# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/may/20/rejecting-the-cult-of-bardolatry-does-not-make-you-a-philistine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At the end of last month, on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the country went barmy for the Bard. There were festivals and fetes up and down the land. There were twee recitals on street corners for the masses and opulent concerts in baroque halls for the few. National treasures assembled, dressed all in black like a sketch group at a jolly funeral, to lend their rich baritones to a gala in his name. Even the president of the United States took time out of his world tour to stop by the Globe theatre and watch a few scenes.

In fact, these celebrations were not anomalous, but merely slightly exaggerated versions of what happens every year - the worship of the god known as Shakespeare. There are thousands of Shakespeare plays put on every year across the world. People climb over each other to watch Benedict's or David's or Rory's must-see/best ever/breathtaking Hamlet. Books are published, column inches are filled, documentaries are commissioned. It is simply endless.

For many years I went along with all of this. I sat with my parents on damp picnic blankets watching travelling journeymen fumble through lines. I paid through the nose to watch the biggest names doing the biggest parts. I even went along to iconoclastic shows like Shitfaced-Shakespeare and Hip-Hop Shakespeare. I believed what I was told: that going to see any Shakespeare in any form was spiritual ambrosia, that it was my duty as a Briton to love Shakespeare, that not loving Shakespeare was somehow evidence of a philistinic contempt of the arts.

But now I'm ready to admit it: I don't like Shakespeare. Never have, really.

There's no doubt that Shakespeare had an extraordinary command of the English language. His ability to construct plays in prose and verse of different meters; his knack for memorable neology and mastery of rhetoric (the enduring familiarity and modern usage of many of his own quill-wrought words and phrases, some of which I may have quite naturally used in this piece, is legitimate evidence of Shakespeare's linguistic prowess); and his flair for the poetic flourish are all astonishing. Even Shakespeare's biggest critics - among them Leo Tolstoy and Voltaire (more from them later) - agreed that this is the case.

But Shakespeare's florid language does have a downside: to the modern ear it impedes semantic and dramatic understanding of his plays. Granted, the broad strokes of the narrative can be absorbed - for example, boy meets girl, boy/girl fall in love, boy/girl kill themselves in a credulity-stretching suicidal farce - but the language and details are certainly sub-perspicuous. Really following the plot and the highly rendered monologues and dialogue requires scholastic devotion.

That is the root of my dislike: Shakespeare is hard to understand. There are other issues to gripe about - that the never-ending Shakespeare pageantry diverts support away from new playwrights; that his androcentric stories perpetuate gender inequality in theatre; that some of his plays have racist overtones; that his plays tend to venerate the upper classes and patronise the lower - but the difficulty of the language presents the tallest obstacle. Given this barrier (and this is a given: I refuse to believe that anyone can understand a Shakespearean soliloquy as well as they can a modern conversation), why does Shakespeare retain such popularity even though it so difficult to follow? Why do thousands of people still go and watch Shakespeare every year?

Part of it comes down to the peculiar human weakness for idolatry and deference to celebrities. George Bernard Shaw said that the English "worship their great artists indiscriminately and abjectly" and described this phenomenon - the uncritical ovine devotion to Shakespeare - as "Bardolatory". Leo Tolstoy expanded on this point by saying (in a foreshadowing of GCSE English teaching): "In every man of society and time, from the first period of his conscious life, it has been inculcated that Shakespeare is a genius as a poet and a dramatist and that all his writings are the height of perfection." Ludwig Wittgenstein, that champion of linguistic clarity, felt much the same, suggesting that adoration of Shakespeare arose not "from a genuine appreciation of his works but merely through an unquestioning herd mentality among the would-be literati".

The Bardolatory cult means that Shakespeare is universally revered without reproach. A Sunday supplement review of a Shakespeare production will often criticise the direction, or the production, or the acting, but never the play itself; the most a critic will say is that X or Y Shakespeare play is "difficult" or "not my favourite". The words themselves are inviolable. Shakespeare is the mascot of all media outlets, whose Bardolising lackeys engage in a sort of necro-obsequious evangelical proselytism.

And we lap it up. Because going to see Shakespeare is cultural currency, or or "a necessary sign of gentility in a bourgeois world" as the academic Dr Erin Sullivan put it, in describing Tolstoy's view. Laughing at the right places in one of the comedies is a sign that you get the Bardy argot, which is a sign of good upbringing, of good cultural table manners. That laughter is the same as the laughter of the person who ostentatiously guffaws at a corny joke told in French at a pretentious dinner party.

Worse, this culture induces people to bluff. Friends of mine who work at the National Theatre have seen people snore their way through the longueurs of King Lear and then proclaim the performance to be the best they've ever seen. The power of the cult and the cachet that comes with it is such that some people are not prepared to admit that they do not enjoy the battle of Shakespearean comprehension. The Bard is a such an enormous cultural figure that merely questioning his worth makes one appear a seditious upstart or an unpatriotic apostate. It should not be so.

Not all Shakespeare's fans are glassy-eyed kool-aid quaffers. The more redoubtable Shakespeare advocate will say that his plays are worth the comprehensive effort because cracking them open, semantically speaking, gives you access to a world of edifying treasure. They'll say that Shakespeare's work has stood the test of time because he was a heaven-sent moral philosopher, that his divine insight into the human condition has never been bettered, that the collection of his plays is a window into the soul. Samuel Taylor Coleridge even said that Shakespeare possessed "a wisdom deeper even than consciousness". These people will also tell you that once you have the hang of Shakespeare's intricate verbal embroidery, his verse and metaphors give the plays a numinous quality that amplifies the power of each philosophical insight and makes them all the more memorable.

This argument is depressingly retrophilic. We should not think so little of our modern selves as to believe that the written word reached its apotheosis more than 400 years ago. Indeed, it is hard to argue the case for art being capable of an apotheotic moment, given the world that it describes is in constant flux. Many literary greats did not accept the primacy of Shakespeare, and neither should we.

Tolstoy: "Sincerity is completely lacking in all Shakespeare's works. In all of them one sees intentional artifice, one sees that he is not in earnest, but he is playing with words."

Bernard Shaw: "Shakespeare's weakness lies in his complete deficiency in that highest sphere of thought in which poetry embraces religion, philosophy, morality. His characters have no religion, no politics, no conscience, no hope, no convictions of any sort."

And, most viscerally, Voltaire: "Shakespeare is a drunken savage, whose plays please only those in London and Canada."

Moreover, the language barrier makes it very difficult for us to properly interrogate the themes and content that underpin Shakespeare's plays - those apparently soul-nourishing nuggets that we are encouraged to dig for. Because what happens when form inhibits meaning, as it does in Shakespeare's plays? What happens when greasepainted board-treaders hyper-enunciate their way through three hours-plus of lyrically gorgeous but semantically abstruse poetry? What happens is that too much intellectual effort is expended trying to untangle the meaning from what is written and said, and our brains become distracted, softened up, willing to accept the clumsy groping advances of the hokey messages that prey on the vulnerable. And we end up swallowing the primary colours, bold-letters-quote-on-an-Athena-poster level philosophy of "To be or not to be - that is the question". Style does not so much triumph over substance as rout it.

GH Hardy summed this up rather well in his book A Mathematician's Apolog'. During a section where he considers the nature of beauty in mathematics and art (and mathematics as art), he quotes a line from Richard II:

"Not all the water in the rough rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed King"

Before giving his concise verdict:

"Could lines be better, and could ideas be at once more trite and more false?"

It is a universal truth that impressive or confusing form is used to veil voids of meaning. Consider the vacuous suit in your office who deflects your complaints with a barrage of opaque jargon. Consider that, for a brief time at least, Russell Brand - another hyperverbose word-wizard with a cult following - was seen to be a leading public intellectual. Consider that Midsomer Murders is a genuinely popular television programme in Sweden. We should bear all this in mind when assessing the worth of Shakespeare.

Generally speaking, I think it is a good thing for art to stretch our mental faculties. Tom Stoppard's plays are a modern paradigm of art-as-vigorous-mental-exercise and are mostly marvellous. But Stoppard is known to make concessions to audience enjoyment, editing out some of the more esoteric references and abstract metaphysical explorations to make the experience more accessible. Because Stoppard knows what Bardolisers do not: that the intellectual effort should not come in the comprehension of ideas, but their contemplation. Otherwise it's all just much ado about nothing.

* This article was amended on 20 May 2016 to clarify that the quote from Dr Erin Sullivan was her characterisation of Tolstoy's view, as expressed in her essay Anti-Bardolatry Through the Ages, rather than her own view.

Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Rejecting the cult of Bardolatry does not make you a philistine

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At the end of last month, on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, the country went barmy for the Bard. There were festivals and fetes up and down the land. There were twee recitals on street corners for the masses and opulent concerts in baroque halls for the few.

# data[].attributes.body
http://omniglot.com/language/articles/metaphorsinpolitics.htm

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/literally-broken-english-language-definition

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483511/I-h8-txt-msgs-How-texting-wrecking-language.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/why-english-people-say-sorry-so-often-a6899886.html

# data[].attributes.body
https://newrepublic.com/article/117757/gender-language-differences-women-get-interrupted-more

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3063455/English-language-changing-fast-words-majority-not-understand.html

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationopinion/9966117/Text-speak-language-evolution-or-just-laziness.html

# data[].attributes.body
Beth's post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Squee! The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is out, with 1,200 new words and 1,000 revised entries for us to geek out about. Squee - an exclamation expressing delight or excitement - has made the list, along with Yolo (an acronym for 'you only live once'), moobs, gender-fluid, uptalk (a manner of speaking in which declarative sentences are uttered with rising intonation at the end) and Westminster bubble.

Who picks the new additions? Is a crack team of caped wordsmiths holed up in a bunker in deepest Oxfordshire, spending day and night on the scent of words before eventually alighting on the contemporary relevance of ... cheeseball (also in the 2016 list, defined as 'someone or something lacking taste, style, or originality; or more prosaically, the breaded and deep fried cheese appetiser')? "It might seem romantic," says Jonathan Dent, senior assistant editor in the OED's new words team, "but it's a lot of standard research, checks and balances. Anything new that goes into the dictionary is drafted and researched by us. It's all down to evidence."

The 15-strong new words team - out of a staff of 70 at the OED - work year round tracking words in corpuses - electronic text collections containing billions of words - and analysing online databases, as well as material submitted by the public through reading programmes. "We are always tracking new words that arrive in the language and start to be picked up widely," Dent tells me. "OED traditionally waits for 10 years of evidence before we add a word but there are exceptions such as livermorium, a chemical element, in this update, which has only been around since 2012. At the same time the wider project of revising the whole text of the dictionary continues."

The updates are achieved through a fine balance of human endeavour and technology, a system introduced in 2000 when the OED went online. But in 1884, when the very first edition started publication it was a different story. "It took around 50 years for them to finish the first run," Dent explains. "That was mainly done through the public reading books and submitting quotations on paper. As soon as it was finished in 1928 they had a whole extra volume's worth of new words."

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Roald Dahl's perma-tanned Oompa Loompas. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

In the latest list, Dent has observed "notable word clusters" around shopping and slacktivism (people supporting political or social causes online but actually taking no further action). As for Brexit (and Grexit), "entries are being prepared for publication, and will very probably appear before the end of this year".

What are his favourite new words? "I try to avoid getting passionate about particular words because we have to treat each of them equally and give them a fair chance," he replies, sounding like a father asked to name a favourite child. But he does concede that with 2016 marking Roald Dahl's centenary, he has found researching Dahlesque (also on the list) words interesting. "Like Oompa Loompa, added because of how often it is used to refer to someone with a perma-tan. And the witching hour, from The BFG, which we traced back to the 18th century." What about vermicious knids, the shape-shifting aliens? "I mention them in my notes but thankfully they haven't escaped the Dahl universe yet," Dent replies sternly. "We should all be worried if they do."

Here's our predictions for next year's new words ...

Brexit fatigue
A collective malaise suffered by millions in the UK after Britain voted to leave the EU. Symptoms include denial, fear, an inability to trust anyone in power or opposition, intolerance, and a propensity to apply for an Irish passport or EU citizenship. See also 'regrexit'.
Avotoast

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Avocado on toast, now known as avotoast. Photograph: bonappetit.com

Avocados artfully applied to toast; the favoured brunch of Instagrammers. Now controversial as the global appetite for the green hipster fruit is indirectly fuelling illegal deforestation in Mexico and crime in New Zealand.

