can be a "very volatile" word, says Murphy. Someone who refers to 'the Americans' versus simply 'Americans' is more likely to be critical of that particular nationality in some capacity. When people referred to 'the Jews' in the build-up to the Holocaust, it became othering and objectifying. According to Murphy, "'The' makes the group seem like it's a large, uniform mass, rather than a diverse group of individuals." It's why Trump was criticised for using the word in that context during a 2016 US presidential debate.
Origins
We don't know exactly where 'the' comes from - it doesn't have a precise ancestor in Old English grammar. The Anglo Saxons didn't say 'the', but had their own versions. These haven't completely died out, according to historical linguist Laura Wright. In parts of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumberland there is a remnant of Old English inflective forms of the definite article - t' (as in "going t' pub").

The letter y in terms like 'ye olde tea shop' is from the old rune Thorn, part of a writing system used across northern Europe for centuries. It's only relatively recently, with the introduction of the Roman alphabet, that 'th' has come into being.

'The' deserves to be celebrated. The three-letter word punches well above its weight in terms of impact and breadth of contextual meaning. It can be political, it can be dramatic - it can even bring non-existent concepts into being.
You can hear more about 'the' on BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth: The Most Powerful Word.
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Is this the most powerful word in the English language?

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'The'. It's omnipresent; we can't imagine English without it. But it's not much to look at. It isn't descriptive, evocative or inspiring. Technically, it's meaningless. And yet this bland and innocuous-seeming word could be one of the most potent in the English language. This story was originally published in January 2020.

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Interesting comparison of the language used in articles about Kate Middleton with those about Meghan Markle (excuse the bad language in the opening...!)

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The Duke and Duchess of Sussex (aka Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) didn't just shockingly " step back" as senior members of the royal family this week - they gave the UK media a big "fuck-you" for years of what they said was biased and unfair coverage.

The couple's new website on breaking up with years of royal protocol laid out - among a lot of other things - their media strategy, stating that they will no longer participate in the traditional royal press system that grants exclusive access to a select group of UK outlets.

Britain's royal correspondents, they said, are seen as reliable sources of information. "This misconception propels coverage that is often carried by other outlets around the world, amplifying frequent misreporting," they wrote. Removing themselves from "royal rota" coverage has sparked an outcry among UK media and drew a protest from the National Union of Journalists.

This isn't a new complaint from the royal couple - they just took an unprecedented step to do something about it. Harry and Meghan have said publicly that they believe they have been treated unfairly by the UK press since the moment news broke of their relationship - that they are bullied, that there are racist undertones to coverage of them, and that they have been held to a different standard than Harry's brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (aka Prince William and Kate Middleton).

The UK media outlets that currently make up the royal rota are the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Evening Standard, the Telegraph, the Times, and the Sun.

Here is a look at 20 stories from these outlets that appear to show a double standard between press coverage of Meghan and Kate. BuzzFeed News has reached out to all of the outlets featured below for comment.

Kate and William: "Prince William was given one of the green fruit - wrapped up in a bow - by a little boy who's mother is suffering during her pregnancy too... 'He said he'd take it to [Kate] and see what happens - and said good luck for [the boy's] mummy.'" Express: Sept. 14, 2017

Meghan: "The pregnant Duchess of Sussex and so-called 'avocado on toast whisperer' is wolfing down a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all round general environmental devastation." Express: Jan. 23, 2019

Kate and William: "Creating their own companies will allow William and Kate to bring out, should they ever chose to, myriad items of officially-endorsed merchandise from tea towels to coffee cups... Kensington Palace officials said they were doing the 'sensible thing' in protecting the couple's rights." Daily Mail: Jan. 17, 2014

Meghan and Harry: "The Sussexes want to stamp their name on dozens of products including T-shirts, hoodies, journals and gloves for their newly-created foundation Sussex Royal... Experts said Harry and Meghan were actively preparing to quit the Royal Family months ago by filing trade mark applications to commercially protect their brand." Daily Mail: Jan. 9, 2020

Kate and William: "Prince William yesterday backed brother Harry's brave admission of his mental anguish - and blasted the monarchy's 'stiff upper lip' tradition... William said: 'There may be a time and a place for the 'stiff upper lip' but not at the expense of your health... '

"'Catherine and I are clear we want both George and Charlotte to grow up feeling able to talk about their emotions and feelings. Over the past year we have visited a number of schools together where we have been amazed listening to children talk about some quite difficult subjects in a clear and emotionally articulate way, something most adults would struggle with. Seeing this has really given me hope things are changing and there is a generation coming up who find it normal to talk openly about emotions.'" Sun: April 19, 2017

Meghan and Harry: "Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have bucked royal tradition once again with their latest TV interview - in which they claimed they were 'existing, not living.' The couple ditched the stiff upper lip of previous Royal Family generations and flew the flag for 'Generation Therapy' as they revealed their emotions to the world - but were they right to do so?

"What you make of 'fragile' Prince Harry and Meghan's comments may depend on your generation. Sun parents and kids reveal what they think of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex airing their emotions in public - and whether they have the right to moan in such positions of privilege..." Sun: Oct. 23, 2019

Kate: "As far as bridal bouquets go there was nothing particularly regal about Kate Middleton's modest arrangement of simple, seasonal flowers. Like the bride herself the bouquet was effortlessly elegant and understated.

"Yet behind that modest posy lay a secret story. Kate, the commoner-turned-duchess, had painstakingly selected blooms with real meaning. She is evidently well-versed in the language of flowers, a little-known romantic relic from the 19th century.

"Hence the use of lilac in her bouquet, which signifies the first emotions of love, the lily of the valley meaning a return of happiness, hyacinth standing for constancy, myrtle meaning love and the ivy, which represents fidelity. Then of course there was the suitably named Sweet William, which is shorthand for gallantry." Express: Aug. 29, 2011

Meghan: "[Meghan Markle] was holding a wedding bouquet which flowers were replicated in Princess Charlotte and the other bridesmaids' flower crowns. Express.co.uk can now reveal the children' crowns were made of flowers that can be deadly, especially for children. Meghan's bouquet was made of forget-me-nots as well as sweet peas, lily of the valley, astilbe, jasmine, and astrantia...

"Lily of the valley is a highly poisonous woodland flowering plant and ingestion could be deadly... As Meghan's bridesmaids were so young, having this flower on their heads could be considered a dangerous decision. Other brides have also used this flowers including Kate Middleton, Princess Eugenie and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall." Express: Oct. 13, 2019

Kate: "It is a fashion conundrum not many of us will ever face, but what exactly does one wear for tea with the Queen? The Duchess of Cambridge met this challenge head on yesterday by co-ordinating her outfit with the Queen's powder blue ensemble... The Queen, on her first official event to mark her Diamond Jubilee, was dressed in a pastel hat and two-piece coat dress with military-style rows of gold buttons designed by Angela Kelly. Looking relaxed and elegant, her outfit was perfect for what looked like a fun official engagement with the girls." Mirror: Feb. 14, 2013
"The Queen's aides had told [Meghan] she would be wearing a green hat as a mark of respect to those who died in the Grenfell Tower fire. The Queen is said to have been 'baffled' when Meghan turned up without a hat as she didn't realize she was supposed to wear one too. A senior aide said: 'I don't think the Duchess fully understood. This was not a request. Those are for others to make, not the Queen.' The Queen's staff are said to have noted the Duchess's mistake or 'lack of deference.'" Mirror: Oct. 29, 2018

Kate: "We see a woman in her prime: stylish, confident and positively radiant, nailing outfit after outfit in the style stakes - and it's a joy to witness... That old uniform of girlish dresses, tan tights and nude heels has been replaced by dazzling super-chic outfits to satisfy even the most exacting fashionista." Daily Mail: June 16, 2019

Meghan: "Proper royalty is about tradition and duty, self-effacing service and loyalty - year after year after year, season after season... That is not to say that a monarchy cannot or must not move with the times - simply that it has to resist the temptation to be buffeted by passing cultural trends. Fashion is the exact opposite. And as fashion's most famous bible, Vogue exemplifies the transient nature of the beast." Daily Mail: July 29, 2019

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Here Are 20 Headlines Comparing Meghan Markle To Kate Middleton That Might Show Why She And Prince Harry Are Cutting Off Royal Reporters

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Over the years, Meghan has been shamed for the same things for which her sister-in-law, Kate, has been praised.

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Englicious.org | English Language Resources for Schools

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Rob Drummond has mapped male-male forms of address in the UK by region:

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Gender - another marginalisation of young women’s voices?

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Gender - another marginalisation of young women’s voices?

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The new Netflix show Love is Blind - in which people fall in love and get engaged without seeing each other first - has sparked many questions. These include: shouldn't these people be in therapy? If looks don't matter, why are they all so hot? And: what is up with Jessica Batten's sexy baby voice?

I can't take credit for that term: it was actually coined on Twitter last week, and written about since. "Sexy baby voice" may sound like an oxymoron, but it is in fact an affectation that a lot of women use. Just look at the clip in which Batten is first shown to be very capable of speaking in a normal adult voice, before just a moment later sounding like she has a tampon in each nostril.

hailey (@shmailey_)
the baby voice jessica from love is blind puts on when shes talking to men is fucking freaky like wtf pic.twitter.com/rbPm9Q97Cv

But is sexy baby voice really, truly a thing? Why would a woman opt to sound like a tiny scared creature? What exactly is sexy about sounding like a baby?

Sociologist Anne Karpf wrote an entire book about the human voice and how it is far less anatomically determined than we think. We use our voice to denote status, power, wealth - and it is affected by society. Women's voices have deepened over the last 40 years, and are more similar to men's voices in more egalitarian countries.

Many of us hate hearing our voice played back to us, which some say is because we are used to hearing our own voice through our bones (which sounds less high-pitched) rather than unfiltered through the air. But Karpf believes our voices embarrass us because we hear in them the things we hoped to have edited out. Like a Freudian slip, they tell people things about us we would rather they didn't know. "We feel betrayed by them," she says.

"If the contestant heard that baby voice played back to her, she would probably be squirming with discomfort," says Karpf.

We all hold multiple voices - one for our boss, our parents, our partner and so on. We switch between these, sometimes at will, sometimes unconsciously, to appear more powerful, to ask for protection and so on.

For women, the desire to "baby-talk" can be especially strong because of societal pressure to protect a man's ego. "Often, extremely bright women have huge difficulty using their voice. They are terrified to use the full force of it. I've rarely encountered a man with that same problem," Karpf says.

Women's voices have always been contentious. Karpf reminds us that women were once banned from speaking in church in case their voices caused impure thoughts in a man, and they were thought to be too emotional for newsreading.
Do you sound gay? What our voices tell us - and what they don't | David Shariatmadari
"Women's voices have always been seen in relation to the desire that they've evoked in men rather than the desires of the woman and what she wants to express," she says.And so comes sexy baby voice: "Babies don't possess social power, economic power, or sexual power."

So are we all being sexist for judging women who use a baby voice? "Yes, I think we are, actually," says Karpf. "We should instead step back and ask why she feels she needs to do that. Why does she feel it's the most attractive way of being?" A man doesn't have the same pressure to counter himself, or to seem smaller for fear of coming off too assertive, she says.

But don't we women have a right to be annoyed at Batten, for making women look like silly babies? "It makes sense that we feel a duality of emotion towards it. On the one hand, we know it's not someone's fault. But we also feel she is complicit because [speaking that way] maintains the existing order of power."

But the fact we're even discussing it is a sign that change has come quickly, says Karpf. "This voice would have passed unobserved 20, 15 even 10 years ago. That it's [caused such a stir]."suggests it's not the default feminine voice any more/"
Topics

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What is 'sexy baby voice'? We spoke to a sociologist to find out more

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The new Netflix show Love is Blind - in which people fall in love and get engaged without seeing each other first - has sparked many questions. These include: shouldn't these people be in therapy? If looks don't matter, why are they all so hot? And: what is up with Jessica Batten's sexy baby voice?

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TED Talks playlist on Language Change

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For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how

Language isn't set in stone. It changes all the time - and in turn, our language changes us. These talks explore how new words come to be.

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7 TED Talks on how language changes over time

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You have JavaScript disabled For the best experience, please turn JavaScript on. Here's how Language isn't set in stone. It changes all the time - and in turn, our language changes us. These talks explore how new words come to be.

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(credit to Eloise who found the article)

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Editor's note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For more coverage, see our coronavirus hub

IN FEARFUL TIMES, people look desperately for trusted sources of information: scientists and public authorities, for example, during the covid-19 pandemic. But they also are relying on a less obvious font of authority. Traditionally a reassuringly solid block of paper, the dictionary was a source of bet-settling gravitas. Today, dictionaries are increasingly online. The best of these are not only better than the best of the old printed ones. They also give lexicographers insight into what is on people's minds.

Merriam-Webster, one of the best-known names in American dictionary-making, has for years tweeted about spikes in look-ups for words during major public events. This time of pandemic is no different. The most obvious spikes are for terms like coronavirus itself-up by 1,100,000% (see chart). But other terms allow the data-watcher to see the crisis develop: people began searching increasingly for epidemic in mid-January, and pandemic in early February. Terms related to prevention have seen a jump as well: quarantine and self-isolation in mid-March, for example. (Side note to etymological sticklers: if you are the type to insist that to "decimate" means to destroy roughly a tenth of something, your quarantine must last 40 days.)

As governments began to act, people sought to understand what was going to be done: draconian, lockdown and triage began surging in February. Martial law, too, but for a specific reason: an American senator, Marco Rubio, tweeted a solecistic reference to "marshall law" on March 16th, leading to the spike in lookups

People have been searching for more than just relatively rarified terms. They have also recently been looking up things like cancel, perhaps wondering whether forms like "cancelling" have one L or two. (Answer: one in America, two in Britain, Canada and many other countries.) Perhaps more strikingly, there have been increases-hard to call them much more than blips, but visible in the data nonetheless-for words like trust and stress. Peter Sokolowski of Merriam-Webster says that it's hard to know for sure why. But he reckons that when people are worried, the need for an abstract term to have a more specific, concrete meaning may seem more urgent. As with stockpiling food and toilet paper, it is as though people are trying to store up as much comprehensible information as they can. Desperate times, unusual measures.

Dig deeper:
For our latest coverage of the covid-19 pandemic, register for The Economist Today, our daily newsletter, or visit our coronavirus hub

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The language of covid-19 has people turning to the dictionary

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Editor's note: The Economist is making some of its most important coverage of the covid-19 pandemic freely available to readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. To receive it, register here. For more coverage, see our coronavirus hub IN FEARFUL TIMES, people look desperately for trusted sources of information: scientists and public authorities, for example, during the covid-19 pandemic.

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Babel interview with Professor Jean Berko-Gleason

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Babel interview with Professor Jean Berko-Gleason

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So many wugs!

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Language is an extraordinary social phenomenon. An extraordinary event such as the coronavirus pandemic exerts pressure on individual and collective language resources. To explain the consequences of these pressures we look at words, grammar, and figures of speech such as metaphor, with examples taken from news reports and also from large collections of texts, or corpora.

Over the past few weeks new technical terms, such as Covid-19, have come into common useand everyday words, such as isolation, distance and lockdown, have been repurposed. New words have been invented, such as the neologism covidiot coined through the process known as 'blending'. Our thoughts have been guided by wartime metaphors, and our behaviour influenced by a carefully-crafted public discourse.

Language change in response to events can be illustrated by the terms social distance and social distancing from a corpus of 'news on the web', part of the corpus resources available from www.english-corpora.org. Between January and June 2019, social distance occurred 24 times and social distancing 2 times. All the instances relate to the metaphoric distance between social groups such as 'workers' and 'bosses'. Between January and March 2020, social distance occurred 1,854 times and social distancing a massive 36,044 times. The vast majority of instances relate to physical distance between people to reduce infection risks. What is interesting is not only the increase in numbers but the increased preference for the -ing form noun: social distancing. Another striking feature is the nouns and verbs used with these phrases. These indicate encouragement rather than coercion: advice, guidelines, recommendations, and a willing compliance with these: maintain, keep, observe, adhere to, comply with. There are (to date) only a very few instances of 'coercion' words such as enforce or requirements.

The word coronavirus demonstrates the lay adoption of a technical word. The 'COVID-19' corpus (available from the SketchEngine suite of corpus resources at www.sketchengine.eu), which consists of academic research articles on the subject, shows the technical use. There are many varieties of coronavirus, and the word generally appears with a modifier to specify the individual type: the SARS coronavirus, the MERS coronavirus and so on. In the UK currently, however, the coronavirus, often shortened to the virus or corona, means only COVID-19. Unlike in the technical literature, it appears unmodified ( how the virus is affecting..., businesses hit by the virus). It alsomodifies a flexible range of other nouns, identifying people affected by the illness ( coronavirus cases, coronavirus victims) or responding to it ( his coronavirus taskforce), referring to actions and events (( corona)virus testing, the (corona)virus outbreak, our strange corona lives)and expressing a judgement about the situation ( the coronavirus challenge, the coronavirus crisis). As new concepts develop in response to circumstances, it combines to form even longer noun phrases. The longest I have found has six words: the coronavirus business interruption load scheme.

More interestingly, the word is beginning to be used to stand in metonymically for a complex set of circumstances. Just as nine eleven is now used to mean 'the attack on the New York World Trade Centre on the 11 th September 2001' in phrases such as as a result of nine eleven, so the virus is starting to be used to indicate a general set of circumstances rather than an organism: long before the coronavirus; coronavirus is a national emergency.

While many language choices are sub-conscious, public language is often carefully crafted. There is evidence that the language used by government and health authorities is designed to promote acceptance of and compliance with containment measures. One example is the pervasive use of the 'war' metaphor. Some of these are brief mentions in passing, such as descriptions of medical staff on the front line or in the firing line. There are more focused characterisations of government directives as defending the country from the pandemic or defeat[ing] the coronavirus, in what is called an unseen war against an unseen enemy.At the more extreme end there are elaborately worked analogies, such as Paul Nurse's appeal to a collective memory of little ships used in the Dunkirk evacuation, applied to the work of small virus testing labs. Metaphors simplify complex situations, but shared metaphors also create a sense of community cohesion.

The other side of this community coin is the construction of a sense of responsibility, achieved through ascribing agency to the general public. The phrase flattening the curve is one of a range of phrases coming from the visualisation of numbers through graphs ( a huge spike in cases and these alarming upward curves are other examples). Note that there are two options for expressing this, because flatten is an 'ergative' verb. We could say 'the curve flattens' ( the curve is the Subject of the sentence) or 'someone / someone's action flattens the curve' ( the curve is the Object of the sentence). Choosing the second option puts responsibility for this statistical outcome on to human actions, and this is what we encounter, in utterances such as you are managing to flatten the curve or we need to stay in lockdown now to flatten the curve. The grammatical character of the verb flatten helps to deliver the message.

Professor Susan Hunston OBE is Professor of English Language in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, in particular the study of evaluative language and the analysis of written academic English.

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Changing language in unprecedented times

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Language is an extraordinary social phenomenon. An extraordinary event such as the coronavirus pandemic exerts pressure on individual and collective language resources. To explain the consequences of these pressures we look at words, grammar, and figures of speech such as metaphor, with examples taken from news reports and also from large collections of texts, or corpora.

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'Invisible mugger': how Boris Johnson's language hints at his thinking | Boris Johnson | The Guardian

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In his first podium speech since he left intensive care earlier this month, Boris Johnson described coronavirus as a "physical assailant".

It was "an unexpected and invisible mugger", he told the nation, giving a colourful twist to the martial metaphors he and his cabinet have tended to use when talking about the disease (in March, he described the crisis as a "fight ... in which every one of us is directly enlisted").

Perhaps it's appropriate that the prime minister chose to personify Covid-19 more directly than in the past. He has, after all, emerged from his own very intimate bout with the virus. And it's not surprising that the pandemic has proved fertile ground for linguistic invention either: things aren't readily accessible to the five senses - whether abstract concepts like Brexit, or invisible pathogens - tend to get "translated", via metaphor, into easily graspable images.

That process, though, is not a neutral one. As linguists such as George Lakoff have pointed out, the metaphors we choose both reflect our prejudices and influence our approach to the world. With Brexit, no deal was either a "cliff edge" or a "clean break", depending on where your sympathies lay.

The "physical assailant" metaphor is one way to look at the challenge of coronavirus, but it is not the only one.

Some have taken to social media to complain that the idea of the "surprise attack" disguises the fact that the government had many weeks to prepare a better response to the pandemic than the one it has executed.

People with cancer have long lamented the drawbacks of framing the disease process as a "battle".

And the prime minister's idea that we "wrestle [coronavirus] to the floor" would seem at odds with the patient, precise work that will have to be done, over many months, to keep it at bay.
David Shariatmadari is the author of Don't Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language

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'Invisible mugger': how Boris Johnson's language hints at his thinking

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In his first podium speech since he left intensive care earlier this month, Boris Johnson described coronavirus as a "physical assailant". It was "an unexpected and invisible mugger", he told the nation, giving a colourful twist to the martial metaphors he and his cabinet have tended to use when talking about the disease (in March, he described the crisis as a "fight ...

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Some interesting discourses about lexis, semantics and pragmatics

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Some interesting discourses about lexis, semantics and pragmatics

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The language that disguises the government’s failings on coronavirus | Coronavirus outbreak | The Guardian

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Your article on the language of Boris Johnson's speech ('Invisible mugger': how Boris Johnson's language hints at his thinking, 27 April) examines the use of metaphors during this crisis. Equally important is the very use of vocabulary. One of the most popular words of the moment is "unprecedented", increasingly used by politicians as if it meant "unpredicted". This crisis was both predictable and predicted, as your reporting makes clear. But to imply that this pandemic was unpredictable and unpredicted relieves politicians of culpability.

Other linguistic constructions have all the appearance of the beginnings of a blame game; in particular "we are following the science". To think there is some single and undisputed body of knowledge and method called "the science" is plain wrong. But if politicians can maintain the fiction that there is something called "the science" and they simply follow it, then how can they be blamed? As you say, vocabulary and metaphors are not neutral constructs.
Adrian Darnell
Durham

* The constant use of war analogies is enabling ministers to treat the public as if they were unable to grasp the risks attached to particular strategies. Talking about the coronavirus as "the enemy" allows the government to keep its strategy, if it has one, secret. The difference is that the virus is not like a wartime enemy; it is not listening, nor will it alter its behaviour if our strategy is publicly known. There are no spies feeding the information to the virus.

The arrogance of ministers at the daily briefing, repeating over and over that they are taking "the right decisions at the right time", suggests an omnipotence that they surely do not have. History will decide whether the decisions were the right ones. Right now it seems the government has no more idea what to do than anyone else, and that is why it trots out platitudes. Are they reassuring the public or themselves?
Morag Watkins
Bovingdon, Hertfordshire

* I am starting a one-man campaign to eradicate the spread of the "ramping up" virus, which seems to be afflicting politicians, journalists, and anyone who comments on the Covid-19 pandemic. I yell at the radio every time Matt Hancock talks about "ramping up coronavirus testing", which he does several times during the "Hancock's Half Hour" briefing at 5pm. Why has he abandoned the perfectly adequate verb "increase"?

Could we start, please, with an instruction to all Guardian journalists to call out politicians who use the phrase? They themselves should pay a £100 penalty into a "ramping up" box each time they use it in an article. Proceeds, of course, to the NHS or social care, according to the editor's choice.
Luxembourg

* I congratulate the Guardian for using the term "physical distancing" rather than the misnomer "social distancing". Physical distancing actually enables some social contact. It helps us to visit and support those who are self-isolating. It has allowed me to sing with my neighbours: for the NHS on Thursday evenings and to celebrate May Day on 1 May: the first time in 400 years that May Day has not been celebrated with singing from the top of Magdalen Tower in Oxford.
Dr Hazel Dawe
Oxford

* "I am ashamed of sending colleagues into mortal risk on my behalf" says Dr Alan Willson ( Letters, 27 April). So should we all be, particularly the government. There is an old Dutch phrase, "verloren hoop" which meant "lost heap" and referred to the soldiers who were put in the frontline of a battle in the certainty that they would die. Without PPE and all the protective gear, some of our caring staff have been treated like that "lost heap". The phrase later became "forlorn hope" in modern English. which has quite a different meaning - our marvellous NHS has not been a forlorn hope, but " a very present help in trouble", and we thank them from the bottom of our hearts.
Susan Castles
Wem, Shropshire
* Join the debate - email guardian.letters@theguardian.com* Read more Guardian letters - click here to visit gu.com/letters Topics

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The language that disguises the government's failings on coronavirus | Letters

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Your article on the language of Boris Johnson's speech ('Invisible mugger': how Boris Johnson's language hints at his thinking, 27 April) examines the use of metaphors during this crisis. Equally important is the very use of vocabulary. One of the most popular words of the moment is "unprecedented", increasingly used by politicians as if it meant "unpredicted".

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In this op-ed, Juli Delgado Lopera, author of Fiebre Tropical writes about Spanglish - the language they calls home - and those who seek to discredit it.
It usually starts with let me tell you una cosita, mami. It is Saturday and all my tías, my grandmother, and cousins are seated around the dinning table sharing some of yesterday's arroz con pollito. My tías take turns retelling church gossip, gesturing with their hands, pointing with their mouths. A cacophony of ays and no me diga eso peppered with sighs, negation of heads and increíble! I sit in the corner, a teenager, hating every second of this family-bonding ritual, of the church talk, waiting for my cue to go smoke a cigarette around the lake. The cue never comes. So I sit at the table and partake in the convo that has now trailed to a mix of Spanish with the new English words everybody is learning: Fulanita en ese dress! and my mom's favorite new phrase- Oh my god! -that she pronounces phonetically in Spanish: O-mai-got.

What I don't know at the time: My tías, my mom, and grandmother are natural storytellers. Glorious storytellers. These women know how to talk. They've done so much talking, they've mastered all of its elements including the blending, mixing and creating of new words. When they don't know a word in English, they make it up by using the Spanish word and adding "tion." Uy, tía T says when she's annoyed, what a jodation. What I do know at the time: I love watching them mix and match words. Make up words. Invent sounds. In the little dollar store notebook my grandmother gave me I write down these inventions. When they say something delicious, I feel an excited pang in my stomach, I toss it around in my tongue, jot it down. Tía M says, Cuidao! Don't say too much porque Juli will write your secretos and put it on the internet en Inglés so we don't understand.

A ver, cariño, primero la primaria: I learned English from the ground up. I wasn't born in it. When I arrived to the humid swamp of Miami I was 15 years old, speaking a very cachaca Spanish with some drops of Caribbean tones from my grandmother. Pero de English very little, almost ni pío other than Hello! My name is. English was this confusing, amorphous dark matter I entered while at school, chastised by teachers for my mispronunciation, laughed at by students for conjugating words wrong. In English class I'd write my essays phonetically in Spanish so I could read them out-loud without panicking at the students' laughter. And, yes, you guessed it, I hated school. Couldn't figure anything out, was very lost most of the time. I pretended to understand what people said, what words meant, but really, "correct English"-the English taught in schools, the English institutionalized as the "standard" one, i.e. White English- felt completely inaccessible. All day unintelligible sounds swirled around me until my tía picked me up after school and I could breathe and relax listening to Spanish sounds I knew. Ay qué calorcito hace, she'd say when I entered her van and I'd let out a sigh.

But there was no escaping it. I was now in the U S of A, English was everywhere. And yet, it wasn't. At least not the "correct" kind taught at school, the "standard" white English I read in books. On the streets of Miami, at the Cuban grocery store with my mom, at my grandmother's dining table a very different type of English was spoken. We existed inside a very different language. In these places language took on a very different shape, a more playful shape, one without rigid boundaries. Here, English and Spanish were not mutually exclusive; they were not two separate languages, but rather open circles touching each other. We didn't know where one ended and the other began. It didn't matter. Here we lived and spoke in Spanglish. Because it made sense for us. Our lived experience did not take shape in white English or in standard Spanish, it was a mix and match of the sounds we heard around us from the different Latin American immigrant groups.

Here we showed incredible creativity and versatility. We said "quora" instead of "quarter," "La Pinabora" instead of Peanut Butter. Here we pushed language to fit our world: I have to plancha it, give me the trapo, mom wants her chanclas, oye, estás ready?

¿Y, por qué no?

I've always been fascinated with the relationship between the spoken and written word. The formative moments at the dining table around my tías, the chisme-talking-telenovela-watching with my grandma plus the hangueo sensacional on the streets of Miami-all of it- nourished in me a deep love for the ways we speak and how that spoken word can be used in writing. This is the language that moves me. Spanglish doesn't come with a grammar book, a class or a dictionary. It is in the air, existing only for those who have developed an ear for it.

Spanglish felt delicious to my tongue. It felt like home. It has the tucu-tucu rhythm of Spanish lifting words in English and conjugating them however it sees fit. And yet-there was an inevitable hierarchy at play here, with "standard" English at the top. This "standard" white English has linguistic legitimacy-we see it spoken and written everywhere, particularly in "formal" settings like politics and journalism- while the English I heard on the streets of Miami spoken by Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans and every other immigrant group was pushed aside, disregarded and treated as less than, not real English, not good English. I understood this by watching the condescending way my mother was treated when blending languages, how I was treated at school for speaking with a thick accent and how this mix of English never once made it to a book taught in the public school I attended. This mixture of English spoken with other languages, in my case Spanish, is therefore discarded. Pa la basura. Discarded language in turn rarely makes it to literature: Yes yes you can go speak Spanglish with your abuelita and yes yes we can have shops with names like Julio's Tacos or Sandrita's Lavaderia or watch Shakira say a few words in Spanish on the TV-we're allowed these "unregulated" non-threatening spaces- but try writing a story in Spanglish and watch people flip. Try publishing it. Because this hierarchy permeates literature and writing. If literature is the high art of language, Spanglish- this discarded, illegitimate spoken language - can never be "real" literature.

I remember one time a few years ago in a writing workshop when a white woman, upset by my use of Spanglish, read the text out-loud, butchering the words for all the hear, and concluding the story was "bad" and completely "unrelatable." Countless times I have sat in a writing workshops to the inevitable moment when a white writer points out the Spanglish in the text and lets me know she feels "disconnected," that this way of treating English, of bringing Spanglish slang from the streets of Miami to a story, is an "incorrect" use of language.

If Spanglish is wrong and standard white English is "correct" then who's being understood? Whose world is called into life?

Spanglish is not perceived as legitimate in literature because it is not legible to whiteness. Period. Spanglish is unconcerned with the white gaze, it throws the white grammar book out the window and builds one for itself. One that is playful, imaginative, brilliant. Limitless. One that is concerned with creative expression, with rhythm. Spanglish does not look outside, it doesn't react to whiteness, but rather looks deep inside itself for the linguistic tools it already has and shapes them. It takes a mother tongue - Spanish - and by mixing and matching, by embellishing it with English, turns it into a drag queen: Spanglish. Spanglish takes my grandmother's language - the way she pronounced every English word phonetically in Spanish, her thick accent - and legitimizes it as high art. When my grandma says, we were dancing bien pegao. Spanglish says, put that in a libro mami.

¿Y, por qué no?

This is the place from which I write. This in-between space, this hybridity, this limitless sabrosongo play of Spanish slang-specifically from Colombia- and the English I heard on the streets of Miami and San Francisco, where I live now. The language that is tossed aside, that is erased and discarded by the publishing industry, is my fuel. I take my mother's accent, her o-mai-got and craft a character out of it. I take my tía's I'm gonna contártelo todo when I see you later. My primo's watcheando la T.V, printeando la homework, haciendo la londri. This incredible sazón y tumbao, this musicality and its brilliance find their way to my stories. It's the heart of my craft.

¿Y, por qué no?

I've been told over and over again that I can't write like this, that this is not correct, that people won't understand. My abilities as a writer have been questioned over and over again. And yet. Here's my first novel all in Spanglish published and coming to you. I listen only to my heart and the rhythms of my grandmother and the M

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exican drag queens at the local bar yelling "yeeees perra!" I listen to the sounds of the futuro making their way to my fingers. To the Cuban señoras at the local panadería dropping their, estaciónate en el parking mija. This is the evolution of language, mami, this right here. So, get with the program, hon.

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Spanglish Is Seen as "Incorrect" English Because It's Not Legible to Whiteness

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In this op-ed, Juli Delgado Lopera, author of Fiebre Tropical writes about Spanglish - the language they calls home - and those who seek to discredit it. It usually starts with let me tell you una cosita, mami. It is Saturday and all my tías, my grandmother, and cousins are seated around the dinning table sharing some of yesterday's arroz con pollito.

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Why we’ve created new language for coronavirus - BBC Worklife

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Throughout history, challenging circumstances have given rise to new ways of expressing those challenges. George Eliot, the 19th Century writer who was famously frustrated by rigid gender and lifestyle norms, is credited with the first recorded use of the word 'frustrating'. More recently, Brexit led to a flowering of new words, including the inevitable 'Bremain' and 'Bregret', and a repurposing of existing words, such as 'backstop'.

While Brexit may be the closest parallel, the speed of the linguistic change we're seeing with Covid-19 is unprecedented, says Robert Lawson, a sociolinguist at Birmingham City University. Lawson attributes this to multiple factors: the dizzying pace at which the virus has spread, its dominance in the media and global interconnectivity at a time when social media and remote contact are so important.

Many of the newly popular terms relate to the socially distanced nature of human contact these days, such as 'virtual happy hour', 'covideo party' and 'quarantine and chill'. Many use 'corona' as a prefix, whether Polish speakers convert 'coronavirus' into a verb or English speakers wonder how 'coronababies' (the children born or conceived during the pandemic) will fare. And, of course, there are abbreviations, like the ubiquitous 'WFH' and the life-saving 'PPE'.
Old words in a new light
Like everyone else, lexicologists are scrambling to keep up with the changes the pandemic has wrought. According to Fiona McPherson, the senior editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), back in December 'coronavirus' appeared only 0.03 times per million tokens (tokens are the smallest units of language collected and tracked in the OED corpus). The term 'Covid-19' was only coined in February, when the WHO announced the official name of the virus. But in April, the figures for both 'Covid-19' and 'coronavirus' had skyrocketed to about 1,750 per million tokens (suggesting that the two terms are now being used at roughly the same frequency).

Innovative signs: In the UK, 'covidiots' is being used to described those ignoring social distancing rules

All of the terms added to the OED in April, in an unscheduled update, were related to the pandemic in some way, including 'infodemic' and 'elbow bump'. But McPherson notes that the only actual new word added to the dictionary is 'Covid-19'. The others are pre-existing terms that have gained new resonance at a time when many people are subject to a 'stay-at-home order' (US), 'movement control order' (Malaysia) or 'enhanced community quarantine' (Philippines).

"Although a lot of the words we're using just now and a lot of the terminology is actually older, a lot of it seems fairly new. 'Coronavirus' itself goes back to the 1960s," she points out.