Corbynista
A member of the Labour party who supports leader Jeremy Corbyn. Initially viewed as a person who stands for pure socialist, anti-Blairite values, now deployed only as a term of abuse.
Pokémoning

Facebook Twitter Pinterest

Pokémoning ... mind how you go. Photograph: Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Going out to play Pokémon Go, or accompanying children doing so. Pitfalls of Pokémoning include bumping into obstacles, the constant need to recharge your phone and the tedium of always, always catching Pidgeys.

Trumpism
The personality-fuelled politics of Donald Trump, often used to denote extreme rightwing, narcissistic, anti-immigrant views and overt patriotism.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Yolo! How do they choose new words for the Oxford English Dictionary?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Squee! The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is out, with 1,200 new words and 1,000 revised entries for us to geek out about. Squee - an exclamation expressing delight or excitement - has made the list, along with Yolo (an acronym for 'you only live once'), moobs, gender-fluid, uptalk (a manner of speaking in which declarative sentences are uttered with rising intonation at the end) and Westminster bubble.

# data[].attributes.body
Libs' Post

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
As with British English and American English generally, UK and US emails are very similar and easy to understand for both groups of English speakers, but there are some confusing differences. The article aims to summarise all of the variations between British emails and American emails, including starting, ending, and the main body of emails.
Starting British and American emails Opening greetings in UK and US emails
The major opening greetings ("Dear Alex", "Dear all", "Dear Sir or Madam", etc) are basically the same in British and American emails. The most common differences have to do with punctuation. In American English you need a point after abbreviated titles ("Dear Mr. Case", "Dear Ms. Case", "Dear Dr. Case", "Dear Mrs. Case"). Although some people in the UK also do this, it is not strictly correct in British English because the missing letters (the "iste" that you take out to make "Mr" from "Mister") are not from the end of the word. This means that titles should be written without a point ("Dear Mr Case", "Dear Ms Case", "Dear Dr Case", "Dear Mrs Case") in British English. Use of the title "Professor" also varies a little between Britain and America, as most lecturers in British universities are not strictly professors. However, as it never hurts to flatter an academic by giving them a promotion when you write to them, it can't hurt to use "Professor" in the UK too, even if it isn't strictly correct.

As well as the comma or no punctuation that are used after an opening greeting in both Br. Eng. and Am. Eng. ("Dear Alex,", "Dear Alex"), Americans sometimes use a colon after the opening greeting ("Dear Alex:"), which is rare in the UK.

In a similar way, both Americans and British tend to use "Dear Sir or Madam" or "Dear Sir/ Madam" when you don't know someone's name, but Americans sometimes use the more traditional forms "Dear Sir" or "Dear Sirs", which are generally considered too old-fashioned or even sexist in the UK.

In group emails, "Hi everyone", "Dear all", "To: All staff", "Hi guys", etc can be used to start emails in both kinds of English. Some British people, especially older ones, still resist "Hi guys", especially if they are writing to mixed gender or all female groups of people. However, in general "Hi guys" has become equally common in the UK and United States when starting very informal group emails.
UK versus US email opening lines
As with most things in this article, the most common opening lines ("Thank you for your email about...", "I'm writing to you about...", "Hope you had a good weekend", etc) are the same in Britain and the States. However, there are versions of some of those which do vary.

Americans quite often use "mail" as a synonym of "email" when mentioning previous contact in the opening line ("Thanks for your mail about...", etc). This is rare in UK emails and very informal if used. If you mention the date of previous contact, dates are written the opposite way round in British and American English ("Thank you for your email of 29 January" in British vs "Thank you for your email of January 29" in American).

Social opening lines can also vary. The most common friendlier form of "How are you?" in American English is "How are you doing?", and you might sometimes want to use the super-casual version "What's up?" (or even "Wassup?") "How are you doing?" is not used in British English, and "What's up?" has the very different meaning of "What's wrong?" and so isn't suitable for emails. More informal versions of "How are you?" in British English include "How's it going?", "How are things?" and "How's life?"

Another good variation on the slightly impersonal opening line "How are you?" is to ask about more specific things with sentences like "How was your trip?" and "I hope your presentation went okay". This kind of opening line varies when it is about (long) time off, with the American "How was your vacation?"/ "I hope you had a good vacation" being equivalent to the UK "How was your holiday?"/ "I hope you had a good holiday". (When an American says "holiday", they mean "national holiday", sometimes called "bank holiday in Britain).
Ending British and American emails UK vs US email closing lines
Yet again, the most common ones ("I look forward to hearing from you", "If you need any more information, please do not hesitate to contact me", "Thanks in advance", "Once again, please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused", etc) are shared between America and the United Kingdom. Of those common kinds of closing emails, the only major difference is "Cheers".

"Cheers" is an informal British version of "Thank you in advance" at the end of request emails, which is very common at the end of British emails. It is also very useful, because the more formal "Thank you in advance" can be a bit heavy, like reminding someone at the end of a conversation that you need something to be done. For that reason, some Americans have picked up "Cheers". However, it is still very rare in the US and is usually conscious borrowing from British English rather than a part of US English.

There are also small differences in some of the rarer and more specific closing lines offering more help ("If..., please..."). For example, "Please phone my mobile (phone) if you get lost" in British English is "Please phone my cell(phone) if you get lost" in American, and "Please text me if you have any problems getting there" is "Please send me an SMS if you have any problems getting there" in American English.

When it comes to job applications, in my experience Americans tend to end with a special phrase trying to really appeal to the reader ("I really hope I have the chance to contribute to the success of your company soon", "I look forward to having the chance to explain more why I think ABC Ltd would be the perfect place for me", etc), while Brits tend to stick to fairly standard closing lines ("If you need any more information, please contact me" and/ or something like "I look forward to hearing from you and having the chance to speak to you soon").
British and American email closing greetings
Choices in which informal closing greetings to use tend to be more about personal preference than regional variance, with some people from both the UK and the USA often using "All the best", "Kind regards", "BR", "Best wishes", etc, but other people avoiding or even hating the same phrases.

There are more predictable and more important differences in formal closing salutations. Firstly, British English has two super-formal forms with an important difference in how they are used, "Yours sincerely" and "Yours faithfully". "Yours faithfully" is only used at the end of an email starting with "Dear Sir/ Madam" or "Dear Sir or Madam". "Yours sincerely" is therefore used to end very formal emails starting with names ("Dear Mr Case", "Dear Ms Case", etc). "Yours faithfully" and "Yours sincerely" are not used in American English. There are two similar-looking phrases in American English ("Sincerely" and "Sincerely yours") but they are used interchangeably with any kind of super-formal email, meaning it doesn't matter if the name is used at the beginning of the email or not. "Sincerely" and "Sincerely yours" are not standard in British English.

The other possibility with very formal American emails is to use the most common closing greeting in standard business emails, "Best regards". "Best regards" is also very common in British emails, but can't be used in very formal situations such as legal-sounding complaints and job applications, where "Yours sincerely" and "Yours faithfully" are the only ones which are formal enough. In other words, "Best regards" is slightly more formal in American English than it is considered to be in the UK.

All of this means that there is no avoiding having to remember to use the right one of "Yours faithfully" and "Yours sincerely" in very formal British emails and letters. Even native speakers can make mistakes with this, especially nowadays when many people rarely write or receive very formal emails. Two ways of remembering which one is which out of "Yours sincerely" and "Yours faithfully" are:

- You never use two letter S phrases in one email, so "Yours sincerely" doesn't go with "Dear S ir or Madam"

- The two closing greetings are the opposite way round to how you might expect given the meaning, with the more personal sounding "faithful" strangely going with the more impersonal "Dear Sir/ Madam"

Note that neither of these are reasons why we use those forms, but simply ways of making them easier to remember.
The body of UK and US emails
Theoretically, almost any difference between British and American English could come up in the body of the email, depending on the topic or function. This section deals with some of the more common functions for emails, namely requests, making arrangements, apologising, giving instructions, job applications and checking progress.
UK versus US request emails
"Could you...?"/ "Could I...?" is a very common way to make requests in both UK and US English, but the common variations on that vary. British people also often use "Can you...?"/ "Can I...?", but this can be considered too casual, rude or even wrong in the same situations in American English.

For more polite request in American English, "May I...?" is very common. For Brits "May I...?" is only used for asking for permission, not requests. Longer forms like "Could I possibly... (if it's not too much trouble)?" are therefore used for polite requests.

One specific request that comes up with emailing a fair amount also varies in the UK and the US, being "Could you fill in the attached form?" in British and "Could you fill out the attached form?" in American.
British-style and American-style making arrangements emails
English emails making invitations, fixing meetings etc don't vary that much. For example, in both places we usually include really detailed reasons for saying no to an invitation (which is less common in many other countries). The biggest differences between UK-style and US-style making arrangements emails tend to be connected to prepositions of time, e.g. "Monday thru Friday" in American English against "Monday to Friday" in British, and "on the weekend" in the USA vs "at the weekend" in the UK.

The point mentioned above about the order in which dates are written in British and American English is also relevant here. This means that 2/3/16 could be taken to mean 2 March 2016 by a British person or February 3 2016 by someone from the States. You should therefore always write dates with the month as a word, and usually also include the day of the week ("Monday 4 March" in British or "Monday March 4" in American).
UK vs US apology emails/ replies to complaints
This issue is more of a cultural difference. American companies often ban their employees from actually apologising when they receive complaints (at least initially), as this might seem like the company is accepting responsibility and so weaken the position of the company, for example if they are later sued by the customer. American companies therefore tend to respond with phrases which sound sympathetic but aren't actually apologising like "I was sorry to hear about your issues with..." This is also becoming more and more common in the UK. However, traditional British communication style includes a lot of apologising, and some UK customers can respond very negatively to any attempt to get out of using an actual apology. Therefore, if at all possible British emails tend to have actually apologies like "I am sorry about your issues with..."

A much smaller difference related to apologies is do with the general difference in the spelling of "-ize" endings. As well as the "-ize" form used in America ("I would like to apologize for..."), the British also have an "-ise" ending ("I would like to apologise for...") which is not used in American English. Both forms are correct in UK English, but Brits tend to prefer "-ise".
British and American emails giving instructions/ demanding action
Possibly the greatest complaint between colleagues from these two countries is the British saying that Americans are too direct, and Americans saying British are too indirect and therefore difficult to understand. This is a particular issue when it comes to giving instructions, e.g. from a boss to someone in their team. British bosses tend to use polite requests language like "It would be a great help if you could..." and "If at all possible,...", whereas Americans use language that more clearly means "You have to...", even if the language is much more polite ("Would you...?", "I'd like you to...", etc). Although instructions from a boss are usually understood and accepted as such, there is a small difference that a British style order could make the team member think the duty is optional, and that the British employee could feel that their boss could be more polite. This can also be an issue in emails.
British and American job application emails
As well as the differences in closing lines mentioned above, there can be some differences in the body of cover letters. In my experience, American job applications tend to concentrate more on showing that they can sell themselves, whereas British cover letters tend to just focus more on the basic facts. This can mean that Brits reading American applications sometimes think "Yes, well, everyone would say that, wouldn't they?" and/ or "And where is the evidence for that?" In contrast, Americans reading UK cover letters may assume everyone oversells themselves in a job application and so the British applicant must be even less qualified than their rather modest description of their achievements suggests. Alternatively, they might decide that the UK applicant won't have the ability to sell themselves and their ideas that they will need in their job.

In addition to the cultural differences, there is a difference in the sentence mentioning the attachment with a cover letter, as it is "Please find my CV attached" in British and "Please find my résumé attached" in American.
US and UK progress check emails
This is a good example of the most famous difference between British and American grammar, which is the British love of the Present Perfect ("has/ have + Past Participle"). Americans tend to use Past Simple with "yet" and "already" when checking and reporting on progress ("Did you finish the report yet?", "I already finished half of the PowerPoint", etc), whereas in British emails you need to use Present Perfect ("Have you finished the report yet?", "I've already finished half of the PowerPoint", etc).
List of differences between British and American emails Phrases with stars (*) below are also correct on the opposite side of the table, meaning they are also right in the other kind of English. See the article above for more details.
Copyright © 2016 Alex Case

Written by Alex Case for UsingEnglish.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Differences between British and American emails - UsingEnglish.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
As with British English and American English generally, UK and US emails are very similar and easy to understand for both groups of English speakers, but there are some confusing differences. The article aims to summarise all of the variations between British emails and American emails, including starting, ending, and the main body of emails.

# data[].attributes.body
Saw this the other day and it got me thinking about how we use the vocative and the adjectives we use to describe people. How we address people and refer to people has lots to do with gaining or sustaining power and really can show deep rooted attitudes. What do you think?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A bird is a small, fragile thing. It chirrups, flutters and nests. It definitely does not chair board meetings, run multinational corporations or govern nations. So it's little surprise that a new survey shows "bird" topping the list of "pet names" that British women would like banned from everyday use.

The research, commissioned by Kellogg's Special K, surveyed 2,000 women around the country. Fifty-four per cent said "bird" was a word they'd like to consign for ever to Room 101; 45% would bin "doll"; 44% would choose "chick", while 38% loathe "babe". They're all diminutives, you'll notice. Infantile, in the case of "chick" and "babe". In all four cases, incapable of speech or even complex thought. Cute, but ultimately unable to change a light bulb unaided.

But - oh, come on now, love - what does it really matter? They're just words, after all - harmless terms of affection, in fact. The chosen names aren't even insults or sexist slurs. Who doesn't love a fluffy chick? Where's the harm in being compared to one? So stop flapping about it. Don't brood over it. All this nagging is just henpecking.

A single word, you see, can hatch and breed until you have a whole flock of related words, each different but all related. All pecking slowly away at women's self confidence, shaping the way women are seen in the workplace and having consequences every bit as real as the damage done by sticks and stones.

Another report came out this week, this time from the global management consultancy firm McKinsey and Co and Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In organisation. It analysed data from 132 American companies, representing 4.2 million employees. And for every 100 women promoted to managerial positions, it found, 130 men made the same leap up the ladder. Why? In part, because "birds" aren't being given the opportunity to show their ability. The report highlighted the fact that women are less likely to be given challenging assignments or to receive the critical feedback we all need in order to get any better at the jobs we do.

While 46% of the men surveyed said they had received difficult feedback, only 36% of women had. The most common reason managers gave for holding back this criticism from women was the fear of being hurtful. And who wants to hurt a little fluffy "chick"? That would just be mean.

A couple of years ago, in the course of writing a book called 100 Leading Ladies, I spoke to 100 of Britain's most influential women, across all fields and from different walks of life. In an interview with the psychotherapist Susie Orbach, she told me: "I think we have a little difficulty with female public intellectuals in this country because we still attribute gravitas to masculinity."

Stories such as this piled up. Betty Jackson CBE, one of the UK's most successful fashion designers, described how: "When we first applied for a loan from the bank, the bank manager addressed all his questions to [her husband] David, even though he's French and could barely speak a word of English at the time. I had to translate between them."

Things have moved on since the 1970s and many of these terms sound peculiarly old-fashioned. But words can still hold women back. As the brilliant Baroness Lola Young, currently an independent crossbench peer, told me: "Ambition is almost a dirty word sometimes, especially when applied to women. It's meant as a covert insult: 'She's a really ambitious woman.'"

Perhaps surprisingly, McKinsey's research showed that more women than men ask for a raise at work (29%, compared with 27% of men). In response, 30% of women were told that they were being "bossy", "aggressive", or "intimidating", compared with just 23% of men.

No surprise, then, that the fifth most hated term singled out by British women is "queen bee". Because, in a world where the fond nicknames for women are fluffy and cute, being a boss becomes a mild insult. Words matter. You can kill two birds with one stone. But you dent the ambitions of 3.52 billion of them around the world by showering them with a whole lexicon of little pebbles.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Being called a bird is infantilising. Such terms hold women back | Hattie Garlick

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A bird is a small, fragile thing. It chirrups, flutters and nests. It definitely does not chair board meetings, run multinational corporations or govern nations. So it's little surprise that a new survey shows "bird" topping the list of "pet names" that British women would like banned from everyday use.

# data[].attributes.body
''Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.

At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".

"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.

"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.

"He was some kind of singer?"

The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.

But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.

"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.

"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

Super slang

One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.

It is often used to voice disapproval or anger towards another commentator, says Svitlana Pyrkalo, a producer at the BBC World Service Ukrainian Service.

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.

"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.

"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."

One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.

In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.

They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.

Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".

But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The secret of their success is their longevity.

"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.

She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.

Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.

Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.

"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.

"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.

Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.

But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.

Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.

"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.

"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."

For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.

"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.

"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.

"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well."

More on this story

Related Internet Links

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed? In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A UK child is likely to say the word 'like' five times as much as his or her grandparents, language researchers say.

The word 'love' is used more than six times as often as 'hate', while 'save' is used with 'money' twice as often as the word 'spend'.

The research, which is part of the Cambridge English Corpus - a database of two billion words and thousands of hours of recordings - shows a marked decline in the correct use of grammar.

The study found that MPs and other public figures are speaking more informally, with words like 'gonna' being used instead of 'going to'.

Brian Sewell, the art critic, and historian David Starkey are shown to use formal English, in contrast to Janet Street-Porter and footballer David Beckham, who use colloquial speech.

Street-Porter responded to the study by writing in the Daily Mail: 'Listen to Alan Sugar, David Beckham or Adele and it's obvious that sounding downmarket no longer holds you back in life... Am I bovvered? Hardly - my grammar, when written, is pretty damn good.'

The Corpus also highlighted the most commonly misspelled words in the English language by global learners.

These are 'because' ('becouse'), which ('wich'), accommodation ('accomodation'), advertisement ('advertisment') and beautiful ('beatiful').
Is there still such a thing as 'proper English'? Why is it important to study the evolution of the English language? Find out about the Open University's 'English in the World Today' module here. You can also take a look at the OU facebook page and join the conversation with students, advisers and academics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the English language is, like, changing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A UK child is likely to say the word 'like' five times as much as his or her grandparents, language researchers say. The word 'love' is used more than six times as often as 'hate', while 'save' is used with 'money' twice as often as the word 'spend'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Staff at the West Midlands primary have drawn up list offending phrases

Parents and local residents have branded the move as 'snobbish'

But the school says it wants it children to have 'the best start possible'

Children at a primary school in the West Midlands have been told to speak proper English instead of the Black Country dialect to halt a 'decline in standards'.

Those who say they 'cor do that' - 'can't do that' - will not be punished, but they will be corrected every time they utter an outlawed phrase.

Angry parents criticised the ban at Colley Lane Primary School in Halesowen, claiming it is 'snobbish' and 'insulting'.

A letter posted to parents last week said the school wanted pupils to have the 'best start possible'.

It added: 'Recently we asked each class teacher to write a list of the top ten most damaging phrases used by children in the classroom. We are introducing a "zero tolerance" in the classroom to get children out of the habit of using the phrases on the list.'

The Black Country includes Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall, and southern parts of Wolverhampton. Other words and phrases on the prohibited list include 'ay', meaning 'pardon', and 'I day', meaning 'I didn't'.

Alana Willetts, 30, whose nine-year-old son George goes to the school, said staff should be teaching pupils about the Black Country and its dialect.

'Some of my friends have gone on to be doctors and lawyers and I'm an engineer - [the accent] doesn't affect you as a person,' she said. 'I think it is patronising and insulting to say that people with a Black Country accent are disadvantaged. All the parents are outraged.'

Ann Mills, 62, who has two grandchildren at the school, added: 'I was raised here and I'm proud of the way we speak.'

'I COR BELIEVE IT': THE PHRASES PUPILS ARE BANNED FROM SAYING

8. 'Somefink' instead of 'something.'

But Zheyan Kareem, 31, who moved to the UK eight years ago and whose seven-year-old son is a pupil, supported the ban, saying: 'English is my second language. So for me ... it is good if my child speaks English in the house and not slang picked up at school.'

The primary school, which has 592 children aged four to 11 and was judged 'good' at its last Ofsted inspection, defended the move. Headteacher John White said: 'We value the dialect but we want to encourage children to learn when to use it and when not, like for a job interview.'

The Black Country includes the three Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell and Walsall and the southern parts of the city of Wolverhampton, but does not include Birmingham.

Headteacher John White said: 'I think we are seeing a decline in standards of English when children come into school.

'We are seeing that some children coming in are not able to speak very much at all to be honest.

'I think some of the changes in society - the amount of time people sit around and talk together and the amount of screen time - seem to be having an effect on how confidently children speak when starting school.

'We want to pick them up on that and improve their standards in English. It is important because it is the foundation of everything.

'If they can't say it, it is likely they can't read it, and even less likely they can write it.

'We value the dialect but we want to encourage children to learn when to use and when not, like for a job interview. It is, of course, fine to use in other situations and we would celebrate that.

'We know it is a topic lots of people will be interested in, but I'm positive about it. If it starts to get people talking about the issue, that can only be a good thing.

'We will correct children if they get the words wrong.'

The school was rated as either Good or Outstanding in a Ofsted inspection report in 2010.

IT'S NOT BRUMMIE! THE LOCAL DIALECT THAT STILL USES MIDDLE ENGLISH GRAMMAR AND THE LANGUAGE OF CHAUCER

The distinctive Black Country dialect of the 'Yam Yams' is spoken in towns like Wolverhampton, Sandwell, Tipton and Dudley, and can be very confusing to outsiders.

Scholars find it fascinating because it has preserved grammar from Early Modern English and even Middle English.

'Thee', 'Thy' and 'Thou' are still in use, as is the case in parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire. 'Ow B'ist', meaning 'How beist thou?' is a common greeting, with the typical answer being 'Bay too bah', meaning 'I bayn't be too bad'.

'I haven't seen her' becomes 'I ay sid 'er'. Black Country dialect often substitutes the word 'ar' for 'yes'.

Several word pronunciations are also different: 'you' is pronounced 'yow' (pronounced yo with a silent w), whereas 'go', which is often pronounced 'goo' or 'gooin'' for 'going', is more in line with pronunciations in the Midlands.

It is also quite common for broad Black Country speakers to say 'agooin' instead of 'going'.

Inhabitants are proud to be known as Black Country 'folk' and resist hints at any relationship to people living in Birmingham, calling Birmingham 'Brum-a-jum' (Birmingham's colloquial name is 'Brummagem', a corruption of its older name of 'Bromwicham' and hence West Bromwich) or 'Birminam' (missing the g and h out and saying it the way it's spelt).

Residents of Birmingham ('Brummies') meanwhile often refer to their Black Country neighbours as 'Yam Yams', a reference to the use of 'Yow am' (or yow'm ) instead of 'You are', and not because they say 'I yam' instead of 'I am'.

Dudley residents often refer to the people of Birmingham as 'Dummy Brummies'. Also, the town of Walsall can be pronounced either 'War-sall' or 'Wor-sull', with a strong Walsall accent considered to be typical 'yam-yam'.

The strong Black Country dialect is less commonly heard today than in the past. However, a stronger variation of the dialect (than the one frequently used) appears to be heard quite often in conversations between older Black Country folk.

The word endings with 'en' are still noticeable in conversation as in 'gooen' (going), 'callen' (calling) and the vowel 'A' is pronounced as 'O' as in 'sond' (sand), 'hond' (hand) and 'mon' (man). Other pronunciations are 'winder' for window, 'fer' for 'far', and 'loff' for 'laugh' exactly as Chaucer's English was spoken.

Local dialect was (and probably still is to a lesser degree) quite distinctive between the different towns and villages of the Black Country. Although most outsiders to the Black Country can't tell this difference, Black Country folk can quiet fiercely defend the difference between the accent.