What McPherson calls the "nuancing of already existing words" can in some cases be subtly harmful. War metaphors invoking 'battles' and 'front-lines' are being widely applied to the pandemic, yet thinking only in terms of a wartime emergency can detract from longer-term structural changes needed. This has given rise to the project #ReframeCovid, in which linguists collect crowdsourced examples of alternatives to war language.

Inés Olza, a linguist at the University of Navarra in Spain, says she started the project spontaneously on Twitter. She understands the temptation to invoke war metaphors, especially at the start of the pandemic when they were necessary to build unity and mobilise swiftly. But "a sustained use of that metaphor and abuse of it, and the lack of alternative frames, might generate anxiety and might distort things about the pandemic", she believes.

As well, terms such as 'natural disaster' and 'perfect storm' can create the impression that the pandemic was inevitable and unavoidable, neglecting the political, economic and environmental contexts that make certain people more exposed. Some healthcare workers have expressed their frustration at being called 'heroes', rather than seen as complex, frightened individuals doing a job, who need protective equipment and policy rather than relying on their own sacrifices.

In some cases the language being used isn't appreciated: this US healthcare worker is protesting against a lack of PPE

"Speakers are free to use the metaphors they want," Olza emphasises. "We are not censors." But she and some of her fellow linguists believe that it's useful to reflect on language and to have alternative framings for discussing the pandemic - beyond militaristic language that can obscure the roles of individuals and communities, and toward expressions that communicate collective care and individual responsibility. She says that Germans have been especially good at finding non-war terms. German's compounding of terms, for instance, has allowed for one-off words like 'Öffnungsdiskussionsorgien' ('orgies of discussion') to describe the seemingly endless policy debates over reopening.
Why humour helps
Overall, there's a wealth of linguistic creativity that hasn't yet entered the dictionary, but reflects the role of novel language as a coping mechanism. These innovative usages, Lawson says, "allow us to name whatever it is that's going on in the world. And once you can name the practices, the events, the social conditions around a particular event, it just gives people a shared vocabulary that they can all use as a bit of a shorthand. I think ultimately if you can name it, you can talk about it; and if you can talk about it, then it can help people cope and get a handle on really difficult situations".

Writer Karen Russell has found the newly ubiquitous term 'flatten the curve' to be reassuring - a reminder of the importance of both individual and collective action, which "alchemizes fear into action". And both the practice and the terminology of 'caremongering', used for instance in Canadian and Indian English, allow for an alternative to scaremongering.

Beyond earnest words like these, a kind of slightly anxious humour is central to many of the 'coronacoinages'. The German 'coronaspeck', like the English 'Covid 19', playfully refers to stress eating amid stay-at-home orders. The Spanish 'covidiota' and 'coronaburro' (a play on 'burro', the word for donkey) poke fun at the people disregarding public health advice. 'Doomscrolling' describes the hypnotic state of endlessly reading grim internet news. Lawson's favourite, 'Blursday', captures the weakening sense of time when so many days bleed into each other.

Australian English, no stranger to light-hearted abbreviations, has produced 'quaz' for 'quarantine' and 'sanny' for 'sanitiser'. Queer and black communities, so often a wellspring of linguistic innovation, have given rise to 'Miss Rona' as a slang term for the virus. And for the unsayable, there are always emojis. The folded hands emoji, the medical mask emoji, and the microbe emoji (yes, that exists) have all become more popular during the pandemic.

Some of these emojis and terms might seem flippant, but "I don't think that by having a little bit of light in the dark, people are making light of the situation", says McPherson. Lawson agrees: "If you can laugh at them, it makes things more manageable almost, and just helps with people's psychological health more than anything else."

Linguists believe that many of the terms currently in vogue won't endure. The ones with a stronger chance of sticking around post-pandemic are those that describe lasting behavioural changes, such as 'zoombombing', which is influenced by 'photobombing' and describes the practice of invading someone else's video call. McPherson reckons that 'zoombombing' could become a generic term (like 'hoovering' up a mess) even if the company Zoom loses its market dominance.

Ingenuity with vocabulary can also communicate that the current hardships, like many of the coronacoinages, won't last forever. Olza has taken to referring to the tasks on her 'corona-agenda', which can be a subtle way of asking for people's patience with her temporarily disrupted schedule. Eventually "I will get my usual agenda back," she says hopefully.

Until then, bring on the quarantinis.

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Why we've created new language for coronavirus

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From 'covidiots' to 'quarantine and chill', the pandemic has led to many terms that help people laugh and commiserate.

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Language is part of the machinery of oppression. BLM.

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Language is part of the machinery of oppression. BLM.

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Chokeholds, or "lateral vascular neck restraints", have been banned by many American police departments since the 1990s. This is sometimes hard to remember because there have been so many deaths since then, using precisely this technique. Chokeholds look like a kind of judo manoeuvre: an arm thrown around the neck followed by a slow squeezing pressure applied to the carotid artery. It can quickly disable an adversary, although more than a few seconds of applied pressure can kill. As in judo, a knee to the neck accomplishes much the same end.

The police chokehold is a sensitive issue among African Americans. The history of black death by suffocation evokes an ugly history that is not limited to lynching with nooses. Many do not remember that Rodney King was not only beaten with batons, but that one officer, Theodore Briseno, put his foot on King's neck to hold him down. Perhaps because King did not die, that small fact is lost in today's discussions.

But this week has been all about the dead. Eric Garner died in 2014 and his name usually begins the litany. He was arrested for selling "loosies", or unwrapped single cigarettes. Officers threw him to the ground, applied a chokehold and held him down until he died. We know this incident well because angry crowds gathered, begging officers to let him go as Garner cried out 11 times: "I can't breathe." We know this because bystanders took lots of pictures.
A week that shook a nation: anger burns as power of protests leaves Trump exposed
Garner's name is chanted like a mantra in the long, sad sequence of more recent deaths of black Americans, deaths by many means. Breonna Taylor, Philando Castile, Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown. That sequence now culminates with the name of George Floyd. Arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 bill, Floyd was thrown to the ground where he succumbed after nearly nine minutes, with the full weight of police officer Derek Chauvin's knee held on his neck. Again crowds gathered. Warnings were shouted as Floyd's life slipped away. Clear pictures were taken.

The world has exploded since then. Floyd's death has been a lightning rod for demonstrations around the planet. While much attention has centred on the behaviour of the four police officers at the scene - and particularly upon Chauvin's carelessly cavalier demeanour throughout - the harm should not be thought of as limited to these officers' behaviour, nor ought it be confined to the question of police reform. Here, for example, is the initial charging document for Floyd's death, issued by the Minneapolis medical examiner: "The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death."

This is an astonishing description, a shameful circumlocution.

But of course Floyd did die by asphyxiation. That much is so obvious that the medical examiner's report reads like systemic bureaucratic corruption, indicating more than simply the lethal indifference of a single "rogue" officer. Blaming Floyd's death on "underlying health conditions" is a remarkably determined deflection of Chauvin's agency.

In the end, Floyd's family hired an independent coroner who confirmed lethal asphyxiation. And quickly thereafter, a final report was issued by Minnesota's coroner, who logged the official cause of death as strangulation.

The linguistic effacement of agency often directs gaze in powerful ways, tells us where to look and where not to. For example, Kajieme Powell was a black man with mental health problems. In 2014, he took snacks from a convenience store and tossed them on the street, allegedly brandishing a steak knife. He called out to the police: "Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me, shoot me now." They obliged him, 12 times over.

The police's actions were explained with what has since become a fairly common appellation, "suicide by cop", or police-assisted suicide. It is an interesting deployment of the passive. It eliminates official responsibility by recasting a trigger-happy officer as the extended will of the deranged, self-sacrificing Powell. He did it to himself. No one's fault but his own.

This is a feature of the trope of black bodies killing themselves. It echoes the degree to which higher rates of Covid-19 infections among African Americans are often blamed on biological difference rather than the circumstances of their lives - the toll too frequently referenced as solely the product of "co-morbidities" such as obesity, asthma, bad choices, genetic "propensity". But poverty creates petri dishes for the virus: black, poor and older people die at higher rates in America because their social circumstances have ghettoised them into tight, poisoned geographies, like bugs placed in a jar, with the cap screwed on tightly.

As we watch, two great tragedies unfold and intertwine: the toll of coronavirus, and the toll of extrajudicial deaths at the hands of state actors. One maps on to the other in a double helix of grief and despair. Americans are yearning to resolve the incoherence of this moment. This emotional tinderbox must be read against the backdrop of other events. We respond not merely to the misuse of police power but also to the bewildering federal mismanagement of life-sustaining resources amid a global pandemic: we watch the mishandling in every possible way, of food distribution, of subsidies and financial assistance, of medical equipment.

This perfect storm of collective smothering - a foot on all our necks - has made the image of Floyd's death even more exceptionally powerful. It is legible to such a broad political spectrum because the resonance of "I can't breathe" makes us cringe with sorrow, induces frightening political constrictions, yet doubles also as coronavirus's power to make its victims literally gasp for breath.

It is such a fragile moment. Perhaps we sit on the razor's edge of real reform. Or perhaps we will never find our way out of the linguistic maze that keeps turning the dead into deadly agents of their own demise.

* Patricia Williams is a professor of law at Columbia University and a regular columnist for the Nation
Topics

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Language is part of the machinery of oppression - just look at how black deaths are described | Patricia Williams

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hokeholds, or "lateral vascular neck restraints", have been banned by many American police departments since the 1990s. This is sometimes hard to remember because there have been so many deaths since then, using precisely this technique. Chokeholds look like a kind of judo manoeuvre: an arm thrown around the neck followed by a slow squeezing pressure applied to the carotid artery.

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Yesterday’s Sunday Times reviewed the RSC’s production of Macbeth as “less garishly diverse” than the previous week’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Unsurprisingly, such overt racism has been called out, on Twitter and here by the RSC. Another example of how we need to be aware of how language contains and transmits ideologies and prejudices; these need to be challenged loudly and often.

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We are shocked and appalled by the unacceptable and abhorrent phrase used in a Sunday Times listing this week, describing our 2018 production of Macbeth as "less garishly diverse in casting" than our 2018 Romeo and Juliet.

John Dugdale made the comment (published 14 June), in previewing Polly Findlay's 2018 RSC production of Macbeth, comparing it to Erica Whyman's Romeo and Juliet. Such deliberate and offensive use of language demonstrates clear prejudice and devalues people, in this case specifically devaluing the work of RSC Artists.

Bally Gill and Karen Fishwick as Romeo and Juliet

Our purpose at the RSC is to ensure that Shakespeare is for everyone and we aim to reflect the nation's talent in all its diversity, such that the audiences which we serve are all able to recognise themselves on stage. Hamlet says that the purpose of playing is to hold "the mirror up to nature". We believe that when you watch these great plays, you should see yourself reflected in what you see and that the most effective productions are those that celebrate the widest range of skills and talents."

Gregory Doran, Artistic Director
Catherine Mallyon, Executive Director
Erica Whyman, Deputy Artistic Director

Letter to the Sunday Times

Artistic Director, Gregory Doran, has written the following letter to the Sunday Times:

John Dugdale previewing last night's broadcast of Polly Findlay's 2018 RSC production of Macbeth in The Sunday Times, describes it as "less garishly diverse in casting" than Erica Whyman's production of Romeo and Juliet the previous week.

I would appreciate understanding what Mr Dugdale means by "garishly diverse". When Juliet uses the word garish ("All the world will be in love with night/And pay no worship to the garish sun") she means the sun is too self consciously dazzling, vulgarly obtrusive perhaps, or tastelessly showy. Is Mr Dugdale implying that the diversity in the casting of this production is obtrusive or inappropriate in some way?

Does he object to a British Asian actor from Coventry playing Romeo, or a Glaswegian playing Juliet, or is his objection that Mercutio was played as a woman? By all means challenge us on the quality of performance, but to object to the right of these actors to play these great roles, because of their regionality, their ethnicity, or their gender is surely unacceptable and insulting.

Hamlet says that the purpose of playing is to hold "the mirror up to nature". If as a young person you watch these great plays, but do not see your own face reflected in what you see, why should you engage? Our purpose at the RSC is to ensure that Shakespeare is for everyone, whatever your class or colour, and that we reflect the Nation in all its diversity.

And if that seems garish, then I can make no apology for that.

Sincerely

Gregory Doran
Artistic Director
Royal Shakespeare Company

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RSC response to The Sunday Times | Royal Shakespeare Company

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We are shocked and appalled by the unacceptable and abhorrent phrase used in a Sunday Times listing this week, describing our 2018 production of Macbeth as "less garishly diverse in casting" than our 2018 Romeo and Juliet. John Dugdale made the comment (published 14 June), in previewing Polly Findlay's 2018 RSC production of Macbeth, comparing it to Erica Whyman's Romeo and Juliet.

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'General northern English’ accent has formed among the urban middle class, researchers find | The Independent

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Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

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They've been on the cutting edge of the English language since at least the 1500s

smithsonianmag.com

Criticizing teenage girls for the way they speak is nothing short of a time-honored tradition for adults who take issue with to everything from slang to vocal fry. But Quartz's Gretchen McCulloch has a bone to pick with those critics. She argues that female teen linguists should be lauded for their longtime innovation - they've been shaking things up for centuries.

McCulloch argues that female teenagers are actually "language disruptors" - innovators who invent new words that make their way into the vernacular. "To use a modern metaphor, young women are the Uber of language," she writes.

William Shakespeare has long been seen as the poster boy for introducing new words into the English language, though some have questioned his celebrated language disruptor status. But young women may have been the true linguistic revolutionaries of Shakespeare's day. McCulloch notes that in the 2003 book Historical Sociolinguistics, University of Helsinki linguists Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg surveyed 6,000 letters from 1417 to 1681. They found that female letter-writers changed the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers, spearheading the adoption of new words and discarding words like "doth" and "maketh."

Women are consistently responsible for about 90 percent of linguistic changes today, writes McCulloch. Why do women lead the way with language? Linguists aren't really sure. Women may have greater social awareness, bigger social networks or even a neurobiological leg up. There are some clues to why men lag behind: A 2009 study estimated that when it comes to changing language patterns, men trail by about a generation.

That's largely due to adult male blowback against female stereotypes in speech (think vocal fry or uptalk) and the fact that, in the past, females have traditionally taken care of children, as Chi Luu wrote for JSTOR Daily in February. Thus, men learn from their mothers, and women tend to learn new lingo from other women.

Though Gretchen Wieners was never able to make "fetch" happen, it's clear that women have been revolutionizing language for a long time. Not bad for a group of kids that get lots of flak for adopting new lingo.

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About Helen Thompson

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Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries

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smithsonianmag.com Criticizing teenage girls for the way they speak is nothing short of a time-honored tradition for adults who take issue with to everything from slang to vocal fry. But Quartz's Gretchen McCulloch has a bone to pick with those critics.

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Accents - from The i Newspaper online | inews.co.uk

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More essential opinion, news and information on Accents - from The i Newspaper online | inews.co.uk

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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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“Moisture is the essence of wetness” - Derek Zoolander, 2001

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"I think it's time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness," Boris Johnson said on Tuesday. He added, "I wanted to get that off my chest."

Ah, the firm smack of leadership at a time of national crisis. The crisis, of course being a global pan... gosh, sorry, that seems to be wrong, it's actually a row about the fact that the BBC has decided to cancel the performance of a patriotic song. No, hang on, that's wrong too! It is performing the song. Just without the lyrics. Although the reason for this may simply be restrictions on the number of participants due to the global pan... well, let's just say none of this is straightforward.

The political definition of 'wet' has the most resonance for Tories, and may be why Johnson instinctively reached for it

I'm not going to get involved in litigating the latest culture war update (I think we're on 13.6.12342), though I note my colleague Rafael Behr has pointed out that "without a blank cheque for marginal constituencies, Downing Street will rely on the constant mining of ... grievances to persuade people that Johnson is on their side". I do, however, find the language interesting.

It's the word "wetness" that jumps out. A strange choice, redolent of playing field taunts, though perhaps not unexpected from the man who seems to view running the country as an only slightly elevated form of class clownery, and who once used an official document to label David Cameron a " girly swot ".

But reflexive silliness aside, Johnson seems to be saying that self-examination, stopping to consider the implications of our symbols or actions, is "wet". He's using the sense described in the Oxford English Dictionary as "inept, ineffectual, effete". As with "girly swot", there's a definite current of what you might call "toxic masculinity" here. One of the earliest citations of this usage is from a 1924 novel by Percy Marks, called The Plastic Age: "A man is wet if he isn't a 'regular guy'; he is wet if he isn't 'smooth'; he is wet if he has intellectual interests; and he is wet if he is utterly stupid."

The OED says "wet" is also used "quasi-adverbially" (as in "don't act wet"), "and in the combination wet fish. A wet individual, a 'drip'. Also specifically in politics."

That political definition probably has the most resonance for any Conservative, and may be why Johnson instinctively reached for it. The OED expands on it as follows: "A politician with liberal or middle-of-the-road views on controversial issues (often applied to members of the Conservative party opposed to the monetarist policies of Margaret Thatcher)." The implication is that deeming Rule, Britannia! inappropriate in this day and age (which, it bears repeating, isn't necessarily what happened), is lily-livered, wishy-washy, lacking in backbone.

If those phrases strike you as being straight out of a mid-century Britain of stern morality, spam and conscription, that's not necessarily a coincidence. Though the political use of "wet" didn't originate with Thatcher, who was born in 1925, she definitely popularised it, and she was a creature of her times.
This phoney war over Last Night of the Proms is everything we deserve | Joel Golby
As the earliest newspaper references show, she was fond of the phrase even before it caught on as a label to differentiate ministers who balked at her economic "shock therapy" from those who supported it (by analogy, "dries"). A 1979 Associated Press report on Thatcher's style says: "She reportedly marks civil servants' work like school essays - with remarks such as 'wet' and 'what are the facts?' scrawled on memos." In April 1980, the Times asks: "Who are to be counted among the wets? The answer seems to be anybody who crosses the prime minister in fashioning a particular policy." Since the main policy splits tended to be about spending, as time wore on the meaning gradually narrowed. Wets were one-nation Tories unafraid of a bit of state intervention in the economy. Dries were proponents of tight fiscal restraint with the aim of controlling inflation.

The irony being, of course, that Johnson now finds himself presiding over the economically wettest Tory administration for decades. But if its meaning has become untethered from the intra-party battles of the 1980s, its symbolism is still potent: to be "wet" in the Tory lexicon is to be snivelling, cowardly, afraid to take tough decisions. In the current climate, this appears to mean seeing nuance, pausing to reflect and considering consequences. Johnson's penchant for vague but emotionally loaded language may fire up those who respond to this kind of manipulation, but it certainly doesn't make for good government.

* David Shariatmadari is the author of Don't Believe a Word: From Myths to Misunderstandings - How Language Really Works
Topics

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'Stop this wetness!': the roots of Boris Johnson's watery contempt | David Shariatmadari

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think it's time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history, about our traditions and about our culture, and we stopped this general bout of self-recrimination and wetness," Boris Johnson said on Tuesday. He added, "I wanted to get that off my chest." Ah, the firm smack of leadership at a time of national crisis.

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Why women talk less – language: a feminist guide

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Courtesy of Merriam-Webster

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The rumpus over conversate ("to converse") is fairly recent, at least when compared to the word itself (it's been around for over 200 years). If you would like to learn more about the word that bridges Notorious B.I.G. and Archibald Loudon (author of the 1811 A Selection of Some of the Most Interesting Narratives) you may do so here.

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Merriam-Webster's Great Big List of Words You Love to Hate

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People feel strongly about some words. Very strongly. They lament the 'wrong' use of words, but here at Merriam-Webster we know there's not really such a thing so we compiled a list of all the words you love to hate.

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It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.

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It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.

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It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.
— EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) September 24, 2020

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It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.original_text
It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.metadata.attachment_props.text
It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.

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BBC iPlayer - The Secret History of Writing - Series 1: 1. From Pictures to Words

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We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilisation itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word. But how and where did writing begin, and who began it? In From Pictures to Words, the first of three films about the history of writing, we uncover the hidden links between all the diverse writing systems in use today and trace the origin of our own alphabet to a turquoise mine in the Sinai Desert and a man riding a donkey whose name was Khebded.

Writing is a recent innovation. Our species has existed for about 300,000 years, and for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing. At the Moon Dreaming site in the Northern Territory of Australia, Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Aboriginal Wardaman people, explains how Aboriginal culture has been transmitted down the generations orally, without the need to write anything down. So, why did people eventually feel the need to make permanent records in visual form?

According to Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist from the British Museum, it was in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, where the need for record-keeping was first felt. Here, about 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians developed the first city states. The city dwellers depended for their sustenance on taxing the surrounding countryside, and Irving produces a clay tablet from this period that is the distant ancestor of today's spreadsheet: a grid of boxes ruled into the clay, with symbols that represent numbers, and small stylised pictures that represent commodities, such as an ear of barley. These so-called pictograms would be the basis for the first writing systems, and so we owe writing to the first accountants and tax inspectors.

But the language of accountancy is limited. To represent the full vocabulary of the Sumerian people would require a key conceptual leap, a way to use pictures to represent not things but sounds. This is what Irving dubs the giant leap for mankind, something called the Rebus Principle: the idea is that a picture of an ear of barley can represent barley, but it can also be used to represent the sound of the word barley in Sumerian, which is pronounced 'sheh'. Thus, the word 'sheh-ga', which means 'beautiful', can be represented by the pictogram of an ear of barley, followed by the stylised picture of a cow's udder, which stands for milk, pronounced 'ga' in Sumerian.

The Rebus Principle is the key that unlocked writing for all the peoples of the ancient near east. Egyptian hieroglyphs, which developed in the same period, are also based on the same principle. The earliest known complete Egyptian text is found beneath a pyramid near Cairo, inscribed on the walls of the tomb of Pharaoh Teti. The Pyramid Texts are a series of elaborate magic spells, designed to raise Teti to eternal life. Hieroglyphs are indeed magic, because like all writing, while they may not be able raise the dead, they do allow them to speak.

In fact, the Rebus lies behind all the ancient writing systems of the world. The earliest known Chinese writing is found inscribed on bones and turtle shells from 3,500 years ago. Chinese is a picture-based script that uses the Rebus Principle to represent sounds with stylised pictures. The same is true of Mayan glyphs, a writing system that developed in Central America about 2,600 years ago. The similarities between these scripts is striking. Is this evidence of a common root for all writing?

In essence, the Rebus Principle is simply a sort of pun, something that could have occurred to a child. Irving Finkel believes that it was invented many times, as a natural expression of a common human sense of humour! The similarities between ancient writing systems are simply due to the fact that we all share the same human mind.

But today, most people write using alphabets - simple scripts with just a few dozen symbols that seem to have no connection to pictures. Here the story is different, because the alphabet was only invented once. In the company of archaeologist Pierre Tallet, we travel to the Sinai to an ancient Egyptian temple perched high above the desert. This is the place where the cultural exchange between Egyptian scribes and illiterate Canaanite migrant workers created a new kind of script. This script also used the Rebus Principle, but in a radically simpler way, adapting hieroglyphic pictograms to represent the sounds of the Canaanite tongue.

Almost every alphabet in use today, from Arabic to the Latin alphabet, can trace its origins to this script. Our letters do not look like pictures, but in fact in almost every word we write lie hidden the ghosts of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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BBC Four - The Secret History of Writing, Series 1, From Pictures to Words

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We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilisation itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word.

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BBC iPlayer - The Secret History of Writing - Series 1: 1. From Pictures to Words

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilisation itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word. But how and where did writing begin, and who began it? In From Pictures to Words, the first of three films about the history of writing, we uncover the hidden links between all the diverse writing systems in use today and trace the origin of our own alphabet to a turquoise mine in the Sinai Desert and a man riding a donkey whose name was Khebded.

Writing is a recent innovation. Our species has existed for about 300,000 years, and for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing. At the Moon Dreaming site in the Northern Territory of Australia, Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Aboriginal Wardaman people, explains how Aboriginal culture has been transmitted down the generations orally, without the need to write anything down. So, why did people eventually feel the need to make permanent records in visual form?

According to Irving Finkel, an Assyriologist from the British Museum, it was in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, where the need for record-keeping was first felt. Here, about 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians developed the first city states. The city dwellers depended for their sustenance on taxing the surrounding countryside, and Irving produces a clay tablet from this period that is the distant ancestor of today's spreadsheet: a grid of boxes ruled into the clay, with symbols that represent numbers, and small stylised pictures that represent commodities, such as an ear of barley. These so-called pictograms would be the basis for the first writing systems, and so we owe writing to the first accountants and tax inspectors.

But the language of accountancy is limited. To represent the full vocabulary of the Sumerian people would require a key conceptual leap, a way to use pictures to represent not things but sounds. This is what Irving dubs the giant leap for mankind, something called the Rebus Principle: the idea is that a picture of an ear of barley can represent barley, but it can also be used to represent the sound of the word barley in Sumerian, which is pronounced 'sheh'. Thus, the word 'sheh-ga', which means 'beautiful', can be represented by the pictogram of an ear of barley, followed by the stylised picture of a cow's udder, which stands for milk, pronounced 'ga' in Sumerian.

The Rebus Principle is the key that unlocked writing for all the peoples of the ancient near east. Egyptian hieroglyphs, which developed in the same period, are also based on the same principle. The earliest known complete Egyptian text is found beneath a pyramid near Cairo, inscribed on the walls of the tomb of Pharaoh Teti. The Pyramid Texts are a series of elaborate magic spells, designed to raise Teti to eternal life. Hieroglyphs are indeed magic, because like all writing, while they may not be able raise the dead, they do allow them to speak.

In fact, the Rebus lies behind all the ancient writing systems of the world. The earliest known Chinese writing is found inscribed on bones and turtle shells from 3,500 years ago. Chinese is a picture-based script that uses the Rebus Principle to represent sounds with stylised pictures. The same is true of Mayan glyphs, a writing system that developed in Central America about 2,600 years ago. The similarities between these scripts is striking. Is this evidence of a common root for all writing?

In essence, the Rebus Principle is simply a sort of pun, something that could have occurred to a child. Irving Finkel believes that it was invented many times, as a natural expression of a common human sense of humour! The similarities between ancient writing systems are simply due to the fact that we all share the same human mind.

But today, most people write using alphabets - simple scripts with just a few dozen symbols that seem to have no connection to pictures. Here the story is different, because the alphabet was only invented once. In the company of archaeologist Pierre Tallet, we travel to the Sinai to an ancient Egyptian temple perched high above the desert. This is the place where the cultural exchange between Egyptian scribes and illiterate Canaanite migrant workers created a new kind of script. This script also used the Rebus Principle, but in a radically simpler way, adapting hieroglyphic pictograms to represent the sounds of the Canaanite tongue.

Almost every alphabet in use today, from Arabic to the Latin alphabet, can trace its origins to this script. Our letters do not look like pictures, but in fact in almost every word we write lie hidden the ghosts of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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BBC Four - The Secret History of Writing, Series 1, From Pictures to Words

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We take it for granted, but every time we pick up a pen, we are employing the most powerful technology ever invented: the technology of writing. The invention of writing about 5,000 years ago made civilisation itself possible, and every innovation of the modern world is based on the foundation of the written word.

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Interview with the consultant linguist on the film ‘Arrival’

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Interview with the consultant linguist on the film ‘Arrival’

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(which you must watch if you haven’t already!)

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In defence of jargon – it might be infuriating but it also has its uses

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Anyone who tried to get their head around the financial crisis of 2008 soon found themselves drowning in an alphabet soup of BEITs, CDOs, CDCs, ETFs and MBS. When British novelist John Lanchester wrote about this world he commented that "you are left wondering whether somebody is trying to con you, or to obfuscate and blather so that you can't tell what's being talked about". He wasn't wrong.

One recent study shows how people are more likely to use jargon when they feel insecure. Led by psychologist Zachariah Brown, it shows how some groups use jargon specifically to make up for having a low social status.

In one experiment, they looked at 64,000 dissertations from hundreds of universities in the US and found that those written by students from lower-status institutions used more jargon. In another part of the study, they asked participants to pick a pitch for a start-up. When people were put into a lower-status position, they found they were more likely to pick jargon-laden pitches. In a range of other settings they noticed that when people found themselves in a low-status position, they were significantly more likely to reach for jargon.

one line man/Shutterstock.com

Clearly, there are pitfalls to jargon. Research shows how it can be a major turnoff in the business world. One study found that knowledgeable investors were unimpressed by investment propositions that were filled with unnecessary jargon. Similarly, jargon can make non-experts see new technologies in a more negative light. Another study found that when new technologies are presented to people using jargon, they tend to see them as much riskier.

Jargon is, by definition, exclusionary. This means it can get in the way of understanding crucial information. One study found that the frequent use of medical jargon by doctors meant their patients didn't understand about half of what their doctors said to them.

Even between experts, it can be counterproductive. A study of different subfields in ecology, for example, found that key terms would often mean very different things to different experts. This would then trigger heated but ultimately fruitless disagreements.

The upside of jargon

Jargon might be infuriating, but it's also useful. Jargon sums up complex issues in fewer words. This enables experts to talk precisely to each other about concepts they are familiar with.

Jargon can help remove emotion when tackling difficult topics. Doctors, for example, often dehumanise patients by talking about a person in pain as an interesting case of some specific disease. Research shows that this helps create emotional distance, which allows them to make more reasonable decisions.

Shutterstock.com

But this can also be problematic. In 1984 the US State Department replaced the word "killing" with "unlawful deprivation of life" in its human rights reports to help cover up the unpleasant reality of government-sanctioned killings in countries the US supports.

Jargon is also used to solidify a sense of belonging within groups. Professional wrestlers, for instance, talk about their sport as "business", getting into the ring as "going to work", and putting on a convincing performance as "selling". Similarly, North American truck drivers use expressions like "bobtailing a twin screw jimmy" to purposefully exclude non-truck drivers from their conversations.

Resisting a full ban

The dangers of jargon have spurred frequent calls to ban it altogether. In 2015, the then British prime minister, David Cameron asked civil servants to ensure their communications were jargon free. In 2010, then US president, Barack Obama signed the Plain Language Act which required federal government documents to be written in a "clear, concise manner". Presidents Nixon, Carter and Clinton all signed official orders requiring simple and plain language be used in government.

These world leaders were all following in the footsteps of George Orwell who in 1946 recommended that you "never use a long word where a short one will do". But Orwell's advice was preceded by Thomas Sprat, who in 1667 wrote how members of the newly founded Royal Society resolved "to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swelling of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words".

Despite these constant calls for plain language, jargon seems to have a habit of returning. Instead of trying to take on the impossible task of creating a jargon-free world, we might narrow our ambitions and just try to cut out what the scholar Russel Hirst calls "bad jargon".

Some potential indicators of bad jargon are words that look or sound strange, hybrids or terms that are difficult to pronounce. After chasing out the bad jargon, we need to ensure that any specialist terms which are left are "good jargon". That means they should be economical, precise and as universal as possible. Instead of fighting against all jargon, we should follow Russell Hirst's advice and become champions of good jargon and its staunchest defenders.

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In defence of jargon - it might be infuriating but it also has its uses

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Anyone who tried to get their head around the financial crisis of 2008 soon found themselves drowning in an alphabet soup of BEITs, CDOs, CDCs, ETFs and MBS. When British novelist John Lanchester wrote about this world he commented that "you are left wondering whether somebody is trying to con you, or to obfuscate and blather so that you can't tell what's being talked about".

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The Linguistic Evolution of Taylor Swift

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The Linguistic Evolution of Taylor Swift

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The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.

With the surprise midsummer release of Folklore, it seems that Taylor Swift has finally put out an indie record much cooler than her others, one that even a Pitchfork editor could love. The critically acclaimed, aptly named Folklore feels like a cozy, autumnal, cardigan-wearing kind of album, homing in on the telling and retelling of stories of heartbreak and longing through the lyricism of language at the heart of Swift's songwriting.

It appears to be a tentative new step toward a more subdued, contemplative form of music, in the decade-long, genre-bending career of one of the most successful-yet also much criticized-artists of this era. Despite the awards and fan adoration, Taylor Swift is also an artist who has been beset with a mess of contradictory criticisms, at once derided for revealing too much about her personal life in her music, and at the same time dismissed as nothing more than a manufactured, blank space of an inauthentic pop star.

If the new sounds of Folklore are part of a struggle for musical legitimacy, the album's success might shine a light on why it has taken so long for critics to take Swift seriously.

Until recently, in fact, even her supporters sometimes drew attention not to her creative skill in songwriting but to her work ethic or marketing savvy, as if to damn with faint praise. If the new sounds of Folklore are part of a struggle for musical legitimacy, the album's success might shine a light on why it has taken so long for critics to take Swift seriously. Why is it that some of them can never accept that Taylor Swift might have something worthy to say?

Perhaps the answer lies in how the disparate threads of language, accent, and the public image of authenticity and identity all get tangled up in that particularly confessional genre that gave Taylor Swift her start at the tender age of fifteen: country music.

Although it seems obvious that musicians, like the rest of us, likely enjoy a variety of genres, it still comes as a surprise when they successfully cross over to a different kind of music. Switching styles, whether in music or the way you speak, can be viewed with suspicion, and stepping outside the norm can be stigmatized.

The accent on singing

Taylor Swift, by some accounts a music nerd herself, famously made the move from country to pop, and took many of country's songwriting and stylistic traditions with her. This naturally has played a part in how she and her music have been received by a wider audience, but it hasn't always been positive. She first established a strong public persona as a real, relatable girl with a growing and evolving sense of self who just happened to be a country star. But country's complex relationship with the ideas of realness, authenticity, and identity through personal storytelling was perhaps hard to translate to modern pop, a seemingly artificial genre. What's more, the lived experience that's grist for Swift's songwriting now includes success, wealth, and privilege. Though her personal storytelling can seem far removed from what many of us may experience, there's clearly something at the heart of those stories that we can still relate to.

Linguistically, this contradiction is evident in Swift's code switching from one musical genre to another. Code switching occurs when a speaker straddling different speech communities changes from standard or expected languages, dialects, or even accents in some contexts to more marked ones in the same language in other contexts. Since many regional or class-based accents can be stigmatized for such unknowable things as education level and intelligence (or even the potential to be a supervillain), it might seem strange that people switch from standard to nonstandard ways of speaking, even unconsciously. But it's exceptionally common, and most curiously so when it comes to music.

The reasons for doing this, and the choices of code switching that speakers make, are almost always socially motivated, according to linguist Carol Myers-Scotton. Code switching is "a creative act, part of the negotiation of a public face." It's a way to signal which cultural group you identify with-where you want to belong. It can also signal a disruption of what's seen as acceptable and normal-which, for instance, is what some musical genres, like rock 'n' roll and hip-hop, are all about.