Here is a glossary of Black Country vocabulary:

Aive - Lift, heave
Bawk - Confuse
Beesum - A pert young woman
Bibble - Pebble, stone
Blithyed - A fool
Bowler - A large moth
Boffle - To hinder
Bonk - A small hill
Broo'us - A brewery
Cagmag - A gossipy old woman
Caw - Cannot
Chicklings - Pig's intestines (a Black Country delicacy)
Codding - Joking
Fizog - Face
Flen - A flea
Jed - Dead
Kench - Back strain
Miskin - An outside toilet
Carradiddle - A lie, fib
Tranklements - Miscellaneous items, paraphernalia
Werit - Worry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Midlands school bans children from using 'Black Country dialect'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Staff at the West Midlands primary have drawn up list offending phrases Parents and local residents have branded the move as 'snobbish' But the school says it wants it children to have 'the best start possible' Children at a primary school in the West Midlands have been told to speak proper English instead of the Black Country dialect to halt a 'decline in standards'.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Accent coaches hear a lot of funny stories. A personal favourite came from a Spanish nurse: "One of my patients, she ask me about her fadder, 'is he getting washed?' I say yes of course, every day, and she look very upset. I realise, she did no say 'washed', she say dis word ..." She wrote down the word "worse".

We giggled, and I taught her how to make the "er" sound in "worse" versus the "o" sound in "washed". Then we covered the s/sh distinction, which is always useful - she wasn't happy about the smirks she'd had when declaring "I'm not going to take this sit any more".

But the longer I teach pronunciation, the more often I find myself listening to a different kind of story. The nurse whose patients ask to speak to someone else, the consultant whose promotion is postponed until she sounds "more English", even though she's no more difficult to understand than Marion Cotillard. In an economy where we so frequently encounter people who aren't as comfortable communicating in English, how many are we subconsciously judging?

I tripped and stumbled into accent coaching. I'd returned to London from a two-year stint in Mexico where I became bilingual and skint. I was saving for an expensive journalism master's, starting with whatever the bureau de change would give me for my crumpled pesos.

So I was relieved to discover there was a market for my bizarre skill: I am an accent geek. I can hear the position of people's tongues, and teach them to manipulate it to get a better English accent. Placing the tip millimetres behind the teeth to make an English "t"; the difference between the "l" in "light" and in "pill" ... things normal people don't notice because they're busy getting on with their lives.

I thought my students would be perfectionists like I was with Spanish - having mastered the language, they'd want to perfect the accent. Many were, and unlike my friends their eyes didn't glaze over at the mention of glottal stops, diphthongs and fricatives.

But I didn't expect the hordes of people who just wanted to be taken seriously.

A study by the University of Chicago found a sentence said in a foreign accent is less likely to be believed. Why? If the sentence was: "Oh, Farage and me, the laughs we've had", I'd understand the scepticism. Otherwise it seems bizarre. Apparently, it comes from an "inability to separate what's being said from how it's being said". But that doesn't answer the question of why an unfamiliar formation of sounds undermines credibility. The tips of their tongues touching their teeth when they say "t", or saying "doze" instead of "those" seems a flimsy basis for mistrust. So, do we think foreigners are dishonest or stupid?

Even out-and-out xenophobes start sentences with, "I don't mind foreigners, but ..." While it's tedious to hear bigotry tarted up as a point of view, at least the lie is an acknowledgement that xenophobia isn't acceptable. But companies don't start sentences with, "we're not xenophobic, but ..." - they make it company policy. Sergey sounds Russian and it makes clients uncomfortable; let's hire someone to make him sound English. Never mind that the client's discomfort is far less reasonable than a Russian having a Russian accent.

I'd love to sit in on one of their budget meetings. "I'm afraid we can't buy new printers, that money's gone into removing all evidence that Marco, Xi and Abdul were born outside the home counties."

It's not just us. The study found the same reaction to foreign accents in all countries - arguably solving the mystery of why so many Hollywood baddies are English. But we monolingual Brits have less right to pass judgment. We have the worst language skills in Europe. Many of us can't even properly pronounce the food we eat (bruschetta is "bru-SKET-a". We should stop saying "bru-shet-a" if we don't want to drive Italians crazy).

Yet when we meet a bilingual foreigner with a twang? Eyes roll, their promotions are delayed or denied, and they end up in my classroom. It makes me a decent living, but I can't help feeling they shouldn't have to put up with this sit.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is Britain becoming a nation of accent snobs? | Erica Buist

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Accent coaches hear a lot of funny stories. A personal favourite came from a Spanish nurse: "One of my patients, she ask me about her fadder, 'is he getting washed?' I say yes of course, every day, and she look very upset. I realise, she did no say 'washed', she say dis word ..."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Want a promotion? Don't speak like an AUSSIE: Rising in pitch at the end of sentences make you sound 'insecure'

Inflections added to the end of sentences are called high-rising terminals

The language trait is common i n Australian and American accents

As a result, the trait is also known as Australian Question Intonation (AQI)

UK publisher Pearson surveyed 700 men and women in managerial roles

More than half said if a Briton used AQI it would hinder their prospects

While 85% said the trait was a 'clear indicator of insecurity'

The popularity of Australian TV shows in the UK is changing the way we speak - and it could be having a knock-on effect on our careers.

More than 70 per cent of bosses claim that the rising trend among Britons - especially teenagers - of adding inflections to the ends of sentences is 'particularly annoying.'

While almost 85 per cent said that when non-Australian people use this language trait it is a 'clear indicator of insecurity' and could hinder their chances of a promotion or payrise.

WHAT IS AUSTRALIAN QUESTION INTONATION?

The language trait is known as a high-rising terminal (HRT), commonly referred to as 'Australian Question Intonation' (AQI).

It is the act of raising a voice at the end of a sentence that makes the statement sound like a question and is common in Australian and American accents.

According to UK publisher Pearson, the use of AQI has recently grown rapidly among teenagers and graduates in the UK.

The firm surveyed 700 men and women in managerial, executive and ownership roles.

The majority (71 per cent) agreed that AQI is a 'particularly annoying trait', with 85 per cent adding the use of the trait is a 'clear indicator of a person's insecurity or emotional weakness.'

More than half said AQI would hinder the prospects of promotion and a better pay grade in their own organisation.

While 57 per cent believed AQI has the potential to damage a person's professional credibility by revealing an inability or reluctance to speak their mind.

Of the respondents responsible for interviewing job applicants for senior roles, only 16 per cent said they would be willing to gloss over AQI and focus purely on an applicant's strengths and aptitude.

In some cases, 44 per cent of respondents admitted they would mark down an applicant by as much as a third based purely on the candidate's irritating speech.

However, this was only found to be the case when a British applicant used AQI, and didn't apply when Australian or American people naturally spoke in that way.

The survey was conducted on behalf of Pearson to mark the release of Speak For Yourself - a guide to effective speech and communication due to be released later this month.

Author Harry Key, a voice techniques expert, said: 'HRT is becoming increasingly common in the UK - especially among teenagers - but the results of this research suggest that using it in a business or workplace setting is definitely to be avoided.

'Based on the feedback we received, using HRT when making statements has the very real potential of jeopardising job prospects and, even, career paths in some organisations.'

Key added: 'Speaking in definite or indefinite tones doesn't just sound different, it feels different and will affect the way the speaker is perceived.

'The message is clear: if you know what you're talking about, and want to be respected for it, then you need to sound like you know it.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
People who add inflections to sentences seen as insecure by employers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Inflections added to the end of sentences are called high-rising terminals The language trait is common i n Australian and American accents As a result, the trait is also known as Australian Question Intonation (AQI) UK publisher Pearson surveyed 700 men and women in managerial roles More than half said if a Briton used AQI it would hinder their prospects While 85% said the trait was a 'clear indicator of insecurity' The popularity of Australian TV shows in the UK is changing the way we speak - and it could be having a knock-on effect on our careers.

# data[].attributes.body
Thought this was interesting. How important is language in maintaining gender stereotypes? See this link too: https://youtu.be/B8gz-jxjCmg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and American Girl Scouts chief Anna Maria Chavez are leading a campaign to discourage the use of the word "bossy". Does the term destroy the confidence of young girls, asks Tom Heyden.

The campaign claims that terms like "bossy" are disproportionately applied to females, preventing schoolgirls from seeing themselves as future "leaders". From its inception the word has been associated more with women than with men. It first appeared in 1882, according to the OED, mentioning "a lady manager who was dreadfully bossy". It's telling that Little Miss Bossy doesn't have a Mr Men equivalent in Roger Hargreaves's children's series. As late as 2008, the word appeared in reference to females four times more often than males, claim the Ban Bossy campaigners. "To me, the reference is always in association with women," says Helen Trim, director of recruiting firm FreshMinds. "I have three brothers and my family still call me 'bossy' today." Her father is the only other family member who could be considered in that way, says Trim, but nobody would ever call him so. "He was a male, he was expected to lead and be the leader of his family."

Some commentators say the word should be "reclaimed", rather than banned. "But the thing with 'bossy' is that there's an infantile element to it," says Sara Mills, research professor in linguistics at Sheffield Hallam University. "You think of 'bossy' as being like a little kid who's claiming more than they have the right to claim. Although it comes from boss, it has those connotations of [being] infantile."

It's not just "bossy" under fire. "Pushy" is another example, says Mills. The implication is that women shouldn't present themselves as powerful and confident, she suggests, which some women take on board. Trim points out that many modern female business role models are able to be a boss without being labelled bossy. And she rarely, if ever, hears the word used within her industry. But she says that the damage may be done much earlier in a woman's life. "Women have far more confidence issues in the workplace than men," she says. "It does stem from those early teenage years. I think it's impossible to ban a word but if people are replacing it with words like 'confidence' or 'assertiveness' we would all be in a much better place."
Follow @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and American Girl Scouts chief Anna Maria Chavez are leading a campaign to discourage the use of the word "bossy". Does the term destroy the confidence of young girls, asks Tom Heyden. The campaign claims that terms like "bossy" are disproportionately applied to females, preventing schoolgirls from seeing themselves as future "leaders".

# data[].attributes.headline
George Gallivan - how the internet is changing language

# data[].attributes.subject
George Gallivan - how the internet is changing language

# data[].attributes.body
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10971949

# data[].attributes.body
the view that British language is now 'sloppy' and has no integrity

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
British people are used to the stream of Americanisms entering the language. But some are worse than others, argues Matthew Engel.

I have had a lengthy career in journalism. I hope that's because editors have found me reliable. I have worked with many talented colleagues. Sometimes I get invited to parties and meet influential people. Overall, I've had a tremendous time.

Lengthy. Reliable. Talented. Influential. Tremendous.

All of these words we use without a second thought were not normally part of the English language until the establishment of the United States.

The Americans imported English wholesale, forged it to meet their own needs, then exported their own words back across the Atlantic to be incorporated in the way we speak over here. Those seemingly innocuous words caused fury at the time.

The poet Coleridge denounced "talented" as a barbarous word in 1832, though a few years later it was being used by William Gladstone. A letter-writer to the Times, in 1857, described "reliable" as vile.

Find out more

Listen to Matthew Engel discuss 'Americanisms' on Four Thought on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesday 13 July at 2045 BST
Listen again via the BBC iPlayer Or download the podcast
My grandfather came to London on the outbreak of World War I and never lost his mid-European accent. His descendants have blended into the landscape. That's what happens with immigration. It's the same with vocabulary migration.

The French have always hated this process with a very Gallic passion, and their most august body L'Academie Francaise issues regular rulings on the avoidance of imported words. English isn't like that. It is a far more flexible language. Anarchic even.

That's part of the secret of its success. It has triumphed where Latin, French and the artificial language of Esperanto all ultimately failed, and become the natural medium of global communication. This is the version of English sometimes known as "Globish".

To use it requires only a rudimentary knowledge of grammar and, so it is said, a vocabulary of a mere 1,500 words.

But what the world is speaking - even on levels more sophisticated than basic Globish - is not necessarily our English. According to the Oxford Guide to World English, "American English has a global role at the beginning of the 21st Century comparable to that of British English at the start of the 20th".

The alarming part is that this is starting to show in the language we speak in Britain. American usages no longer swim to our shores as single spies, as "reliable" and "talented" did. They come in battalions.

In the 1930s, the talkies took hold and represented the first overwhelming manifestation of American cultural power. This was reinforced in the 1940s by the presence of large numbers of US servicemen in Britain and the 1950s marked the heyday of the western.

There may have been a brief pushback after that, in the era of Swinging London, as Bill Haley and Elvis faded, and the Beatles and Stones conquered the world, along with words like "fab" and "groovy". In the years since, however, the movement seems to have become overwhelming, unstoppable and almost wholly one way, with the exception of Harry Potter.