Many linguists, such as Peter Trudgill, have long noted how the accent of modern pop music is generally American, no matter where a music artist hails from. So Adele's natural Cockney accent when speaking melts into fluid, American tones when singing, which is largely regarded by most people as unremarkable and normal. In "Prestige Dialect and the Pop Singer," linguist S. J. Sackett notes that a kind of pseudo-southern American accent has become the standard "prestige" pop music accent, perhaps because of, rather than in spite of, its anti-establishment, working-class associations.

Meanwhile, indie rock groups like the Arctic Monkeys, singing in their own native Sheffield accents, might seem more marked. Yet choosing to sing against the musical tide, in a nonstandard accent, can signal independence and authenticity.

The genre of country music, in differentiating itself from pop, abounds in the stronger regional accents of the American South, not just from natives such as Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn but even a Canadian like Shania Twain or the Swedish Americana group First Aid Kit.

Swift follows in a long line of singing like you belong. The southern accent is clearly evident in her early singles, such as " Our Song," written when she was fourteen, where you can hear marked phonetic features of Southern American English from the very first word. The diphthong in the pronoun "I" [aɪ], in "I was riding shotgun," sounds more like the monophthong "ah" [a:]. There's also the lack of rhotic "r" in words like "car" and "heart," and grammatical variation such as the lack of verb agreement in "your mama don't know." In the penultimate line, "I grabbed a pen and an old napkin," the famous southern "pin-pen" merger reveals itself, as "pen" and "napkin" are rhymed.

In Swift's crossover single "22," the genre is pure pop, but the southern accent is still a force to be reckoned with: The "e" of "twenty" sounds more like "twinny" and the "two" sounds more like "tew." However, whether Swift code-switches because of the musical genre in which she's singing, or because she may have only acquired her accent after moving to the South as a young teen, she largely loses the more marked linguistic elements in transitioning into a pop artist, with an appropriately general American accent.

In fact, Swift ironically refers to the oddity of the accent change in the bewildering lineup of her personas in the music video "Look What You Made Me Do." Her upbeat country music persona exclaims only a brief "y'all!" "Oh, stop acting like you're so nice, you are so fake," answers yet another version of herself.

Fake it to make it?

Taylor Swift isn't alone in being accused of faking an accent. American pop-punk bands like Green Day have been accused of faking British accents in imitation of the Sex Pistols, just as non-American groups (such as the French band Phoenix) put on their best-dressed American accents during performances. Code switching in genres is not uncommon and generally passes unnoticed, especially if listeners never get a chance to hear an artist's normal speaking voice-unless that voice sings in a new genre where a different accent might be the norm.

An accent is seen as such an integral part of a speaker's identity that when it changes, it can open up accusations of being fake and inauthentic, even though artists need to evolve and create in new ways. Although this might be a desirable trait in an actor, who conveys other people's stories through their own body, for an artist who purports to tell their own lived experience through narrative songwriting, it can call into question their integrity or intentions in terms of the grubby necessities of making a living.

"Music can not be true or false, it can only refer to conventions of truth or falsity."

This is a complicating factor particularly when it comes to country music.

Aaron A. Fox opens up his essay on the discourse of country music by asking: "Is country music for real?" [...] A unique, if elusive core of 'authenticity' tantalises country's supporters and infuriates its critics"; yet to quote Simon Frith, "music can not be true or false, it can only refer to conventions of truth or falsity." The only way we can talk about the time we spend in our lives is really through narrative, and these stories about our lives are constructed and shaped by our culture and language-never the absolute truth, but a continually evolving retelling of our past, present, and futures.

In lay terms, country music is obsessed with the idea of authenticity, perhaps more so than other genres, not only because of its musicality (the skill involved in playing acoustic instruments, for example) but also because of its storytelling: Artists are supposed to write and perform songs about their own life experiences. Country songs are ideally biographical, "the real lives of real people." The kind of language they use is therefore crucial.

As Fox notes, the thematic concerns of country music, of loss and desire, of heartbreak and heartache, are intensely private experiences, but they are laid starkly bare and made public in song, ready to be consumed by the public. The language of these songs takes the plain, everyday, down-home ways of speaking that ordinary, often working-class people use, and intensifies them into an unnatural, poetic, metaphorical state, with a "dense, pervasive use of puns, clichés and word-play."

Dolly Parton's "Bargain Store," for example, uses her own dialect both lyrically and in performance to recast her life of poverty and her broken heart, things that people often keep private.

My life is likened to a bargain store
And I may have just what you're lookin' for
If you don't mind the fact that all the merchandise is used
But with a little mending, it could be as good as new

Pamela Fox also considers how the autobiographical country song is different for women. Far from a masculine or chauvinistic perspective of a hard-drinking, hard-worn life of labor and lost loves, successful women in country such as Lynn, Parton, and Tammy Wynette have public identities positioned as overcoming an earlier life of hardship and poverty, particularly family origins in coal mining, sharecropping, or cotton picking. This source of authenticity is hard to fake or debate, compared to the assumed emptiness of a comfortable middle-class life.

And yet, writes Fox, "one cannot remain country for long if one lacks roots (and slowly exchanges ordinary life for an unreal world of excess and continual displacement)." In a way, "success stories rank as distinctly gendered 'failures' of country authenticity: as working female celebrities, they forfeit not only their traditional pasts," but the public respect that comes with the humble domestic or maternal world they sing about, thanks to their new lives of comfort and success. As Dolly Parton put it, "Although I look like a drag queen's Christmas tree on the outside, I am at heart a simple country woman."

In a way, Swift's struggle with the perception of authenticity is just as real and problematic as the one faced by the women in country who came before her, though Swift came from upper-middle-class origins rather than poverty.

The worth of words

In "The Last Great American Dynasty," Swift pens the story of someone she never knew: the eccentric, wealthy Rebekah Harkness of Rhode Island. As Swift inserts herself into the narrative's end, it transpires that Harkness owned the house that Swift later bought.

"Fifty years is a long time/Holiday House sat quietly on that beach," she adds. "Free of women with madness, their men and bad habits/And then it was bought by me."

Swift's personal experience is slightly less relatable because it reminds most of us that we can't simply buy holiday houses on a beach in Rhode Island. And yet, the feelings of being outside of the norm, of not belonging and feeling out of place, of being criticized as mad, are certainly emotional states we all can understand.

In Swift's evolving songwriting, about other people or herself, the events may be outside our experience, but they can be just as heartfelt through the deft use of language. And in this, we may come to understand just what Taylor Swift's words are worth.
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The Linguistic Evolution of Taylor Swift - JSTOR Daily

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If Taylor Swift shifts her accent in her transition from country to pop, does she lose the personal authenticity important to country music?

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Pet names for women at work are sexist and unprofessional

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More than a decade later, women are still given signals that they do not belong in professional spaces. For example, a Pennsylvania city administrator announced she is leaving her post in January due in part to being called diminishing names. Jody L. Ocker, a retired Air Force Colonel, told Sunbury City Council, "I'm not 'kid' or 'dear.' I am not the 'girl' you hired for the front office to just do whatever I'm told." Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been referred to with the diminishing term "girl." A voter recently explained why he didn't support Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, "I thought the girl just wanted the job because she wanted to be the boss, that's all." Clinton was a 69-year-old woman at the time of the election.

In our joint research, we have collected women's stories of workplace gender bias. Many professional women in our data expressed dismay at being referred to with pet names and diminutives such as "missy," "kiddo," and "girl." While some pet names ("sweetheart," "honey," etc.) may be used to express affection in the home or in romantic relationships, they are not appropriate in the workplace. Imagine going to see your male lawyer about writing a contract. How likely are you to refer to him as "little boy" or "sweetheart?" Addressing a man that way in the workplace sounds ridiculous, yet it's common for women.

The subtle undertone to pet names is a sexist message that women don't belong in professional settings and lack competence. A mathematician whose male bosses refer to her as "sweetie" and "honey" commented, "It's like they are intimidated by my abilities and so to 'put me in my place' they need to use demoralizing pet names to make me seem not as competent."

Referring to women with pet names and diminutives is an example of treating women as they would be in the home, as mothers, sisters, daughters, or wives. The problematic nature of such terms was pointed out by a leader in a faith-based nonprofit who was called "sweetie," "dear," and "hon" by her organization's top leaders. She commented, "They are meaning it in a nice way like they see me as a granddaughter, but it comes off condescending and somewhat demeaning because I'm not a child and this is a professional setting." An engineer described how even some men who worked for her have addressed her with pet names like "sweetie," "dear," and "baby."

A common diminutive term is the word "girl" to refer to an adult woman. When a marketing firm partner was sharing research with the board of a nonprofit for which she was doing pro-bono work, a board member commented, "I don't know who this girl is, but I completely disagree with her." (Fortunately, the owner of the marketing firm interjected, "This woman is a partner in my company and was the lead designer on the project.") In another example, an architect's boss told her, "It doesn't even matter that you're a girl anymore," referencing her in-demand skills. Not only was the comment mistaken-the architect was a grown woman-but it also alludes to the idea that being a girl is something that must be overcome.

To create an inclusive workplace culture respectful of women, there are two steps that we can all take.

First, make a commitment to stop using diminishing terms to refer to women. If you are an organizational leader and this type of language is especially common in your workplace, let the entire staff know that they are expected to stop using pet names and diminutives for women, whether those women are customers, coworkers, subordinates, or managers.

Second, use bystander intervention. Recognize that women may experience backlash if they call out others who use sexist language. In addition, these terms can be so common that even well-intentioned people may continue to use them. And using diminishing terms isn't a problem exclusive to men. Women may also have been socialized to refer to other women as "girls." Or they may use a pet name like "honey" or "sweetie" with another woman to assert their own dominance. If you hear diminishing names being used, gently correct the individual on the spot or later in private.

One woman summed up perhaps the best advice: "You can call me by my name. Or better yet, just talk to me like a human and leave out all of the [pet] names." Doing so sends a signal to women that they do indeed belong, fostering the culture of workplace equality that Justice Ginsburg fought for.
Amy Diehl, Ph.D. is associate vice president and chief information technology officer at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania and an expert on gender bias in the workplace. Find her on Twitter @amydiehl. Leanne Dzubinski, Ph.D. is associate dean of the Cook School of Intercultural Studies and associate professor of intercultural education and studies at Biola University, and a prominent researcher on women in leadership.

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We need to talk about using pet names for women at work

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More than a decade later, women are still given signals that they do not belong in professional spaces. For example, a Pennsylvania city administrator announced she is leaving her post in January due in part to being called diminishing names. Jody L. Ocker, a retired Air Force Colonel, told Sunbury City Council, "I'm not 'kid' or 'dear.'

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“A demonstration of a woman who is unafraid to speak with confidence”

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“A demonstration of a woman who is unafraid to speak with confidence”

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Interesting for attitudes towards women’s language...

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Every few months on social media, a campaign reliably comes around urging women to stop undermining ourselves at work. Don't, we're advised, use the qualifier "just", as in "can I just float an idea?" Stop apologising for making routine demands or having the temerity to use up someone's time. Most recently and trenchantly, don't, we are advised, ground every timorous request with the phrase "no worries if not".

I say and do all of these things, although less frequently than I once did. Where 10 years ago the qualifiers came out as reflex, these days, I generally catch and delete them before I hit send. I don't open emails with "sorry to bother you", unless I'm being deliberately passive aggressive. (This is my preferred tonal mode, obviously, although it gets me nowhere in the US. A snippy email I sent to an American last week hinged on the word "unideal", a neutral term to American ears, but to a Brit, clearly, signifying a curse on you and your family for a thousand years.)
A woman of colour as US vice-president: three writers on what Kamala Harris means to them
These exhortations to pull ourselves together and stop vacillating have been a useful alert to behaviours many women engage in at the level of instinct. These behaviours are also strategic, a necessary hedge to what we know is the offputting effect of women making demands. The "no worries if not" habit is a particularly hard one to break, based as it is on a justifiable anxiety that the only way to get what you want is to present it as an act of largesse on the part of the person you are asking.

All of which has been on my mind this week while watching the ascent of Kamala Harris to vice-president-elect. Although the relief and ecstasy at the election results were huge, when she made her victory speech on Saturday night, I didn't expect to be moved. Harris wasn't accepting the top job, after all: she was the warm-up act for Joe Biden and celebrating her "first" when the position was still second-in-command seemed to me a bit dismal. And yet, when she gave a shout-out to all the young girls watching, including my five-year-old daughters, urging them to see themselves in ways others might not traditionally have seen them, to my amazement I had to swallow hard and look away.

Harris had, over the weeks and months of the campaign, been subject to a lot of the criticisms that dogged Hillary Clinton. She was too abrasive, too cocky, too full of herself. During the primaries, while Bernie Sanders and Biden shouted and chopped the air with their hands, Harris remained, by necessity, even-tempered and moderately spoken. A man who loses his temper is forceful; a woman who does so is unhinged.

The soft-approach of "no worries if not" isn't a self-defeating verbal tic, therefore, but has for a long time been the quickest and easiest way for women to deliver a frictionless result, and it is one it would be good to retire. I recently wrote a book with Megan Rapinoe, whose directness - with Donald Trump, with Sports Illustrated, with the governing body of her own sport - has been interpreted by some as monstrous impoliteness, about which Rapinoe doesn't have a shred of self-doubt.

Why, she says, shouldn't she and her teammates demand more money, when they win all the time and are, compared with male footballers in the US, chronically underpaid? Why shouldn't she, while accepting an award from Sports Illustrated, flag up how few women and writers of colour they employ? And why shouldn't she say, after winning, "I deserve this"?

All of which I understand intellectually, but still find basically socially mortifying. In the writing of this book, we had to go over it, again and again, and each time it struck me as freshly outlandish. How did she not die of embarrassment? Wasn't she worried these kinds of statements made her appear "ungrateful"? Where did she get the gumption to presume she might take up that much space? "I think about the people I'm speaking for, not those I'm speaking to," she said, which is a useful reframing. And in a phrase that could serve, admirably, as the title for a book of whimsical essays on female confidence, "I don't need you to like me to know that I'm right."

Neither the confidence thing, nor the perception of women asking for things as rude, will be solved quickly, and to that extent "no worries if not" remains a useful approach. But with a woman in the second highest office in the land, it would be nice if a shift got under way: from help me out here, I'm grateful for any bone you might throw me, to help me out here because it's your job.

* Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York. She is the author of One Life, by Megan Rapinoe
Topics

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Kamala Harris didn't become vice-president-elect by saying 'no worries if not' | Emma Brockes

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Every few months on social media, a campaign reliably comes around urging women to stop undermining ourselves at work. Don't, we're advised, use the qualifier "just", as in "can I just float an idea?" Stop apologising for making routine demands or having the temerity to use up someone's time.

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From melodic scouse to Adele's cockney – I love the UK's regional accents | Life and style | The Guardian

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am from Liverpool, so am well versed in regional accents. Mine was never pronounced (so to speak) and, after living abroad, then Oxford and now London, it slip-slides; a baby deer on ice. Often people narrow their eyes at me, trying to work out where I am from. It may be unplaceable, but going back to Liverpool and spending time around scousers, it tends to pick up again.

This is something called the chameleon effect. We subconsciously mirror people's accents and body language to fit in. It is not copying, but a natural reflection.

A question often asked is how one pronounces neither or neither, either or either. But for most of us it's often... either. This is true of many words for me. Down south, the long "a" rules in bath or laugh or glass. The north has flat, short vowel sounds. I never really know which type of "a" is going to come out of my mouth.

I like the Liverpudlian accent's melodic cadence, which lends itself to the humour the city is famed for. But I wouldn't say it was my favourite. I feel a solidarity with Brummies, because the accent is disparaged as much as the scouse one. I quite like the Yorkshire accent, which I say not only because the boss has a twinge of it.

I do like received pronunciation, although apparently it is spoken by only 2% of the population - and 99.9% of BBC presenters. The Queen's speech, I'm so sorry, has come to sound absurd, with a touch of the Bond villain. I wouldn't want the upper classes to dilute their accents, however; I don't think anybody should be coerced in such a way.

I really was not a fan of cockney - but then along came Adele. Glaswegian is great.

But my favourite accent is to be found in Belfast; a Northern Irish accent immediately adds three points to a person's attractiveness. It has the friendliness of scouse, but is much softer and more charming.

I used to have an ex-girlfriend who, I'm ashamed to say, I frequently asked to say "power shower". She was not, she told me many times, "a performing monkey". But whenever she relented, I soaked in that "power shower" just as I would a deeply pleasurable, relaxing bath. And how, then, did you pronounce that final word?

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From melodic scouse to Adele's cockney - I love the UK's regional accents | Hannah Jane Parkinson

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am from Liverpool, so am well versed in regional accents. Mine was never pronounced (so to speak) and, after living abroad, then Oxford and now London, it slip-slides; a baby deer on ice. Often people narrow their eyes at me, trying to work out where I am from.

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The UK should follow France and make accent discrimination illegal

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that we are judged by the way we speak- it's one of the first things we notice when we meet new people. If we weren't, surveys about the sexiest and ugliest accents in Britain wouldn't catch our attention every two months, your colleague's noxious plus one would stop repeating what you say in a cheap imitation of your voice at after-work socials, and the most powerful positions in the UK wouldn't be filled by people who speak in received pronunciation.

On Friday, French politicians voted that accents do matter, and deemed them so important that discrimination against someone for having one is now illegal.

France may have different reasons for making accents a protected characteristic - a government minister openly mocking a reporter from Toulouse for the way she spoke being a shining example - but it is my view that we would benefit greatly from having a law like this in the UK.

It will come as no surprise that I'm writing this as a person with a regional accent. When I left my hometown of Hull behind in 2010, I didn't question how I spoke, because it was the same as everyone around me. But since then, strangers, potential employers and people with no clue of how to chat a person up have openly mocked the way I speak, thinking it fair game in polite conversation.