The coining of the term
J Witherspoon, writing in the Pennsylvania Journal, 1781
The first class I call Americanisms, by which I understand an use of phrases or terms, or a construction of sentences, even among persons of rank and education, different from the use of the same terms or phrases, or the construction of similar sentences, in Great Britain.

The word Americanism, which I have coined for the purpose, is exactly similar in its formation and signification to the word Scotticism.

American culture is ubiquitous in Britain on TV and the web. As our computers talk to us in American, I keep having to agree to a license spelt with an s. I am invited to print something in color without the u. I am told "you ghat mail". It is, of course, always e-mail - never our own more natural usage, e-post.

As an ex-American resident, I remain a big fan of baseball. But I sit over here and listen to people who know nothing of the games talk about ideas coming out of "left field". They speak about "three strikes and you're out" or "stepping up to the plate" without the foggiest idea what these phrases mean. I think the country has started to lose its own sense of itself.

In many respects, English and American are not coming together. When it comes to new technology, we often go our separate ways. They have cellphones - we have mobiles. We go to cash points or cash machines - they use ATMs. We have still never linked hands on motoring terminology - petrol, the boot, the bonnet, known in the US as gas, the trunk, the hood.

Yet in the course of my own lifetime, countless routine British usages have either been superseded or are being challenged by their American equivalents. We no longer watch a film, we go to the movies. We increasingly have trucks not lorries. A hike is now a wage or price rise not a walk in the country.

Ugly and pointless new usages appear in the media and drift into everyday conversation:

Faze, as in "it doesn't faze me"

Hospitalize, which really is a vile word

Wrench for spanner

Elevator for lift

Rookies for newcomers, who seem to have flown here via the sports pages.

Guy, less and less the centrepiece of the ancient British festival of 5 November - or, as it will soon be known, 11/5. Now someone of either gender.

And, starting to creep in, such horrors as ouster, the process of firing someone, and outage, meaning a power cut. I always read that as outrage. And it is just that.

I am all for a living, breathing language that evolves with the times. I accept that estate agents prefer to sell apartments rather than flats - they sound more enticing. I accept that we now have freight trains rather than goods trains - that's more accurate.

I accept that sometimes American phrases have a vigour and vivacity. A relative of mine told me recently he went to a business meeting chaired by a Californian woman who wanted everyone to speak frankly. It was "open kimono". How's that for a vivid expression?

But what I hate is the sloppy loss of our own distinctive phraseology through sheer idleness, lack of self-awareness and our attitude of cultural cringe. We encourage the diversity offered by Welsh and Gaelic - even Cornish is making a comeback. But we are letting British English wither.

Britain is a very distinct country from the US. Not better, not worse, different. And long live that difference. That means maintaining the integrity of our own gloriously nuanced, subtle and supple version - the original version - of the English language.
This is an edited version of Matthew Engel's Four Thought broadcast.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why do some Americanisms irritate people?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
British people are used to the stream of Americanisms entering the language. But some are worse than others, argues Matthew Engel. I have had a lengthy career in journalism. I hope that's because editors have found me reliable. I have worked with many talented colleagues. Sometimes I get invited to parties and meet influential people.

# data[].attributes.headline
Bethany, Farewell to freshman - Washington State to remove 40,000 pieces of legislation of 'gender biased language'...but manhole survives

# data[].attributes.subject
Bethany, Farewell to freshman - Washington State to remove 40,000 pieces of legislation of 'gender biased language'...but manhole survives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This week new laws will come into effect in Washington State to form the final piece of a six-year effort to rewrite all state laws using gender-neutral vocabulary.

The politically correct crusade will see terms such as 'fisherman', 'freshman' and even 'journeyman plumber' replaced with 'fisher', 'first-year-student' and 'journey-level plumber'.

Signalling an end to hundreds of years of accepted language, the move will now see the state's copious laws, including thousands of words and phrases re-written at tax-payers expense.

Lawmakers have passed a series of bills since 2007 to root out gender bias from Washington statutes, though a 1983 state mandate required that all laws be written in gender-neutral terms unless a specification of gender was intended.

Indeed, the laws will change many words in use that date back to when women did not even work on police forces or the idea of a lady on a fishing boat was unheard of.

The measure approved by the Legislature this year mandated that references to 'his' be changed to 'his or her.' Other nouns like 'clergyman' must be changed to 'clergy.'

'This was a much larger effort than I had envisioned. Mankind means man and woman,' said Democratic state Senator Jeanne Kohl-Welles of Seattle when the law was passed in April.

The new gender-neutral references will now demand and enforce linguistically 'handwriting' in place of 'penmanship,' and 'signal operator' for 'signalman.'

'There's no good reason for keeping our legal terms anachronistic and with words that do not respect our current contemporary times,' Kohl-Welles, the 475-page bill's sponsor, told Reuters.

The state likely won't change the words 'airmen' and 'seaman,' for example, because of objections by the state's Washington Military Department, he said.

Civil engineering terms such as 'man hole' and 'man lock,' also will not be changed because no common-sense substitutes could easily be found, Thiessen said.

Nearly 3,500 Washington state code sections, out of a total of about 40,000 have been tediously scrubbed of gender bias, although most involve adding pronouns 'she' and 'her' to augment the existing 'he' and 'his,' Thiessen said.

The bill passed the Democrat-controlled state House 70-22 on April 9 and unanimously cleared the state Senate on February 8 before being signed by Democratic Governor Jay Inslee - and now past the end of the fiscal year on July 1st is now law.

Washington State's war on sexist language: Translation guide to gender neutral words...and some which survived

Crispin Thurlow, a sociolinguist and associate professor of language and communication at the University of Washington-Bothell praised the project in an interview with Fox News in April.

'Changing words can change what we think about the world around us,' he said. 'These tiny moments accrue and become big movements.'

However, some while maybe admirable, the project has thrown up some interesting questions for Kyle Thiessen.

While 'manhole' and 'manlock' are not easily replaced, it does not substitutes from being suggested.

Such as 'utility hole' and 'air lock serving as a decompression chamber for workers.' However, Thiessen said that these were left alone to avoid confusion.

Washington state is the nation's fourth to boast of eliminating gender bias from its official lexicon, following in the footsteps of Florida, North Carolina and Illinois, Kohl-Welles said.

Other states that have passed gender-neutral constitutional mandates include California, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Utah, Kohl-Welles said. At least nine other states are currently considering gender-neutral legislation, she said.

'Words matter,' said Liz Watson, a National Women's Law Center senior adviser. 'This is important in changing hearts and minds.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Farewell to freshman - Washington State to remove 40,000 pieces of legislation of 'gender biased language'...but manhole survives

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This week new laws will come into effect in Washington State to form the final piece of a six-year effort to rewrite all state laws using gender-neutral vocabulary. The politically correct crusade will see terms such as 'fisherman', 'freshman' and even 'journeyman plumber' replaced with 'fisher', 'first-year-student' and 'journey-level plumber'.

# data[].attributes.headline
Joel Clark-Men's language becoming more similar to women's language

# data[].attributes.subject
Joel Clark-Men's language becoming more similar to women's language

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
More young men in California rise in pitch at the end of their sentences when talking, new research shows.

This process is known as "uptalk" or "valleygirl speak" and has in the past been associated with young females, typically from California or Australia.

But now a team says that this way of speaking is becoming more frequent among men.

The findings were presented at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in California.

"We found use of uptalk in all of our speakers, despite their diverse backgrounds in socioeconomic status, ethnicity, bilingualism and gender," said Amanda Ritchart, a linguist at the University of California who led the research.

"We believe that uptalk is becoming more prevalent and systematic in its use for the younger generations in Southern California," she added.

The team recorded and analysed the voices of 23 native Californians aged between 18 and 22. The researchers were therefore not able to infer similar language patters in older Californians.

Sounding ditzy

People who speak uptalk are often misunderstood to be insecure, shallow or slightly dim, according to the team, who say this was not necessarily the case.

Speaking to the BBC's Inside Science programme, co-author Amalia Arvanati, from the University of Kent, said it was hard to know how this process started.

"People talk about Frank Zappa's song, Valley Girl. Finding out where it started is very difficult because we don't have good records of how people use pitch.

"One possibility is that this is an extension of a pitch pattern that we actually find in most varieties of English which is used when you're making a statement but you're [also] asking indirectly for the interlocutor to confirm if they are with you," Prof Arvaniti said.

She added that "uptalk" had negative connotations which made men less likely to admit to using it, but what was clear was that it was spreading.

"It grates on people, some people think it sounds really ditzy or insecure. This does not accurately come across like that to the native speakers."

Women leaders

Claire Nance, a linguistics lecturer at Lancaster University, commented that the research reinforced the fact that uptalk was "increasingly widespread across all kinds of people".

"Typically, women are trail-blazers in language change and take up innovative features first, then males start using them later.

"No spoken language ever remains stable and constant change is very much the norm. However, change often causes alarm among people who do not use an innovative feature, and uptalk appears to be another example of this trend," Dr Nance added.

She explained that speakers may use uptalk to convey politeness or empathy with the listener, but that this was not always understood by non-uptalkers, perhaps due to its similarity to question intonation.
Inside Science is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Thursdays at 16:30 and 21:00. Listen to the full Inside Science programme here or download the podcast here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
More young men in California rise in pitch at the end of their sentences when talking, new research shows. This process is known as "uptalk" or "valleygirl speak" and has in the past been associated with young females, typically from California or Australia.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's happened. Literally the most misused word in the language has officially changed definition. Now as well as meaning "in a literal manner or sense; exactly: 'the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the traffic circle'", various dictionaries have added its other more recent usage. As Google puts it, "literally" can be used "to acknowledge that something is not literally true but is used for emphasis or to express strong feeling".

Did we, as genuinely hundreds of people are tweeting, just break the English language? Or did we, as totally tens of bloggers are writing, prove that the English language is a beautiful, organic creature that is forever slipping out of our control? Well, no: to be precise, we have done something mildly annoying.

"Literally", you see, in its development from knock-kneed, single-purpose utterance, to swan-like dual-purpose term, has reached that awkward stage. It is neither one nor the other, and it can't do anything right. So to use it at all is to encounter one of several pitfalls:

1. Mucking about with its meaning isn't clever or inventive any more

"Literally" has been playfully abused since the time of Walter Scott. In Chronicles of the Canongate, for example, he writes: "The house was literally electrified; and it was only from witnessing the effects of her genius that he could guess to what a pitch theatrical excellence could be carried." This was 1827, before the popularisation of the electric light: the house was figuratively electrified.

In 1837, a piece in The Mother's Magazine by Abigail and Samuel Whittelsey contained the phrase, "They both literally slept in Jesus", and in 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, that Sherlock's room "was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams" (we can probably also take this as figurative).

The point is that even if it was fun and surprising to force a "literally" where another word should go back in the 1800s, it's getting a bit old now. But not quite old enough to change the word's meaning completely and clean it of all the irritatingly playful associations.

Plus, since then the word has picked up way too much baggage to make it usefully nifty. "Literally" has been mainstream shorthand for "talking like a teenage girl" for a decade - you're not going to get rid of that reference without violent verbal acrobatics. Literally, I'm afraid, is, like, totally eighteen-hundred and late.

2. To use it is to teeter on the edge of a conversational wormhole

You might be near a pedant, and they will say something like "Don't you mean 'figuratively?'" (no, no one says "figuratively" - it is pretentious) or go into "Yes, your foot is LITERALLY coming off. I LITERALLY believe you" paroxysms until smothered. These are the same people who use the word as a definitive intelligence measure - see the snobbery over Jamie Redknapp last year - which in my mind is as much of an error as using a specific piece of knowledge as a mark of cleverness ("X% of Americans don't know where Armenia is! So stupid...").

3. There isn't much to be done

Given all of this, even when someone does use the word correctly, ("he's literally the prime minister"), it is often such a surprise to the listener that the conversation halts anyway - prompting something like "er, yes. You're right. He literally is" to emphasise just how much they have acknowledged your traditional use of language.

So there really is not much we can do with the word "literally", other than avoid it completely. At the moment it is irredeemable. It is a moot word. We just have to leave it up in its bedroom for a while until it grows up a bit.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Have we literally broken the English language? | Martha Gill

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's happened. Literally the most misused word in the language has officially changed definition. Now as well as meaning "in a literal manner or sense; exactly: 'the driver took it literally when asked to go straight over the traffic circle'", various dictionaries have added its other more recent usage.

# data[].attributes.headline
Taya- is texting killing the English Language?

# data[].attributes.subject
Taya- is texting killing the English Language?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
People have always spoken differently from how they write, and texting is actually talking with your fingers

Getty Images

Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all - it's actually more akin to spoken language. And it's a "spoken" language that is getting richer and more complex by the year.

First, some historical perspective. Writing was only invented 5,500 years ago, whereas language probably traces back at least 80,000 years. Thus talking came first; writing is just an artifice that came along later. As such, the first writing was based on the way people talk, with short sentences - think of the Old Testament. However, while talk is largely subconscious and rapid, writing is deliberate and slow. Over time, writers took advantage of this and started crafting tapeworm sentences such as this one, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The whole engagement lasted above 12 hours, till the gradual retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."

( MORE: Why Americans Need Spelling Bees and Vocabulary Tests)

No one talks like that casually - or should. But it is natural to desire to do so for special occasions, and that's what oratory is, like the grand-old kinds of speeches that William Jennings Bryan delivered. In the old days, we didn't much write like talking because there was no mechanism to reproduce the speed of conversation. But texting and instant messaging do - and a revolution has begun. It involves the brute mechanics of writing, but in its economy, spontaneity and even vulgarity, texting is actually a new kind of talking. There is a virtual cult of concision and little interest in capitalization or punctuation. The argument that texting is "poor writing" is analogous, then, to one that the Rolling Stones is "bad music" because it doesn't use violas. Texting is developing its own kind of grammar and conventions.

( MORE: Banning the Term Illegal Immigrant Won't Change the Stigma)

Texting is developing its own kind of grammar. Take LOL. It doesn't actually mean "laughing out loud" in a literal sense anymore. LOL has evolved into something much subtler and sophisticated and is used even when nothing is remotely amusing. Jocelyn texts "Where have you been?" and Annabelle texts back "LOL at the library studying for two hours." LOL signals basic empathy between texters, easing tension and creating a sense of equality. Instead of having a literal meaning, it does something - conveying an attitude - just like the -ed ending conveys past tense rather than "meaning" anything. LOL, of all things, is grammar.

Of course no one thinks about that consciously. But then most of communication operates below the radar. Over time, the meaning of a word or an expression drifts - meat used to mean any kind of food, silly used to mean, believe it or not, blessed.

Civilization, then, is fine - people banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, and there is no evidence that texting is ruining composition skills. Worldwide people speak differently from the way they write, and texting - quick, casual and only intended to be read once - is actually a way of talking with your fingers.

All indications are that America's youth are doing it quite well. Texting, far from being a scourge, is a work in progress.
This essay is adapted from McWhorter's talk at TED 2013.
MORE: Why Do We Love to Invent Languages?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Is Texting Killing the English Language? | TIME.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Texting has long been bemoaned as the downfall of the written word, "penmanship for illiterates," as one critic called it. To which the proper response is LOL. Texting properly isn't writing at all - it's actually more akin to spoken language.

# data[].attributes.headline
How technology influences our language. Millie 

# data[].attributes.subject
How technology influences our language. Millie 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.

At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".

"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.

"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.

"He was some kind of singer?"

The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.

But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.

"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.

"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

Super slang

One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.

It is often used to voice disapproval or anger towards another commentator, says Svitlana Pyrkalo, a producer at the BBC World Service Ukrainian Service.

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.

"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.

"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."

One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.

In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.

They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.

Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".

But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The secret of their success is their longevity.

"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.

She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.

Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.

Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.

"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.

"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.

Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.

But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.

Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.

"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.

"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."

For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.

"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.

"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.

"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well."

More on this story

Related Internet Links

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed? In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

# data[].attributes.headline
Does English still borrow words form other languages?

# data[].attributes.subject
Does English still borrow words form other languages?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
English language has "borrowed" words for centuries. But is it now lending more than it's taking, asks Philip Durkin, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

English speakers may not be famous for being au fait with foreign languages, but all of us use words taken from other languages every day.

In that last sentence au fait is an obvious example, but famous, foreign, languages, use, and taken are also borrowed words. Knowledge of what is being borrowed, and from where, provides an invaluable insight into the international relations of the English language.

Today English borrows words from other languages with a truly global reach. Some examples that the Oxford English Dictionary suggests entered English during the past 30 years include tarka dal, a creamy Indian lentil dish (1984, from Hindi), quinzhee, a type of snow shelter (1984, from Slave or another language of the Pacific Coast of North America), popiah, a type of Singaporean or Malaysian spring roll (1986, from Malay), izakaya, a type of Japanese bar serving food (1987), affogato, an Italian dessert made of ice cream and coffee (1992).

One obvious thing that these words have in common is that not all English speakers will know them. Probably affogato and tarka dal are likeliest to be familiar to British readers, but they do not yet belong to the vocabulary that you would expect just about every British person to know, and experiences will differ greatly in different parts of the world.

Some words slowly build up in frequency. For instance, the word sushi is first recorded in English in the 1890s, but the earliest examples in print all feel the need to explain what sushi is, and it is only in recent decades that it has become ubiquitous, as sushi has spread along the high street and into supermarket chiller cabinets in most corners of the English-speaking world. But, commonplace though sushi may be today, it hasn't made its way into the inner core of English in the same way as words like peace, war, just, or very (from French) or leg, sky, take, or they (from Scandinavian languages). This isn't just because they were borrowed longer ago. It owes a great deal to the different influences that foreign languages have had on the word-stock of English over the centuries.

The number of new borrowed words finding their way into the shared international vocabulary is on a long downward trend

It's very hard to be precise about the boundaries of the vocabulary of any language, especially a global one like modern English. Every speaker of a language has a slightly different vocabulary. English speakers living in New Zealand are likely to be familiar with a wider range of words of Maori origin, like Pakeha, a New Zealander of European descent, aroha (sympathy, understanding), kia ora - a greeting or farewell. English speakers in Scotland may know more words of Scottish Gaelic origin, like cranachan, a type of dessert, pibroch, bagpipe music, Sassenach, Englishman. Dictionaries, even very big ones like the OED, monitor those words that have some traction in English across the world. This sort of monitoring reveals some surprising trends. Although English is now borrowing from other languages with a worldwide range, the number of new borrowed words finding their way into the shared international vocabulary is on a long downward trend.

One big reason for this is the success of English as an international language of science, scholarship, business, and many other fields. If we think about words coming into English from foreign languages in the 18th and 19th Centuries, we may think first of the impact of colonialism and expanding trade. Words like jungle (1776), bangle (1787), yoga (1818), khaki (1863) came into English from languages of South Asia. But in many other cases new words slipped into English as a result of scientific coinages in other European languages. For example, oxygen reflects the French name oxygène that the scientists Lavoisier and Guyton de Morveau gave to the recently discovered element in the 1780s. The word is formed from elements that ultimately come from Greek, but it was coined in French and then borrowed into English.

A similar story applies to paraffin, formed in German in 1830 (from Latin elements), and then borrowed into English in 1835. Other borrowings like semester (1826) or seminar (1889) reflect German innovations in higher education. Such borrowings are still sometimes found today, but have become much less common, as English has become the lingua franca of the world of learning (and of so many other fields). Today, the balance is tipping much more towards English as a donor of new words (eg internet, computer, cell phone, meeting, business) rather than a borrower. By contrast, new borrowings into English today tend to cluster much more closely in a few subject areas, especially names of food and drink.

If we look back further, it was in the Middle Ages that the everyday vocabulary of English was affected most deeply by borrowing from other languages. In the wake of the Norman Conquest, French and Latin put English in the shade for centuries as the language of learning. The church, law, and officialdom. Even everyday business records were typically written in Latin or French down to the late 1300s. This has left an indelible mark on the English language today. Words like age, air, cause, city, idea, join, material, poor, suffer, tax have become part of the fabric of modern English. Not far short of half of the 1,000 most frequently occurring words in modern written English have come into the language from French or Latin, mostly in the period from 1066 to 1500.

Mind your language with the Magazine

Fewer in number, but even more striking in their impact on the language of everyday life, are those words that came into English from Scandinavian languages. When communities of Scandinavian settlers in late Anglo-Saxon England began to switch to using English, they brought with them some words that have become part of the most basic layer of the vocabulary of English, such as give, take, hit, leg, skin, sky, and even the pronoun they. This was greatly helped by the close similarities between the early Scandinavian languages and medieval English.

Close contact does not inevitably lead to borrowing. For example, although English has been rubbing shoulders with Welsh and other Celtic languages in the British Isles for many centuries, relatively few words have come into everyday English from this source. There are some examples, like trousers, gull, clan, or (maybe) baby, but they are tiny in number compared with the vast numbers borrowed from French and Latin, and they have had less impact on the everyday language than words from Scandinavian sources.

Ultimately, patterns of borrowed words reflect complex patterns of cultural contacts across the centuries. Names of foods, plants, animals, and other features of the natural world are borrowed as part of the basic traffic between peoples in different parts of the world. Borrowings affecting other areas of the vocabulary typically follow the pathways of power and prestige between languages. English today may, for once, be more of a lender than a borrower. If we try to look decades or centuries into the future, who knows?
Philip Durkin is the author of Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English Follow Read a follow-up article about readers' examples of loan words @BBCNewsMagazine on Twitter and on Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does English still borrow words from other languages?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
English language has "borrowed" words for centuries. But is it now lending more than it's taking, asks Philip Durkin, deputy chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. English speakers may not be famous for being au fait with foreign languages, but all of us use words taken from other languages every day.

# data[].attributes.headline
Do men and women speak the same language? Millie 

# data[].attributes.subject
Do men and women speak the same language? Millie 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Readers who prefer something a little harder-edged can turn to a genre of popular science books with titles such as Brain Sex, Sex on the Brain, The Essential Difference, and Why Men Don't Iron. These explain that the gulf between men and women is a product of nature, not nurture. The sexes communicate differently (and women do it better) because of the way their brains are wired. The female brain excels in verbal tasks whereas the male brain is better adapted to visual-spatial and mathematical tasks. Women like to talk; men prefer action to words.

Writers in this vein are fond of presenting themselves as latter-day Galileos, braving the wrath of the political correctness lobby by daring to challenge the feminist orthodoxy that denies that men and women are by nature profoundly different. Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of The Essential Difference, explains in his introduction that he put the book aside for several years because "the topic was just too politically sensitive". In the chapter on male-female differences in his book about human nature, The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker congratulates himself on having the courage to say what has long been "unsayable in polite company". Both writers stress that they have no political axe to grind: they are simply following the evidence where it leads, and trying to put scientific facts in place of politically correct dogma.

Yet before we applaud, we should perhaps pause to ask ourselves: since when has silence reigned about the differences between men and women? Certainly not since the early 1990s, when the previous steady trickle of books began to develop into a raging torrent. By now, a writer who announces that sex-differences are natural is not "saying the unsayable": he or she is stating the obvious. The proposition that men and women communicate differently is particularly uncontroversial, with cliches such as "men never listen" and "women find it easier to talk about their feelings" referenced constantly in everything from women's magazines to humorous greeting cards.

The idea that men and women "speak different languages" has itself become a dogma, treated not as a hypothesis to be investigated or as a claim to be adjudicated, but as an unquestioned article of faith. Our faith in it is misplaced. Like the scientists I have mentioned, I believe in following the evidence where it leads. But in this case, the evidence does not lead where most people think it does. If we examine the findings of more than 30 years of research on language, communication and the sexes, we will discover that they tell a different, and more complicated, story.

The idea that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate is a myth in the everyday sense: a widespread but false belief. But it is also a myth in the sense of being a story people tell in order to explain who they are, where they have come from, and why they live as they do. Whether or not they are "true" in any historical or scientific sense, such stories have consequences in the real world. They shape our beliefs, and so influence our actions. The myth of Mars and Venus is no exception to that rule.