While no-one is asking the Government to ban rubbish jokes, it is clear that these examples are based on a widely-held belief: some accents are better than others, and the ones that don't fit into the mould indicate that someone deserves to be judged. If people act on commonly held conceptions about people with an accent, they are in turn acting on a prejudice based on who a person is and where they come from.

A third of employees feel the need to "soften their accent" at work to sound more professional, and leading US security adviser Fiona Hill recently said she would have struggled to claim a top job in the UK because of her Geordie accent. In 2016, as an aspiring broadcast journalist, I was encouraged to take elocution lessons before going on the airwaves.

Accent prejudices have become enshrined in the UK partly because having a regional accent is closely linked to our class background. In our notoriously class-obsessed society, we fail to value the contribution working-class people make. This relies on the old trope that the majority of working-class people, who are more likely to face poverty and bleak social outcomes, are less capable because they did not have the opportunity to take a job, or simply had different priorities to middle-class or upper-class people. When these widely-held beliefs remain unchallenged, they run the risk of further entrenching these inequalities, and affecting social mobility.

The upshot of my own experience is that I was lucky enough to study accentology at university, and learn about these biases first-hand. In our series i sound like, we are creating a map of how different people speak across the UK, looking into how their local history and cultural heritage has shaped the way they speak today. Even in these areas where accents are a point of pride, experts are finding members of the younger generation are washing their hands of their accents in the likes of Cornwall and Norwich to avoid being judged and stereotyped.

A homogenous society does not act as a great equaliser. It benefits the powerful and the minority who speak in received pronunciation, which is, ironically, an accent itself. Classifying accent discrimination as a protected characteristic would benefit those who need the most support in society, and show people from across the UK and beyond that their words and thoughts are valuable, in every which way they say them.
Jasmine Andersson is a reporter at i

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The UK should follow France and make accent discrimination illegal

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that we are judged by the way we speak- it's one of the first things we notice when we meet new people.

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In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable lesson, my English-teacher mother once laughingly told a Year 7 student that he was a cheatercock.

Silence fell across the classroom, until one brave child put up her hand hesitantly and asked, "Miss? What did you just say?"

My mother had accidentally switched into familect. Dialects are language variants tied to geographic areas, sociolects are ways of speaking linked to social groups, but familects are the most intimate form of language. They're what we speak at home when we've come in from work, kicked off our shoes and taken our linguistic bras off.

Inside the privacy of our own homes, we evolve our own slangs, shorthand, nicknames, insults and dialects exclusively reserved for ventriloquising the complex inner monologues of our pets. "Cheatercock" had taken root in our familect after I returned from an extended visit to a friend in Bangladesh with pictures, salwar kameez clothing and a hefty chunk of Anglo-Bengali slang. Unlike me, it did not travel well.

Schools have their own peculiar language

Like families, professional bodies and criminal fraternities, schools have their own ways of speaking. The oldest and most elite public schools are infamous for it.

The language used at Winchester College, for example, has its own name, Notions, and some of it is more than 600 years old. Traditionally, new pupils had to learn it by Christmas of their first year - a term in which both the familects and families of boys were erased and replaced with new social and linguistic loyalty to the school.

As the 1891 Winchester Word Book explains, a boy no longer had anything as common as a family. Instead, he had a "pitch-up", comprised of "his pater, mater, frater and soror". "Nunky and nevy," the guide pauses to caution, "are now obsolete," thus sparing us the embarrassment of dropping a gauche "nunky" in the wrong circles.

But it's not just expensive schools that have their own ways of speaking. When I started teaching at my London comprehensive, I was handed a site map full of confident, carefully labelled, entirely baffling references to the "Volumetric Building".

In the eight years since then, I have asked for explanations several times - "But surely all buildings have volume?" - and have been met with polite confusion. It is the Volumetric Building because it has always been the Volumetric Building and will always be the Volumetric building, world without end.

A perfectly puliminal teacher

When you ask people about the specific vocabularies of their schools, it's places like this they remember: oddly named buildings, corridors of confusing provenance and underwhelming play areas with overwhelming titles. One school's barren concrete zone is the Garden, and another's is the Meadow. One establishment has a shameless Lady Garden.

Some children travel between buildings through a Breeze Way, some via the MUGAS, some though an Inside-Outside Area, and still others through the Covered Way - as if, their teacher remarked, "the rest of the school was roofless and open to the stars".

Learning to speak the language and navigate the built environment is a crucial part of learning to belong to a school - a part just as important as ill-fitting polyester blazers. These language variations identify us as members of our unique little institutional families just as thoroughly as a Winchester boy identifies himself when he opens his mouth and Notions pour out.

Perhaps the closest thing to a familect, however, is what we speak in our classrooms - in the shared language of teachers and the young people who they are dragging through the curriculum whether they like it or not.

These vocabularies are temporary lexical worlds built from jokes, accidents, quirks of the teacher's individual style, and that one time in Year 10 when Sarah thought "puliminal" was a word and wasn't allowed to forget it until the end of Year 11.

The students in one of my classes would shout out "That's ligneous!" when presented with ridiculous vocabulary: a word that joined our classroom familect after an unfortunate writing incident involving a thesaurus and a description of wooden chairs.

Every time I open a presentation for my current Year 11s, they refer to it as my "esteemed colleague". One Year 10 class studied Spectacles instead of the more usual An Inspector Calls, and a Year 9 group several years ago read Tickle a Mockingbird. I myself have fond memories of studying Shakespeare's As You Dislike It Intensely at A level.

In recent years, students have variously encouraged one another to reach giddy literary analytic heights by "deeping" the text, "putting a donk on it", or making "unicorn points".

We have to learn the language of our schools. They existed before us and will continue to exist long after we are gone: we adapt to them, not the other way around.

But our classes have more in common with our families. Both are comprised of people who did not choose one another. Both require that we develop a shared set of habits within a shared set of walls. And both are intense sites for the production of new words - whether you're a cheatercock, a nuncle or a perfectly puliminal teacher.
Tabitha McIntosh is an English teacher and key stage 5 manager at a comprehensive school in outer London. She tweets as @TabitaSurge

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All our classrooms have their own unique language

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In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable lesson, my English-teacher mother once laughingly told a Year 7 student that he was a cheatercock. Silence fell across the classroom, until one brave child put up her hand hesitantly and asked, "Miss? What did you just say?" My mother had accidentally switched into familect.

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By Paige Neal-Holder BBC News

Have you ever used any of these words before?

Fam, imagine if man said you couldn't use words like "peng", basically and "dem tings dere" in your classroom.

Didn't understand any of that?

This might be because you were born in a different generation.

Just imagine if you were not allowed to use slang words that meant "beautiful" or "lots" when you were in school.

That is the case for some students, who are being urged to ditch slang words in lessons in order to teach them how to use formal English.

In fact, some schools have even introduced anti-slang posters and stickers, grammar police badges and word jails, where slang is written on posters with jail images.

Does that mean that pupils studying there have to tell their classmates they look "jolly well splendid" rather than a "peng ting"?

Dr Cushing took this picture on one of his visits to a school

However, a linguistics expert is warning that slang bans may actually cause more harm than good.

"There's no incorrect or correct way of using language," says Ian Cushing, a lecturer in education at Brunel University London.

He carried out a study by visiting schools and speaking to teachers in England over a year and found examples of slang being banned and policed in lessons.

These students talk us through their favourite slang words

These included words such as "peng", "bare" or abbreviations such as "emosh" for emotional.

There were slang bans at about 20 of the schools he visited, which were mostly located in urban areas.

"Language is just one part of your identity - just the same way you wear your hair and clothes," said Dr Cushing.

"Young people will police their own language - they don't need other people to police it for them, they understand the context of their situation, and know when to shift it accordingly.

"Shakespeare is full of slang and we don't see teachers banning that - there's a hypocrisy here, which is rooted in cultural and linguistic snobbery."

Do you know these slang terms?

Peng = someone who is good-looking

Bare = lots of or a large amount of

Fam = short for family or a close friend

Bruv = short for brother

Bait = when something is blatantly obvious

Calm = no problem

The linguistics academic says slang is a natural way of speaking, and banning it may be a threat to a person's identity.

It may also make students feel discriminated against and less motivated to take part in lessons.

"Young people are typically the innovators of language change, so actually we should be celebrating that rather than banning it in the classroom," said Dr Cushing.

Slang ban ain't the one

Francesca, a student at South Thames College, a further education college in Wandsworth, south-west London, says she is allowed to use slang in her lessons.

But the idea of a slang ban on students does not appeal to her.

"It's like taking away their voice in a way," says the business student, warning that young people might feel they were unable to "express themselves".

"I think it will end up driving more students to not want to communicate.

"I would probably end up getting in trouble for things that would slip out, not by purpose," she says, adding that a slang ban could stop students wanting to "interact" in the classroom.

These students have no qualms showing off their favourite slang words...

Fellow student Tomas migrated to England five years ago and could not speak English.

He started learning slang in secondary school and now uses it with his friends.

"I think if slang was banned in primary or secondary, it would be understandable, because that's when children are growing and start listening to slang," he says.

"On one hand I think it should be banned, because it will help children and young adults to learn and be prepared for the working world. But banning it can also mean that the freedom of speech for some people can be affected."

Imran is a fan of slang word "fam"

Another student, Imran, says: "If my teacher told me that I cannot use slang words, I will feel a bit uncomfortable, mainly because it's not harming anybody.

"Slang is something that I've grown up with and it's just something that I wouldn't be able to finish the sentence with, without using it.

"There are cultures that use slang as a language, and if it's being stopped, they wouldn't be able to communicate with people the way they previously did when slang was involved."

Maybe using slang in school ain't that bad after all, innit?

Shakespeare remixed: Putting urban slang into Othello

However, other people argue that a slang ban is indeed necessary.

Chris McGovern, chairman of Campaign for Real Education, says allowing slang is not doing any favours for underprivileged children.

He says they are left in an "employment gutter" because of their "linguistic impoverishment".

"Nurturing street slang is fine for linguistic acrobats such as Cambridge graduate Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego, Ali G," he says.

"It is much more difficult for that 20% of school leavers who, according to employers' organisations, are largely unemployable because of poor literacy.

"In the UK today, around nine million adults are functionally illiterate, and many of them suffer under-employment, unemployment or destitution as a consequence."

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Should schools be allowed to ban slang words like 'peng'?

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Research suggests that slang bans in schools may be more harmful than good.

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Political correctness: the power of language

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Political correctness: the power of language

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hree weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength. Donald Trump had run as a candidate whose primary qualification was that he was not "a politician". Depicting yourself as a "maverick" or an "outsider" crusading against a corrupt Washington establishment is the oldest trick in American politics - but Trump took things further. He broke countless unspoken rules regarding what public figures can or cannot do and say.

Every demagogue needs an enemy. Trump's was the ruling elite, and his charge was that they were not only failing to solve the greatest problems facing Americans, they were trying to stop anyone from even talking about those problems. "The special interests, the arrogant media, and the political insiders, don't want me to talk about the crime that is happening in our country," Trump said in one late September speech. "They want me to just go along with the same failed policies that have caused so much needless suffering."

Trump claimed that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were willing to let ordinary Americans suffer because their first priority was political correctness. "They have put political correctness above common sense, above your safety, and above all else," Trump declared after a Muslim gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando. "I refuse to be politically correct." What liberals might have seen as language changing to reflect an increasingly diverse society - in which citizens attempt to avoid giving needless offence to one another - Trump saw a conspiracy.

Throughout an erratic campaign, Trump consistently blasted political correctness, blaming it for an extraordinary range of ills and using the phrase to deflect any and every criticism. During the first debate of the Republican primaries, Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Trump how he would answer the charge that he was "part of the war on women".

"You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs,' and 'disgusting animals'," Kelly pointed out. "You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees ..."

"I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct," Trump answered, to audience applause. "I've been challenged by so many people, I don't frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time either."

Trump used the same defence when critics raised questions about his statements on immigration. In June 2015, after Trump referred to Mexicans as "rapists", NBC, the network that aired his reality show The Apprentice, announced that it was ending its relationship with him. Trump's team retorted that, "NBC is weak, and like everybody else is trying to be politically correct."

In August 2016, after saying that the US district judge Gonzalo Curiel of San Diego was unfit to preside over the lawsuit against Trump Universities because he was Mexican American and therefore likely to be biased against him, Trump told CBS News that this was "common sense". He continued: "We have to stop being so politically correct in this country."During the second presidential debate, Trump answered a question about his proposed "ban on Muslims" by stating: " We could be very politically correct, but whether we like it or not, there is a problem."

Trump and his followers never defined 'political correctness", or specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to

Every time Trump said something "outrageous" commentators suggested he had finally crossed a line and that his campaign was now doomed. But time and again, Trump supporters made it clear that they liked him because he wasn't afraid to say what he thought. Fans praised the way Trump talked much more often than they mentioned his policy proposals. He tells it like it is, they said. He speaks his mind. He is not politically correct.

Trump and his followers never defined "political correctness", or specified who was enforcing it. They did not have to. The phrase conjured powerful forces determined to suppress inconvenient truths by policing language.

There is an obvious contradiction involved in complaining at length, to an audience of hundreds of millions of people, that you are being silenced. But this idea - that there is a set of powerful, unnamed actors, who are trying to control everything you do, right down to the words you use - is trending globally right now. Britain's rightwing tabloids issue frequent denunciations of "political correctness gone mad" and rail against the smug hypocrisy of the "metropolitan elite". In Germany, conservative journalists and politicians are making similar complaints: after the assaults on women in Cologne last New Year's Eve, for instance, the chief of police Rainer Wendt said that leftists pressuring officers to be politisch korrekt had prevented them from doing their jobs. In France, Marine Le Pen of the Front National has condemned more traditional conservatives as " paralysed by their fear of confronting political correctness ".

Trump's incessant repetition of the phrase has led many writers since the election to argue that the secret to his victory was a backlash against excessive "political correctness". Some have argued that Hillary Clinton failed because she was too invested in that close relative of political correctness, "identity politics". But upon closer examination, "political correctness" becomes an impossibly slippery concept. The term is what Ancient Greek rhetoricians would have called an "exonym": a term for another group, which signals that the speaker does not belong to it. Nobody ever describes themselves as "politically correct". The phrase is only ever an accusation.

If you say that something is technically correct, you are suggesting that it is wrong - the adverb before "correct" implies a "but". However, to say that a statement is politically correct hints at something more insidious. Namely, that the speaker is acting in bad faith. He or she has ulterior motives, and is hiding the truth in order to advance an agenda or to signal moral superiority. To say that someone is being "politically correct" discredits them twice. First, they are wrong. Second, and more damningly, they know it.

If you go looking for the origins of the phrase, it becomes clear that there is no neat history of political correctness. There have only been campaigns against something called "political correctness". For 25 years, invoking this vague and ever-shifting enemy has been a favourite tactic of the right. Opposition to political correctness has proved itself a highly effective form of crypto-politics. It transforms the political landscape by acting as if it is not political at all. Trump is the deftest practitioner of this strategy yet.

ost Americans had never heard the phrase "politically correct" before 1990, when a wave of stories began to appear in newspapers and magazines. One of the first and most influential was published in October 1990 by the New York Times reporter Richard Bernstein, who warned - under the headline " The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct " - that the country's universities were threatened by "a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform".

Bernstein had recently returned from Berkeley, where he had been reporting on student activism. He wrote that there was an "unofficial ideology of the university", according to which "a cluster of opinions about race, ecology, feminism, culture and foreign policy defines a kind of 'correct' attitude toward the problems of the world". For instance, "Biodegradable garbage bags get the PC seal of approval. Exxon does not."

Bernstein's alarming dispatch in America's paper of record set off a chain reaction, as one mainstream publication after another rushed to denounce this new trend. The following month, the Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz decried the "brave new world of ideological zealotry" at American universities. In December, the cover of Newsweek - with a circulation of more than 3 million - featured the headline "THOUGHT POLICE" and yet another ominous warning: "There's a 'politically correct' way to talk about race, sex and ideas. Is this the New Enlightenment - or the New McCarthyism?" A similar story graced the cover of New York magazine in January 1991 - inside, the magazine proclaimed that "The New Fascists" were taking over universities. In April, Time magazine reported on "a new intolerance" that was on the rise across campuses nationwide.

If you search ProQuest, a digital database of US magazines and newspapers, you find that the phrase "politically correct" rarely appeared before 1990. That year, it turned up more than 700 times. In 1991, there are more than 2,500 instances. In 1992, it appeared more than 2,800 times. Like Indiana Jones movies, these pieces called up enemies from a melange of old wars: they compared the "thought police" spreading terror on university campuses to fascists, Stalinists, McCarthyites, "Hitler Youth", Christian fundamentalists, Maoists and Marxists.

Many of these articles recycled the same stories of campus controversies from a handful of elite universities, often exaggerated or stripped of context. The New York magazine cover story opened with an account of a Harvard history professor, Stephan Thernstrom, being attacked by overzealous students who felt he had been racially insensitive: "Whenever he walked through the campus that spring, down Harvard's brick paths, under the arched gates, past the fluttering elms, he found it hard not to imagine the pointing fingers, the whispers. Racist. There goes the racist. It was hellish, this persecution."