For example, the workplace is a domain in which myths about language and the sexes can have detrimental effects. A few years ago, the manager of a call centre in north-east England was asked by an interviewer why women made up such a high proportion of the agents he employed. Did men not apply for jobs in his centre? The manager replied that any vacancies attracted numerous applicants of both sexes, but, he explained: "We are looking for people who can chat to people, interact, build rapport. What we find is that women can do this more ... women are naturally good at that sort of thing." Moments later, he admitted: "I suppose we do, if we're honest, select women sometimes because they are women rather than because of something they've particularly shown in the interview."

The growth of call centres is part of a larger trend in economically advanced societies. More jobs are now in the service than the manufacturing sector, and service jobs, particularly those that involve direct contact with customers, put a higher premium on language and communication skills. Many employers share the call-centre manager's belief that women are by nature better qualified than men for jobs of this kind, and one result is a form of discrimination. Male job applicants have to prove that they possess the necessary skills, whereas women are just assumed to possess them. In today's increasingly service-based economy, this may not be good news for men.

But it is not only men who stand to lose because of the widespread conviction that women have superior verbal skills. Someone else who thinks men and women are naturally suited to different kinds of work is Baron-Cohen. In The Essential Difference he offers the following "scientific" careers advice: "People with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel staff ... People with the male brain make the most wonderful scientists, engineers, mechanics, technicians, musicians, architects, electricians, plumbers, taxonomists, catalogists, bankers, toolmakers, programmers or even lawyers."

The difference between the two lists reflects what Baron-Cohen takes to be the "essential difference" between male and female brains. The female-brain jobs make use of a capacity for empathy and communication, whereas the male ones exploit the ability to analyse complex systems. Baron-Cohen is careful to talk about -"people with the female/male brain" rather than "men and women". He stresses that there are men with female brains, women with male brains, and individuals of both sexes with "balanced" brains. He refers to the major brain types as "male" and "female", however, because the tendency is for males to have male brains and females to have female brains. And at many points it becomes clear that in spite of his caveats about not confusing gender with brain sex, he himself is doing exactly that.

The passage reproduced above is a good example. Baron-Cohen classifies nursing as a female-brain, empathy-based job (though if a caring and empathetic nurse cannot measure dosages accurately and make systematic clinical observations she or he risks doing serious harm) and law as a male-brain, system-analysing job (though a lawyer, however well versed in the law, will not get far without communication and people-reading skills). These categorisations are not based on a dispassionate analysis of the demands made by the two jobs. They are based on the everyday common-sense knowledge that most nurses are women and most lawyers are men.

If you read the two lists in their entirety, it is hard not to be struck by another "essential difference": the male jobs are more varied, more creative, and better rewarded than their female counterparts. Baron-Cohen's job-lists take me back to my schooldays 35 years ago, when the aptitude tests we had to complete before being interviewed by a careers adviser were printed on pink or blue paper. In those days we called this sexism, not science.

At its most basic, what I am calling "the myth of Mars and Venus" is simply the proposition that men and women differ fundamentally in the way they use language to communicate. All versions of the myth share this basic premise; most versions, in addition, make some or all of the following claims:

1 Language and communication matter more to women than to men; women talk more than men.

2 Women are more verbally skilled than men.

3 Men's goals in using language tend to be about getting things done, whereas women's tend to be about making connections to other people. Men talk more about things and facts, whereas women talk more about people, relationships and feelings.

4 Men's way of using language is competitive, reflecting their general interest in acquiring and maintaining status; women's use of language is cooperative, reflecting their preference for equality and harmony.

5 These differences routinely lead to "miscommunication" between the sexes, with each sex misinterpreting the other's intentions. This causes problems in contexts where men and women regularly interact, and especially in heterosexual relationships.

The literature of Mars and Venus, in both the self-help and popular science genres, is remarkably patronising towards men. They come off as bullies, petulant toddlers; or Neanderthals sulking in their caves. One (male) contributor to this catalogue of stereotypes goes so far as to call his book If Men Could Talk. A book called If Women Could Think would be instantly denounced; why do men put up with books that put them on a par with Lassie or Skippy the Bush Kangaroo ("Hey, wait a minute - I think he's trying to tell us something!")?

Perhaps men have realised that a reputation for incompetence can sometimes work to your advantage. Like the idea that they are no good at housework, the idea that men are no good at talking serves to exempt them from doing something that many would rather leave to women anyway. (Though it is only some kinds of talking that men would rather leave to women: in many contexts men have no difficulty expressing themselves - indeed, they tend to dominate the conversation.)

This should remind us that the relationship between the sexes is not only about difference, but also about power. The long-standing expectation that women will serve and care for others is not unrelated to their position as the "second sex". But in the universe of Mars and Venus, the fact that we (still) live in a male-dominated society is like an elephant in the room that everyone pretends not to notice.

My father, like many men of his generation, held the belief that women were incompetent drivers. During my teenage years, family car journeys were invariably accompanied by an endless running commentary on how badly the women around us were driving. Eventually I became so irritated by this, I took to scouring passing traffic for counter-examples: women who were driving perfectly well, and men who were driving like idiots.

My father usually conceded that the men were idiots, but not because they were men. Whereas female idiocy was axiomatically caused by femaleness, substandard male drivers were either "yobbos" - people with no consideration for others on the road or anywhere else - or "Sunday drivers": older men whose driving skills were poor because they used their cars only at weekends. As for the women who drove unremarkably, my father seemed surprised when I pointed them out. It was as if he had literally not noticed them until that moment.

At the time I thought my father was exceptional in his ability to make reality fit his preconceptions, but now I know he was not. Psychologists have found in experimental studies that when interpreting situations people typically pay most attention to things that match their expectations, and often fail to register counter-examples.

It is not hard to see how these tendencies might lead readers of Mars and Venus books to "recognise" generalisations about the way men and women use language, provided those generalisations fit with already familiar stereotypes. An anecdote illustrating the point that, say, men are competitive and women cooperative conversationalists will prompt readers to recall the many occasions on which they have observed men competing and women cooperating - while not recalling the occasions, perhaps equally numerous, on which they have observed the opposite. If counter-examples do come to mind ("What about Janet? She's the most competitive person I know"), it is open to readers to apply the classic strategy of putting them in a separate category of exceptions ("of course, she grew up with three brothers / is the only woman in her department / works in a particularly competitive business").

In relation to men and women, our most basic stereotypical expectation is simply that they will be different rather than the same. We actively look for differences, and seek out sources that discuss them. Most research studies investigating the behaviour of men and women are designed around the question: is there a difference? And the presumption is usually that there will be. If a study finds a significant difference between male and female subjects, that is considered to be a "positive" finding, and has a good chance of being published. A study that finds no significant differences is less likely to be published.

Most people, of course, do not read academic journals: they get their information about scientific research findings from the reports that appear in newspapers, or from TV science documentaries. These sources often feature research on male-female differences, since media producers know that there is interest in the subject. But the criteria producers use when deciding which studies to report and how to present them introduce another layer of distortion. And sometimes headlines trumpet so-called facts that turn out, on investigation, to have no basis in evidence at all.

In 2006, for instance, a popular science book called The Female Brain claimed that women on average utter 20,000 words a day, while men on average utter only 7,000. This was perfect material for soundbite science - it confirmed the popular belief that women are not only the more talkative sex but three times as much - and was reported in newspapers around the world.

One person who found it impossible to believe was Mark Liberman, a professor of phonetics who has worked extensively with recorded speech. His scepticism prompted him to delve into the footnotes of The Female Brain to find out where the author had got her figures. What he found was not an academic citation but a reference to a self-help book. Following the trail into the thickets of popular literature, Liberman came across several competing statistical claims. The figures varied wildly: different authors (and sometimes even the same author in different books) gave average female daily word-counts ranging from 4,000 to 25,000 words. As far as Liberman could tell, all these numbers were plucked from thin air: in no case did anyone cite any actual research to back them up. He concluded that no one had ever done a study counting the words produced by a sample of men and women in the course of a single day. The claims were so variable because they were pure guesswork.

After Liberman pointed this out in a newspaper article, the author of The Female Brain conceded that her claim was not supported by evidence and said it would be deleted from future editions. But the damage was already done: the much-publicised soundbite that women talk three times as much as men will linger in people's memories and get recycled in their conversations, whereas the little-publicised retraction will make no such impression. This is how myths acquire the status of facts.
Do women and men really speak so differently?
In 2005, an article appeared in the journal American Psychologist with the title The Gender Similarities Hypothesis. This title stood out as unusual, because, as we have seen, the aim of most research studies is to find differences rather than similarities between men and women. Yet, as the article's author Janet S Hyde pointed out, on closer inspection, the results of these studies very often show more similarity than difference.

Hyde is a psychologist who specialises in "meta-analysis", a statistical technique that allows the analyst to collate many different research findings and draw overall conclusions from them. Scientists believe that one study on its own does not show anything: results are only considered reliable if a number of different studies have replicated them. Suppose that the question is: who interrupts more, men or women? Some studies will have found that men interrupt more, others that women do, and others may have found no significant difference. In some studies the reported gender difference will be large, while in others it will be much smaller. The number of people whose behaviour was investigated will also vary from study to study. Meta-analysis enables you to aggregate the various results, controlling for things that make them difficult to compare directly, and calculate the overall effect of gender on interruption.

Hyde used this technique to review a large number of studies concerned with all kinds of putative male-female differences. In Table 1, I have extracted the results for just those studies that dealt with gender differences in linguistic and communicative behaviour.

To read this table you need to know that "d" is the formula indicating the size of the overall gender difference: minus values for "d" indicate that females are ahead of males, whereas plus values indicate that males are ahead of females.

Click here for the table on Gender differences in verbal/communicative behaviour adapted from Hyde, 'The Gender Similarities Hypothesis'.

So, for instance, the table tells us that when the findings of different studies are aggregated, the overall conclusion is that men interrupt more than women and women self-disclose more than men. However, the really interesting information is in the last column, which tells us whether the actual figure given for d indicates an effect that is very large, large, moderate, small, or close to zero. In almost every case, the overall difference made by gender is either small or close to zero. Two items, spelling accuracy and frequency of smiling, show a larger effect - but it is still only moderate.

There were a few areas in which Hyde did find that the effect of gender was large or very large. For instance, studies of aggression and of how far people can throw things have shown a considerable gap between the sexes (men are more aggressive and can throw further). But in studies of verbal abilities and behaviour, the differences were slight. This is not a new observation. In 1988 Hyde and her colleague Marcia Linn carried out a meta-analysis of research dealing specifically with gender differences in verbal ability. The conclusion they came to was that the difference between men and women amounted to "about one-tenth of one standard deviation" - statistician-speak for "negligible". Another scholar who has considered this question, the linguist Jack Chambers, suggests that the degree of non-overlap in the abilities of male and female speakers in any given population is "about 0.25%". That's an overlap of 99.75%. It follows that for any array of verbal abilities found in an individual woman, there will almost certainly be a man with exactly the same array.

Chambers' reference to individual men and women points to another problem with generalisations such as "men interrupt more than women" or "women are more talkative than men". As well as underplaying their similarities, statements of the form "women do this and men do that" disguise the extent of the variation that exists within each gender group. Explaining why he had reacted with instant scepticism to the claim that women talk three times as much as men, Liberman predicted: "Whatever the average female versus male difference turns out to be, it will be small compared with the variation among women and among men." Focusing on the differences between men and women while ignoring the differences within them is extremely misleading but, unfortunately, all too common.
Do women really talk more than men?
If we are going to try to generalise about which sex talks more, a reliable way to do it is to observe both sexes in a single interaction, and measure their respective contributions. This cuts out extraneous variables that are likely to affect the amount of talk (like whether someone is spending their day at a Buddhist retreat or a high school reunion), and allows for a comparison of male and female behaviour under the same contextual conditions.