In an interview that appeared soon afterwards in The Nation, Thernstrom said the harassment described in the New York article had never happened. There had been one editorial in the Harvard Crimson student newspaper criticising his decision to read extensively from the diaries of plantation owners in his lectures. But the description of his harried state was pure "artistic licence". No matter: the image of college students conducting witch hunts stuck. When Richard Bernstein published a book based on his New York Times reporting on political correctness, he called it Dictatorship of Virtue: Multiculturalism and the Battle for America's Future - a title alluding to the Jacobins of the French Revolution. In the book he compared American college campuses to France during the Reign of Terror, during which tens of thousands of people were executed within months.

one of the stories that introduced themenace of political correctnesscould pinpoint where or when it had begun. Nor were they very precise when they explained the origins of the phrase itself. Journalists frequently mentioned the Soviets - Bernstein observed that the phrase "smacks of Stalinist orthodoxy"- but there is no exact equivalent in Russian. (The closest would be " ideinost ", which translates as "ideological correctness". But that word has nothing to do with disadvantaged people or minorities.) The intellectual historian LD Burnett has found scattered examples of doctrines or people being described as "politically correct" in American communist publications from the 1930s - usually, she says, in a tone of mockery.

The phrase came into more widespread use in American leftist circles in the 1960s and 1970s - most likely as an ironic borrowing from Mao, who delivered a famous speech in 1957 that was translated into English with the title "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People".

Until the late 1980s, 'political correctness' was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically

Ruth Perry, a literature professor at MIT who was active in the feminist and civil rights movements, says that many radicals were reading the Little Red Book in the late 1960s and 1970s, and surmises that her friends may have picked up the adjective "correct" there. But they didn't use it in the way Mao did. "Politically correct" became a kind of in-joke among American leftists - something you called a fellow leftist when you thought he or she was being self-righteous. "The term was always used ironically," Perry says, "always calling attention to possible dogmatism."

In 1970, the African-American author and activist Toni Cade Bambara, used the phrase in an essay about strains on gender relations within her community. No matter how "politically correct" her male friends thought they were being, she wrote many of them were failing to recognise the plight of black women.

Until the late 1980s, "political correctness" was used exclusively within the left, and almost always ironically as a critique of excessive orthodoxy. In fact, some of the first people to organise against "political correctness" were a group of feminists who called themselves the Lesbian Sex Mafia. In 1982, they held a "Speakout on Politically Incorrect Sex" at a theatre in New York's East Village - a rally against fellow feminists who had condemned pornography and BDSM. Over 400 women attended, many of them wearing leather and collars, brandishing nipple clamps and dildos. The writer and activist Mirtha Quintanales summed up the mood when she told the audience, "We need to have dialogues about S&M issues, not about what is 'politically correct, politically incorrect'."

By the end of the 1980s, Jeff Chang, the journalist and hip-hop critic, who has written extensively on race and social justice, recalls that the activists he knew then in the Bay Area used the phrase"in a jokey way - a way for one sectarian to dismiss another sectarian's line".

But soon enough, the term was rebranded by the right, who turned its meaning inside out. All of a sudden, instead of being a phrase that leftists used to check dogmatic tendencies within their movement, "political correctness" became a talking point for neoconservatives. They said that PC constituted a leftwing political programme that was seizing control of American universities and cultural institutions - and they were determined to stop it.

he right had been waging a campaign against liberal academics for more than a decade. Starting in the mid-1970s, a handful of conservative donors had funded the creation of dozens of new thinktanks and "training institutes" offering programmes in everything from "leadership" to broadcast journalism to direct-mail fundraising. They had endowed fellowships for conservative graduate students, postdoctoral positions and professorships at prestigious universities. Their stated goal was to challenge what they saw as the dominance of liberalism and attack left-leaning tendencies within the academy.

Starting in the late 1980s, this well-funded conservative movement entered the mainstream with a series of improbable bestsellers that took aim at American higher education. The first, by the University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, came out in 1987. For hundreds of pages, The Closing of the American Mind argued that colleges were embracing a shallow "cultural relativism" and abandoning long-established disciplines and standards in an attempt to appear liberal and to pander to their students. It sold more than 500,000 copies and inspired numerous imitations.

In April 1990, Roger Kimball, an editor at the conservative journal, The New Criterion, published Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education. Like Bloom, Kimball argued that an "assault on the canon" was taking place and that a "politics of victimhood" had paralysed universities. As evidence, he cited the existence of departments such as African American studies and women's studies. He scornfully quoted the titles of papers he had heard at academic conferences, such as "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" or "The Lesbian Phallus: Does Heterosexuality Exist?"

In June 1991, the young Dinesh D'Souza followed Bloom and Kimball with Illiberal Education: the Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. Whereas Bloom had bemoaned the rise of relativism and Kimball had attacked what he called "liberal fascism", and what he considered frivolous lines of scholarly inquiry, D'Souza argued that admissions policies that took race into consideration were producing a "new segregation on campus" and "an attack on academic standards". The Atlantic printed a 12,000 word excerpt as its June cover story. To coincide with the release, Forbes ran another article by D'Souza with the title: "Visigoths in Tweed."

These books did not emphasise the phrase "political correctness", and only D'Souza used the phrase directly. But all three came to be regularly cited in the flood of anti-PC articles that appeared in venues such as the New York Times and Newsweek. When they did, the authors were cited as neutral authorities. Countless articles uncritically repeated their arguments.

In some respects, these books and articles were responding to genuine changes taking place within academia. It is true that scholars had become increasingly sceptical about whether it was possible to talk about timeless, universal truths that lay beyond language and representation. European theorists who became influential in US humanities departments during the 1970s and 1980s argued that individual experience was shaped by systems of which the individual might not be aware - and particularly by language. Michel Foucault, for instance, argued that all knowledge expressed historically specific forms of power. Jacques Derrida, a frequent target of conservative critics, practised what he called "deconstruction", rereading the classics of philosophy in order to show that even the most seemingly innocent and straightforward categories were riven with internal contradictions. The value of ideals such as "humanity" or "liberty" could not be taken for granted.

It was also true that many universities were creating new "studies departments", which interrogated the experiences, and emphasised the cultural contributions of groups that had previously been excluded from the academy and from the canon: queer people, people of colour and women. This was not so strange. These departments reflected new social realities. The demographics of college students were changing, because the demographics of the United States were changing. By 1990, only two-thirds of Americans under 18 were white. In California, the freshman classes at many public universities were "majority minority", or more than 50% non-white. Changes to undergraduate curriculums reflected changes in the student population.

The responses that the conservative bestsellers offered to the changes they described were disproportionate and often misleading. For instance, Bloom complained at length about the "militancy" of African American students at Cornell University, where he had taught in the 1960s. He never mentioned what students demanding the creation of African American studies were responding to: the biggest protest at Cornell took place in 1969 after a cross burning on campus, an open KKK threat. (An arsonist burned down the Africana Studies Center, founded in response to these protests, in 1970.)

More than any particular obfuscation or omission, the most misleading aspect of these books was the way they claimed that only their adversaries were "political". Bloom, Kimball, and D'Souza claimed that they wanted to "preserve the humanistic tradition", as if their academic foes were vandalising a canon that had been enshrined since time immemorial. But canons and curriculums have always been in flux; even in white Anglo-America there has never been any one stable tradition. Moby Dick was dismissed as Herman Melville's worst book until the mid-1920s. Many universities had only begun offering literature courses in "living" languages a decade or so before that.

In truth, these crusaders against political correctness were every bit as political as their opponents. As Jane Mayer documents in her book, Dark Money: the Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Bloom and D'Souza were funded by networks of conservative donors - particularly the Koch, Olin and Scaife families - who had spent the 1980s building programmes that they hoped would create a new "counter-intelligentsia". (The New Criterion, where Kimball worked, was also funded by the Olin and Scaife Foundations.)In his 1978 book A Time for Truth, William Simon, the president of the Olin Foundation, had called on conservatives to fund intellectuals who shared their views: "They must be given grants, grants, and more grants in exchange for books, books, and more books."

These skirmishes over syllabuses were part of a broader political programme - and they became instrumental to forging a new alliance for conservative politics in America, between white working-class voters and small business owners, and politicians with corporate agendas that held very little benefit for those people.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered incomprehensible ("The Lesbian Phallus"), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation - the force that was taking away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people - attacking it allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign "others".

PC was a useful invention for the Republican right because it helped the movement to drive a wedge between working-class people and the Democrats who claimed to speak for them. "Political correctness" became a term used to drum into the public imagination the idea that there was a deep divide between the "ordinary people" and the "liberal elite", who sought to control the speech and thoughts of regular folk.Opposition to political correctness also became a way to rebrand racism in ways that were politically acceptable in the post-civil-rights era.

Soon, Republican politicians were echoing on the national stage the message that had been product-tested in the academy. In May 1991, President George HW Bush gave a commencement speech at the University of Michigan. In it, he identified political correctness as a major danger to America. "Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States," Bush said. "The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land," but, he warned, "In their own Orwellian way, crusades that demand correct behaviour crush diversity in the name of diversity."

Illustration: Nathalie Lees

fter 2001, debates about political correctness faded from public view, replaced by arguments about Islam and terrorism. But in the final years of the Obama presidency, political correctness made a comeback. Or rather, anti-political-correctness did.

As Black Lives Matter and movements against sexual violence gained strength, a spate of thinkpieces attacked the participants in these movements, criticising and trivialising them by saying that they were obsessed with policing speech. Once again, the conversation initially focused on universities, but the buzzwords were new. Rather than "difference" and "multiculturalism", Americans in 2012 and 2013 started hearing about "trigger warnings", "safe spaces", "microaggressions", "privilege" and "cultural appropriation".

This time, students received more scorn than professors. If the first round of anti-political-correctness evoked the spectres of totalitarian regimes, the more recent revival has appealed to the commonplace that millennials are spoiled narcissists, who want to prevent anyone expressing opinions that they happen to find offensive.

In January 2015, the writer Jonathan Chait published one of the first new, high-profile anti-PC thinkpieces in New York magazine. " Not a Very PC Thing to Say " followed the blueprint provided by the anti-PC thinkpieces that the New York Times, Newsweek, and indeed New York magazine had published in the early 1990s. Like the New York article from 1991, it began with an anecdote set on campus that supposedly demonstrated that political correctness had run amok, and then extrapolated from this incident to a broad generalisation. In 1991, John Taylor wrote: "The new fundamentalism has concocted a rationale for dismissing all dissent." In 2015, Jonathan Chait claimed that there were once again "angry mobs out to crush opposing ideas".

Chait warned that the dangers of PC had become greater than ever before. Political correctness was no longer confined to universities - now, he argued, it had taken over social media and thus "attained an influence over mainstream journalism and commentary beyond that of the old". (As evidence of the "hegemonic" influence enjoyed by unnamed actors on the left, Chait cited two female journalists saying that they had been criticised by leftists on Twitter.)

Chait's article launched a spate of replies about campus and social media "cry bullies". On the cover of their September 2015 issue, the Atlantic published an article by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff. The title, " The Coddling Of the American Mind ", nodded to the godfather of anti-PC, Allan Bloom. (Lukianoff is the head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, another organisation funded by the Olin and Scaife families.) "In the name of emotional wellbeing, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don't like," the article announced. It was shared over 500,000 times.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness stories to spread

These pieces committed many of the same fallacies that their predecessors from the 1990s had. They cherry-picked anecdotes and caricatured the subjects of their criticism. They complained that other people were creating and enforcing speech codes, while at the same time attempting to enforce their own speech codes. Their writers designated themselves the arbiters of what conversations or political demands deserved to be taken seriously, and which did not. They contradicted themselves in the same way: their authors continually complained, in highly visible publications, that they were being silenced.

The climate of digital journalism and social media sharing enabled the anti-political-correctness (and anti-anti-political correctness) stories to spread even further and faster than they had in the 1990s. Anti-PC and anti-anti-PC stories come cheap: because they concern identity, they are something that any writer can have a take on, based on his or her experiences, whether or not he or she has the time or resources to report. They are also perfect clickbait. They inspire outrage, or outrage at the outrage of others.

Meanwhile, a strange convergence was taking place. While Chait and his fellow liberals decried political correctness, Donald Trump and his followers were doing the same thing. Chait said that leftists were "perverting liberalism" and appointed himself the defender of a liberal centre; Trump said that liberal media had the system "rigged".

The anti-PC liberals were so focused on leftists on Twitter that for months they gravely underestimated the seriousness of the real threat to liberal discourse. It was not coming from women, people of colour, or queer people organising for their civil rights, on campus or elsewhere. It was coming from @realdonaldtrump, neo-Nazis, and far-right websites such as Breitbart.

he original critics of PC were academics or shadow-academics, Ivy League graduates who went around in bow ties quoting Plato and Matthew Arnold. It is hard to imagine Trump quoting Plato or Matthew Arnold, much less carping about the titles of conference papers by literature academics. During his campaign, the network of donors who funded decades of anti-PC activity - the Kochs, the Olins, the Scaifes - shunned Trump, citing concerns about the populist promises he was making. Trump came from a different milieu: not Yale or the University of Chicago, but reality television. And he was picking different fights, targeting the media and political establishment, rather than academia.

As a candidate, Trump inaugurated a new phase of anti-political-correctness. What was remarkable was just how many different ways Trump deployed this tactic to his advantage, both exploiting the tried-and-tested methods of the early 1990s and adding his own innovations.

First, by talking incessantly about political correctness, Trump established the myth that he had dishonest and powerful enemies who wanted to prevent him from taking on the difficult challenges facing the nation. By claiming that he was being silenced, he created a drama in which he could play the hero. The notion that Trump was both persecuted and heroic was crucial to his emotional appeal. It allowed people who were struggling economically or angry about the way society was changing to see themselves in him, battling against a rigged system that made them feel powerless and devalued. At the same time, Trump's swagger promised that they were strong and entitled to glory. They were great and would be great again.

Second, Trump did not simply criticise the idea of political correctness - he actually said and did the kind of outrageous things that PC culture supposedly prohibited. The first wave of conservative critics of political correctness claimed they were defending the status quo, but Trump's mission was to destroy it. In 1991, when George HW Bush warned that political correctness was a threat to free speech, he did not choose to exercise his free speech rights by publicly mocking a man with a disability or characterising Mexican immigrants as rapists. Trump did. Having elevated the powers of PC to mythic status, the draft-dodging billionaire, son of a slumlord, taunted the parents of a fallen soldier and claimed that his cruelty and malice was, in fact, courage.

This willingness to be more outrageous than any previous candidate ensured non-stop media coverage, which in turn helped Trump attract supporters who agreed with what he was saying. We should not underestimate how many Trump supporters held views that were sexist, racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic, and were thrilled to feel that he had given them permission to say so. It's an old trick: the powerful encourage the less powerful to vent their rage against those who might have been their allies, and to delude themselves into thinking that they have been liberated. It costs the powerful nothing; it pays frightful dividends.

Trump drew upon a classic element of anti-political-correctness by implying that while his opponents were operating according to a political agenda, he simply wanted to do what was sensible. He made numerous controversial policy proposals: deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, banning Muslims from entering the US, introducing stop-and-frisk policies that have been ruled unconstitutional. But by responding to critics with the accusation that they were simply being politically correct, Trump attempted to place these proposals beyond the realm of politics altogether. Something political is something that reasonable people might disagree about. By using the adjective as a put-down, Trump pretended that he was acting on truths so obvious that they lay beyond dispute. "That's just common sense."

The most alarming part of this approach is what it implies about Trump's attitude to politics more broadly. His contempt for political correctness looks a lot like contempt for politics itself. He does not talk about diplomacy; he talks about "deals". Debate and disagreement are central to politics, yet Trump has made clear that he has no time for these distractions. To play the anti-political-correctness card in response to a legitimate question about policy is to shut down discussion in much the same way that opponents of political correctness have long accused liberals and leftists of doing. It is a way of sidestepping debate by declaring that the topic is so trivial or so contrary to common sense that it is pointless to discuss it. The impulse is authoritarian. And by presenting himself as the champion of common sense, Trump gives himself permission to bypass politics altogether.

Now that he is president-elect, it is unclear whether Trump meant many of the things he said during his campaign. But, so far, he is fulfilling his pledge to fight political correctness. Last week, he told the New York Times that he was trying to build an administration filled with the "best people", though "Not necessarily people that will be the most politically correct people, because that hasn't been working."

Trump has also continued to cry PC in response to criticism. When an interviewer from Politico asked a Trump transition team member why Trump was appointing so many lobbyists and political insiders, despite having pledged to "drain the swamp" of them, the source said that "one of the most refreshing parts of ... the whole Trump style is that he does not care about political correctness." Apparently it would have been politically correct to hold him to his campaign promises.

As Trump prepares to enter the White House, many pundits have concluded that "political correctness" fuelled the populist backlash sweeping Europe and the US. The leaders of that backlash may say so. But the truth is the opposite: those leaders understood the power that anti-political-correctness has to rally a class of voters, largely white, who are disaffected with the status quo and resentful of shifting cultural and social norms. They were not reacting to the tyranny of political correctness, nor were they returning America to a previous phase of its history. They were not taking anything back. They were wielding anti-political-correctness as a weapon, using it to forge a new political landscape and a frightening future.

The opponents of political correctness always said they were crusaders against authoritarianism. In fact, anti-PC has paved the way for the populist authoritarianism now spreading everywhere. Trump is anti-political correctness gone mad.

Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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

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hree weeks ago, around a quarter of the American population elected a demagogue with no prior experience in public service to the presidency. In the eyes of many of his supporters, this lack of preparation was not a liability, but a strength.

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Linguistic analysis of relationship breakups

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Linguistic analysis of relationship breakups

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Treat with caution if recently heartbroken...

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Name: The language of breakups

Age: Timeless. Ever since Eve ate that ill-fated pomegranate, romantic relationships have been problematic. And people have to find a way of saying goodbye. But this particular ...