Numerous studies have been done using this approach, and while the results have been mixed, the commonest finding is that men talk more than women. One review of 56 research studies categorises their findings as shown here:

Pattern of difference found / Number of studies
Men talk more than women / 34 (60.8%)

Women talk more than men / 2 (3.6%)

Men and women talk the same amount / 16 (28.6%)

No clear pattern / 4 (7.0%)

· Source: based on Deborah James and Janice Drakich, 'Understanding Gender Differences in Amount of Talk', in Deborah Tannen (ed.), Gender and Conversational

The reviewers are inclined to believe that this is a case of gender and amount of talk being linked indirectly rather than directly: the more direct link is with status, in combination with the formality of the setting (status tends to be more relevant in formal situations). The basic trend, especially in formal and public contexts, is for higher-status speakers to talk more than lower-status ones. The gender pattern is explained by the observation that in most contexts where status is relevant, men are more likely than women to occupy high-status positions; if all other things are equal, gender itself is a hierarchical system in which men are regarded as having higher status.

"Regarded" is an important word here, because conversational dominance is not just about the way dominant speakers behave; it is also about the willingness of others to defer to them. Some experimental studies have found that you can reverse the "men talk more" pattern, or at least reduce the gap, by instructing subjects to discuss a topic that both sexes consider a distinctively female area of expertise. Status, then, is not a completely fixed attribute, but can vary relative to the setting, subject and purpose of conversation.

That may be why some studies find that women talk more in domestic interactions with partners and family members: in the domestic sphere, women are often seen as being in charge. In other spheres, however, the default assumption is that men outrank women, and men are usually found to talk more. In informal contexts where status is not an issue, the commonest finding is not that women talk more than men, it is that the two sexes contribute about equally.

If it does not reflect reality, why is the folk-belief that women talk more than men so persistent? The feminist Dale Spender once suggested an explanation: she said that people overestimate how much women talk because they think that, ideally, women would not talk at all. While that may be rather sweeping, it is true that belief in female loquacity is generally combined with disapproval of it. The statement "women talk more than men" tends to imply the judgment "women talk too much". (As one old proverb charmingly puts it: "Many women, many words; many geese, many turds.")

The folk-belief that women talk more than men persists because it provides a justification for an ingrained social prejudice. Evolutionary psychology is open to a similar criticism: that it takes today's social prejudices and projects them back into prehistory, thus elevating them to the status of timeless truths about the human condition.

Champions of the evolutionary approach often say it is their opponents whose arguments are based on prejudice rather than facts or logic. They complain that feminists and other "PC" types are unwilling even to consider the idea that sex-differences might have biological rather than social causes. Instead of judging the arguments on their merits, these politically motivated critics just denounce them, and those who advance them, as reactionary and bigoted.

But their stories have a basic flaw: they are based not on facts, but on myths.

© Deborah Cameron. Extracted from The Myth of Mars and Venus published, by Oxford University Press in hardback at £10.99. To order a copy for £9.99 with free UK p&p go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Do men and women speak the same language?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It is a truism that men and women do not communicate in the same way. But is there really any evidence to support this Mars-and-Venus theory? Oxford language professor Deborah Cameron investigates in the first of three extracts from her new book.

# data[].attributes.headline
Language and power referring to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair (Cedric)

# data[].attributes.subject
Language and power referring to Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair (Cedric)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Power really DOES go to the head: Expert says that egos of Thatcher and Blair were reflected in their self-obsessed language

Hubris is commonly associated with a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments or capabilities

British researchers discovered that this personality change was reflected in both Blair's and Thatcher's use of language

It is as if power, almost literally "goes to their head", they say

Between the two of them, they have divided political opinion the world over.

But scientists say that British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and the late Lady Thatcher also had something else in common - the use of egotistical language during their respective periods in office.

Dubbed Hubris syndrome, it has been suggested that a number of Prime Ministers may have developed the personality disorder - known as Hubris syndrome - while in power.

Researchers at St George's, University of London have discovered that this personality change was reflected in both Blair's and Thatcher's use of language.

Hubris, say the researchers, is commonly associated with a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments or capabilities.

It is characterised by a pattern of exuberant self-confidence, recklessness and contempt for others, and is most particularly recognised in subjects holding positions of significant power.

Fourteen clinical symptoms of Hubris syndrome have been described. People who show at least three of these could be diagnosed with the disorder.

Researchers at St George's, University of London, searched for evidence of some of these clinical features in the language used by three British Prime Ministers - Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and John Major - by examining transcribed samples of spoken language taken from Prime Minister's Questions.

They thought that frequent use of certain words or phrases, such as 'sure', 'certain' and 'confident', the first person pronouns 'I' or 'me', references to God or history, might show up during 'hubristic' periods.

They found that 'I' and 'me' and the word 'sure' were among the strongest positive correlations over time in Tony Blair's speech.

Blair's use of the word 'important' also increased with time. Words and phrases that became more frequent with time in the speeches of Lady Thatcher and Tony Blair also included the phrase 'we shall', while phrases that included the word 'duties' diminished.

The authors also found that language became more complex and less predictable during hubristic periods.

For example, Lady Thatcher's language becomes more complex at the end of her term of office, when her decisions and judgements were opening deep divisions within her own party. The same happened to Tony Blair's speech during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

These linguistic patterns were not reflected in the language of John Major. The relative frequency of the word 'we' compared to 'I' was in fact higher throughout the terms of office of both Thatcher and Blair than at any point of Major's premiership.

Additionally, the changes over time in words and phrases adopted by both Thatcher and Blair appeared to mirror the time course of hubristic behaviour.

Dr Peter Garrard, the lead researcher, from St George's, University of London, said: 'Hubris syndrome represents a radical change in a person's outlook, style and attitude after they acquire positions of power or great influence.

'They become obsessed with their self-image, excessively confident in their own judgement and dismissive of others, often leading to rash, ill thought-out decisions.

'In other words, the acquisition of power can bring about a change in personality: it is as if power, almost literally "goes to their head".

'This work shows us that language can reflect this highly characteristic personality change'

The research is published in the journal Cortex.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hubris is commonly associated with a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence, accomplishments or capabilities British researchers discovered that this personality change was reflected in both Blair's and Thatcher's use of language It is as if power, almost literally "goes to their head", they say Between the two of them, they have divided political opinion the world over.

# data[].attributes.headline
Ellie Lang - Researchers looking at how television viewing can lead to accent changes

# data[].attributes.subject
Ellie Lang - Researchers looking at how television viewing can lead to accent changes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Researchers looking at how television viewing can lead to accent changes have claimed Glaswegian fans of EastEnders are picking up Cockney dialect.

Linguists at Glasgow University said the study proved that actively watching TV could speed up language change.

They said pronunciation, typically associated with London English, was being increasingly used by Glaswegians who regularly watched the soap.

Their findings have been published in the American journal, Language.

The study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, looked at how watching EastEnders was altering certain features of the Scottish accent.

The researchers found two particular features of pronunciation, typically associated with the Cockney dialect, were becoming increasingly apparent in the Glaswegian dialect among regular viewers of the BBC programme.

The features were using "f" for "th" in words like "think" and "tooth", and using a vowel sound like that in "good" in place of "l" in words like milk and people.

Emotionally engaged

Jane Stuart-Smith, professor of phonetics and lead researcher on the project, said: "Our study shows that the programmes that we watch on television can help to accelerate changes in aspects of language which are also well below the level of conscious awareness.

We need many more studies in order to appreciate properly the influence of television on language change
Prof Jane Stuart-Smith, Glasgow University

"In particular, this study was investigating why certain linguistic factors that are normally found within the Cockney dialect in London were gradually entering into Glaswegian.

"Although this trend was apparent in people who had contact with friends or family living in London, there was a stronger effect for people who had strong psychological engagement with characters in EastEnders."

The study, however, concluded that simply being exposed to television was not sufficient to cause accent change.

It was suggested that for someone's speech to alter, they needed to regularly watch the programme and become emotionally engaged with the characters.

The researchers also highlighted that television and other forms of popular media constituted only one of many factors that help accelerate language change.

Other, more powerful factors, such as social interaction between peers had a much stronger effect on language change in this study.

Prof Stuart-Smith added: "We don't properly understand the mechanisms behind these changes, but we do see that the impact of the media is weaker than that of actual social interaction.

"We need many more studies of this kind in order to appreciate properly the influence of television and other popular media on language change."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers looking at how television viewing can lead to accent changes have claimed Glaswegian fans of EastEnders are picking up Cockney dialect. Linguists at Glasgow University said the study proved that actively watching TV could speed up language change. They said pronunciation, typically associated with London English, was being increasingly used by Glaswegians who regularly watched the soap.

# data[].attributes.body
Here is an interesting article about the Australian accent. What are your opinions on this subject?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Australians have long known the value of adding an upward inflection to the ends of our sentences. It makes everything sound a bit like a question, doesn't it?

Australians have long known the value of adding an upward inflection to the ends of our sentences. It makes everything sound a bit like a question, doesn't it?

The "high-rising terminal" (or the Australian Question Intonation, if you want to get all racial about it) is getting a bad rap in Britain, though: 85% of managers surveyed by UK firm Pearson found the trait "a clear indicator of a person's insecurity or emotional weakness".

But far from indicating insecurity, some studies suggest that the AQI is often used by powerful people when speaking to their subordinates (thereby explaining why Australians use it when talking to Britons). The theory is that it's much more acceptable for a boss to ask an employee whether they understand something than vice versa. Linguists also believe the high-rising can serve other purposes. A rising intonation at the end of a statement (giving directions, for example) implicitly asks the listener to confirm that they understand what they've been told. Alternatively, it can be used to stop an anticipated interruption.

Besides, it's obvious why Britons would want to talk like Australians. The upward inflection lends us an air of mystery, while we continue to sound sophisticated enough for Americans to mistake us for English people. And it's a proven fact that all eleven members of our Ashes-winning cricket team use the AQI.

The good news (at least for the legion of Aussie expats in London) is that only English people are judged harshly for using the AQI. Perhaps the problem, then, is that you guys haven't quite mastered it yet. If teenagers are going to "uptalk" anyway, then it's probably about time to teach it in schools. Perhaps Shane Warne could put out an instructional video.

It's also worth remembering that the people polled about high-rising terminals were managers, not psychologists (or anyone at all useful to society). If someone is going to write-off your career prospects merely on the basis of a (sexy) little inflection, then would you really want to work for them anyway?

Rae Earl: It turns everything into either combat or inadequacy

Australian intonation is contagious. It's not just the humans either. I have a friend who to this day is convinced that Bouncer the dog in Neighbours had an Antipodean bark. When I questioned her as to the nature of this nationalistic ruff, she said it was friendlier but "uppy". She herself is slightly barking but she has a point.

It's very difficult to live in Australia and not find yourself leaping off at the end of sentences. The problem is this - the Aussie accent does work on the subconscious at lots of levels. It's sounds friendlier, but it also causes fights. To recreate this effect in your own home, question everything that your partner does - from the way they dress to the way they put the washing out. The Australian accent makes statements into questions and questions into inquisitions. It also makes tiny admissions of doubt sound like Pacific-sized adolescent insecurities. "I don't know" when you ask the price of grapes sounds equally like the answer to something like "Do you really love me?" When everything is a question, everything turns into combat or inadequacy. In Australian men over 60 it's particularly prominent and damaging: this monosyllabic generation of male OAPs can even make death into a confusing area. Read this conversation I overheard and go up" at the end of every sentence.

Aussie man: "You OK?" (Question)

Older Aussie man: "Yeah." (Sounds unsure)

Aussie man: "Wife OK?" (Question)

Older Aussie man: "No mate. She's dead." (Sounds like a mixture of question and doubt)

Aussie man: "Shit! Sorry." (Doubt - and questioning, "are you actually glad?")

Older Aussie man: "It's OK." (Is it though? What the hell does the other bloke say now?)

See - sophisticated, complicated speech intonation helps us express our feelings to the maximum. Endless questioning leads to a social manners crisis. We've got to stop this spreading. It works here in Australia. They make allowances. They've got used to it. But if it spreads to Britain it will be like verbal rabies. Besides, do you really want to call a yoghurt a YO-ghurt? Of course you don't. You want a dessert that sounds like a pudding not a greeting. Keep it British. Go down at the end of sentences. And if you find yourself living in Australia, watch lots of home-grown TV and exaggerate what you already have. Also keep your pets away from the locals. Nothing living is immune.
Topics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does speaking like an Aussie make you sound insecure? | Head to head

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Australians have long known the value of adding an upward inflection to the ends of our sentences. It makes everything sound a bit like a question, doesn't it? Australians have long known the value of adding an upward inflection to the ends of our sentences.