Hold on. Eve didn't eat a pomegranate. It was an apple. The facts are disputed. Let's not fall out over it. As I was saying before you interrupted me, this particular analysis of the language of breakups has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an American scientific journal.

Sounds a bit academic. Indeed, but with significant real-world implications.

Do I really want to hear this? You do. Three US psychologists based at the University of Texas at Austin have analysed more than a million posts by 6,800 Reddit users in the r/BreakUps subreddit ...

As one does. Could you PLEASE stop interrupting me!!! They have analysed posts from those involved in breakups and discovered that the language they were using changed three months before a breakup occurred. And it did not return to normal until at least six months afterwards.

Let me guess the linguistic giveaways: anger at being interrupted, use of capital letters and mock-ironic PLEASES; excessive use of exclamation marks. You think you're so smart, don't you? The signs are much subtler. People who are about to break up use more personal and informal language, and say "I" and "We" a lot.

How come? "These are signs that someone is carrying a heavy cognitive load," explains Sarah Seraj, the lead author of the study. "They are thinking or working through something and becoming more self-focused."

Any other signals? They use words such as "would", "should", "because" and "result" more often because they are trying to work out some process they don't understand. They also use "very" and "really" more often, and tend to resort to negatives such as "no" and "never".

You just used the word "because". A slip of the tongue, I assure you.

Um, I'm not so sure. There's a falling off in the use of "a", "the", "in" and "at", indicating a breakdown in logical thinking.

Sorry, but that sounds like total crap. I suggest your use of rude words indicates your logical thinking is breaking down.

You may be right. Are people aware when their language changes that a relationship breakdown is imminent? Apparently not. "It seems that, even before people are aware that a breakup is going to happen, it starts to affect their lives," says Seraj. Subconsciously, they know the relationship is in trouble and words they use reflect that.

I ... I mean we ... should ... Oh, what am I trying to say? I think you're trying to tell me it's over between us.

I really wanted it to work and never thought it would come to this. That's life. Just don't spend the next six months in the Reddit Break-Ups forum. Seraj says it's terrible for your mental wellbeing.

Don't sing: What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?

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We need to talk: the linguistic clues that reveal your relationship is over

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Name: The language of breakups Age: Timeless. Ever since Eve ate that ill-fated pomegranate, romantic relationships have been problematic. And people have to find a way of saying goodbye. But this particular ... Hold on. Eve didn't eat a pomegranate. It was an apple. The facts are disputed.

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Not unprecedented: 2020 – language: a feminist guide

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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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Some reference to interesting research gere

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Some reference to interesting research gere

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Toy stories – language: a feminist guide

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When words fail us – language: a feminist guide

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English has lost all manner of positive words – resurrecting them could overcome our national pessimism

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The Japanese word "aware", pronounced "ah-wah-reh", means a brief moment of transcendent beauty, symbolised by the short-lived cherry blossom. (Photo: DAVID MAREUIL/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth." From our current perspective, even a little bit of happiness might be nice - an inkling that there are brighter days ahead - but with those words George Bernard Shaw was simply voicing the familiar truth that life will always, to use an 16th-century adjective, be "merry-go-sorry", shifting between light and dark.

A riffle through a historical English dictionary - the articulation of human thoughts and experiences across centuries - suggests that the "sorry" bits have always had the edge, linguistically at least, and that happiness is a much rarer commodity.

Take the letter A. The emotions you will find there include "apanthropy": the desire to be away from other people; "abhorrence", deep disgust; the "abdabs", anxiety, usually of the "screaming" variety; "antsy", feeling agitated; "all-overish" (generally a bit "meh"); and "acedia", an apathy of body and spirit.

Even our most recent coinages are a let-down - quite literally in the case of " anticipointment ", which conveys the inevitable disappointment that follows something too eagerly anticipated.

Granted, there are some highlights amongst the gloom. "Ataraxy" describes an elusive but pure serenity, while the joyful "apricity" translates to the warmth of the sun on a winter's day. But these are rare smiles in an otherwise sombre picture.

Perhaps it is a reflection of our national tendency towards pessimism, but English is abstemious with its compliments and yet delivers insults with panache. From centuries past, the dictionary offers several epithets that could come in handy on today's social media: a "stiffrump", for example, is a reactionary who refuses to budge; the "ultracrepidarian" is one who loves to hold forth on subjects they know nothing about, and the "bloviator" is a perpetual blower of hot air.

Were you to look for similarly striking epithets for those who are fair, witty, or virtuous, you might well come up short. There is famously no synonym for love, yet we have an extensive thesaurus for hate. It's more difficult to #BeKind when we don't have the words to articulate it.

Where are the lost positives that once existed - the couth to go with the uncouth, the mayed, the ept, the wieldy and ruth, the gormful, reckful and feckful? Each has been nudged out by their wholly negative siblings, which continue to be aired with gusto.

Melancholy has found expression in so many ways - whether it's the mubble-fubbles of the 16th century, or the blue devils and black dogs of the 17th. Some of our best-loved words are expressions of petulance, irritability, or sheer confusion - those like discombobulation, cantankerousness and curmudgeonly. Where are the terms for sunny, benign cheeriness? Even they tend to come with a sneer - a "gigglemug" is one who smiles too much, and so sets everyone else's teeth on edge.

English has lost words like 'apricity', which translates to the warmth of the sun on a winter's day (Photo: Tamas Zsebok/EyeEm/Getty Images)

And yet, if you look hard enough beyond the frowns, you can still find sparkle in the corners of the dictionary. There are expressions to be had of positivity, of joy for others, and of happiness in the moment. Over the next few months, for example, we can hope to delight in "respair": the unsung enemy of despair and which, in the 16th century at least, meant fresh hope and a recovery from despondency. And there is always "confelicity": the unselfish joy in someone else's pleasure.

Other positive words from a precious collection include "resipiscence", the return to a better state of mind. The equally ungainly "redamancy" is worthy of mention simply because, uniquely in the vocabulary of love, it expresses the act of loving back. And we should all aspire to be "goodwilly" - well-disposed and benevolent towards others (the bonny counterpart to its darker siblings "ill-willy" and "evil-willy").

Do other languages "do" happiness better? Certainly those of the Mediterranean sound as sunny and soothing as their skies and oceans. We can turn to many different tongues for the filling of stubborn gaps in our own language - to the Tagalog of the Philippines, for example, that offers gigil for the irresistible and joyful urge to squeeze something cute.

Tim Lomas, a lecturer in positive psychology at the University of East London, collects expressions of happiness from other languages, like the Chinese kǔ qù gān lái - a description of the journey through pain to sweetness and relief (we all need some of that).

Of course, other languages do longing and wistfulness beautifully too - whether it's the Portuguese saudade or the Welsh hiraeth. Yearning and melancholy tend to go hand in hand, and many cultures capture the bitter-sweetness of a happiness that is destined to fade. The Japanese, for example, have aware: a brief moment of transcendent beauty, symbolised by the shortlived but overwhelming majesty of the cherry blossom.

Perhaps the etymology of "happiness" is the most telling. It is built upon the obsolete "hap", meaning "chance" or "luck", which typically survives only in the negative word "hapless". But if our pessimism finds ample expression in the dictionary, proof exists that positivity can bring its own luck. Surely remembering the lost happinesses of our language would be a very good place to start.
Susie Dent is a lexicographer and etymologist. She has appeared in 'Dictionary Corner' on the Channel 4 quiz 'Countdown' since 1992.

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English has lost all manner of positive words - resurrecting them would be a vote for optimism

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"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth." From our current perspective, even a little bit of happiness might be nice - an inkling that there are brighter days ahead - but with those words George Bernard Shaw was simply voicing the familiar truth that life will always, to use an 16th-century adjective, be "merry-go-sorry", shifting between light and dark.

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Blah blah blah fronted adverbials blah blah blah

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Blah blah blah fronted adverbials blah blah blah

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How to kill the English language | The Spectator

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Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a 'fronted adverbial' is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schooling a seven-year-old. Forgive me if in mentioning it I retraumatise members of category c).

'Fronted adverbials' have become something of a cause célèbre among the parents of primary school children. They even occasioned a prime ministerial joke, interpreted in some quarters as a dig at a certain former education secretary, about 'every detail of the syllabus, from fronted adverbials to quadratic equations'. This term for what others know as a sentence modifier - essentially, a word or clause that qualifies the main part of a sentence - has become a metonym for a whole approach to language teaching. It's an approach that has baffled many parents, exasperates experienced educators (try getting Michael Rosen started on this stuff), and seems to issue in some very odd and potentially counterproductive ideas about how sentences are best formed.

Let's take that example, to start with. Why the special interest in 'fronted' modifiers? 'Fronted', by the way, is a gruesomely clumsy usage to indicate that it's a pre--modifier, i.e. coming at the beginning of a sentence. 'Before he could teach me any more grammar, I scarpered' isn't intrinsically more valuable than 'I scarpered before he could teach me any more grammar'. Indeed, a sensible piece of advice on clear writing is to form 'right-branching' sentences - i.e. to put the main clause as close to the beginning of a sentence as possible. If you're rewarded for rewriting a whole block of text inserting pre-modifiers, you might arrive at the idea that sentences that start that way are better than the other sort.

It's not just fronted adverbials. The other day, for instance, my nine-year-old was asked to rewrite a series of sentences using modal verbs. I have - humblebrag alert - a semi-decent amateur grasp of this sort of material. I studied English at university, whipped through Saussure, Chomsky, Pinker and co, wrote about pidgins and creoles as part of my finals, and have published a general-audience book about English grammar. Still, I hesitated. What the hell is a modal verb?

I had to check my own book to remind myself what counts as a modal verb ('could' and 'should', yup; 'may' and 'might', sure - but 'will' or 'won't'?). Pretty soon I was into the thickets of epistemic and deontic modality, which was no help to anyone. In any case, it was quite unclear in the examples we were given why the insertion of a bunch of modal verbs would improve those sentences. At other times we've been asked to add two or three adjectives to every noun in order to make the sentences more vivid and exciting: but if you do that you just end up sounding like the late Lynda Lee-Potter, bless her adjective-bothering heart.

One problem with all this, it seems to me, is that we're mistaking teaching nine-year-olds how to use language for teaching them something closer to linguistics. It's a meta-subject: if you're teaching a young person to drive, you want them to learn the Highway Code, not how to strip and reassemble an internal combustion engine. The other problem is that the advice is a mishmash, and often questionable if not outright wrong. Undergraduate-level snatches of linguistics are mixed up with decades-old shibboleths of the sort that please pedants and cause actual linguists to slap their foreheads.

I've had my seven-year-old telling me off for starting sentences with conjunctions. And it came out not long ago that examiners had determined that no sentence ending in an exclamation point could be marked correct unless it began with 'How' or 'What'. That is flat wrong. Even hoary old Fowler allows wishes, commands, calls for attention, cries of alarm, shouting.

Grammarian-in-chief Michael Gove, who has driven much of this, once sent a memo to his staff deploring - another of those ancient shibboleths - the passive voice: 'Use the active, not the passive voice. Ministers have decided to increase spending on the poorest children. Poorer children are not having a harder time under this government.' Both the sentences he quoted were - duh! - in the active voice. Shades, here, of the one-time US vice-president Dan Quayle solemnly correcting the word 'potato' to 'potatoe' for the world's media.

The impression I have is that teachers - much against many of their best instincts - have had foisted on them a primary-school curriculum that looks for ways of teaching language that can be marked and quantified: that is, in which you can count the number of modal verbs or fronted adverbials or attributive adjectives there on the page. Reassuring to Whitehall, which likes metrics. Not a great idea, I suspect, for kids.

The thing is this. You can mark grammar when it makes writing bad - put a big red cross against that dangling modifier, that borked agreement or misconjugated verb - but the way in which a particular construction will improve a piece of writing is a much, much more fugitive question. The things that make sentences sing are situational, and instinctive - not formulaic.

That's hard to teach, of course. You learn by doing - by reading and writing and listening. But be not discouraged: the amazing thing is that kids learn grammar instinctively. And as the teacher and writer Kate Clanchy's experience shows (she shares the extraordinarily good poems her teenage students write online), they learn a lot more than just grammar given encouragement. My worry is that they may unlearn it if they're getting a row of ticks for bollocksing up a perfectly good piece of prose by stuffing it full of random grammatical objects just to show it's possible to do so.

Modifying clauses, modal verbs, adjectives, shifts of voice - these are all just objects in the toolkit. They only make sense inasmuch as they are called into use, in a particular situation, to serve their purposes at the right time. I'm reminded of the old parable about people finding a great number of large rocks near the shore, counting and measuring and cataloguing them - and not at any point realising that if you stacked them up one on the other, and climbed to the top, you could see many miles out to sea.

Oh, yeah: 'probably'. That was the fronted adverbial. Probably.

If you're teaching someone to drive, you want them to learn the Highway Code, not how to strip an engine

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How to kill the English language | The Spectator

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Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a 'fronted adverbial' is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schoolin...

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https://thewalrus.ca/blah-blah-blah-the-lack-of-small-talk-is-breaking-our-brains/

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Exploring familects:

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When people share a space, their collective experience can sprout its own vocabulary, known as a “familect.”

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The way we use emojis evolves like language and changes their meaning - New Scientist

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karnoff/Shutterstock

The meaning of emojis changes depending on the context in which they're used and when they've been posted, according to the first study of their use over time.

Alexander Robertson at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues tracked how emojis were used between 2012 and 2018 by Twitter users. In all, 1.7 billion tweets were checked to see if they contained an emoji, with duplicate content and non-English tweets filtered out.

The tweets were then analysed with models that recognise the semantics of how words are used based ...

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The way we use emojis evolves like language and changes their meaning

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A study of emoji use on Twitter has found that their meaning changes over time over time. For example the fist bump changed from signifying a willingness to fight, to being used to support movements such as Black Lives Matter

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I am trying hard to follow the Serenity Prayer and accept the things I cannot change. I'm not talking about the last five pandemic pounds, or my inability to sleep through the night, nor even the inane decision to change all the exit numbers on the Mass. Turnpike. I can see these are fruitless crusades, and I've surrendered any chance of turning them around.

No, what I'm having trouble accepting are the corruptions of my beloved first language, which seem to get more numerous and hideous with every sunrise. I know English is a living tongue, evolving all the time, and I wouldn't want to be like the French, with an Académiethat exterminates every creeping Anglicism, like "popcorn" or "deadline."

But it's a struggle. While we were busy quarantining last July, the loathsome "irregardless" was affirmed as valid by the lexicographers at Merriam-Webster. Never mind that the 'ir' is a useless appendage (ir*re*gard*less adverb. regardless). With the tiny caveat "non-standard," Merriam-Webster nonethelesslong agoadmitted irregardless into the canon simply because "it has been in widespread and near-constant use" for decades. The tyranny of the majority, indeed.

But that's a familiar old grumble. More recently I've been cringing at the popularization of "simpatico" as a stand-in for "sympathetic." Really, no. From the Italian, simpatico simply means "nice." You are not simpatico with my views on English usage. You find me surprisingly simpatico given this curmudgeonly column. But like many other words wrested from their original meanings (problematic comes to mind, which once meant "uncertain," not "full of problems"), simpatico, meaning "like-minded," is now accepted as a secondary definition.

Then there's "fulsome," increasingly used as a synonym for "full." It is not; it means excessive, or overdone, as in "fulsome praise." But in January, I saw an article in no less an authority than The Washington Post proclaiming that two face masks "offer more fulsome protection" against COVID-19 than one. To be sure, fulsome as a synonym for "abundant" was in general use in the 13th century, but just because there was a deadly plague back then too doesn't mean we have to disinter the moldy usage today.

Where does this word inflation end? Impactful. Potentiality. Utilize. I blame the Internet, with its infinite space, for allowing simple words to balloon into blimps.

More subtle is the superfluous "of a" when modifying a noun. "He was a good of a farmer." "This is a hard of a class." Doubt me? Once you notice this peculiar usage you will be seeing it everywhere. A recent article in Business Insider informed readers that "people are finally figuring out how great of a place Boise is to live."

Another nit of mine is overwriting, especially prevalent in ad copy and instructions. "Thoroughly wash the facial area." "Place the seatback tray in the locked position.") As the critic Paul Fussell noted in his book "Class," overwriting is often a tipoff that a person is social climbing, thinking that fancier words are higher status (thus, "gratuity" for "tip").

A similar insecurity underlies the pretentious use of "myself" instead of the simpler "me." "The memo was addressed to Jean and myself," usually signals that the writer doesn't know whether to use "me" or "I," so temporizes in the middle.

And don't get me started on punctuation! Repeated exposure to the misuse of the apostrophe in "it's" hasn't made me immune from its sting. "A wise dog scratches it's own fleas." "Read my article in it's entirety." Arrgh! This common error is a puzzle to me. I understand that people figure the fleas belong to the dog, so the possessive is called for. But no one writes "Fido scratches hi's own fleas," or "the article is her's," so why the confusion over its? It's with an apostrophe is a contraction for "it is" and nothing more. His, hers, its. That's all you need to remember.

Sigh. At a time when we have trouble understanding one another at the deepest levels, I know that carping about English usage is a bit of self-indulgent snobbery. I'd much rather have people think clearly and listen carefully. Just to hear, and to be heard, would be such a balm. If we could achieve that, maybe I could let go of the grammar glitches, irregardless.

Renée Loth's column appears regularly in the Globe.

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Losing battles with the language - The Boston Globe

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I am trying hard to follow the Serenity Prayer and accept the things I cannot change. I'm not talking about the last five pandemic pounds, or my inability to sleep through the night, nor even the inane decision to change all the exit numbers on the Mass. Turnpike.