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Use the padlet to research knowledge & language (and the other elements of the course) in a real-world context, via a huge range of articles, videos, and podcasts from media sources all over the world.

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You can use the resource to develop a clearer understanding of this optional theme, grasp how TOK concepts manifest in the real world, and gather examples to support arguments in the essay and exhibition.

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We have arranged the media sources by 'Big Question' (one of our ways of structuring TOK - see this page of the site for more details). You can also apply them easily to the knowledge framework: Section 1 links to nature and scope; Section 2 links to ethics; Section 3, 5, 6 links to methods & tools; Section 4 links to perspectives.

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The 12 key terms are highlighted - and feature in separate Padlet here.

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A BBC article, which looks at a range of culturally-specific terms, this time about character traits and modes of behaviour, for which there are no words in the English language.

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A BBC article, which looks at a range of culturally-specific terms, this time about character traits and modes of behaviour, for which there are no words in the English language.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Source 3 Students can look through the different terms, and pick out their favourites. Think about what the writer says: “Learning other languages offers insights into the way that other cultures see the world”, and, “Languages encapsulate culture. They are an embodiment of the way in which a particular group of people has agreed to communicate.” Do you agree? Or is linguistic relativism unhelpful in giving us an insight into the relationship between language and culture? Does language determine knowledge?

KEY TERMS Culturally-specific terms

LINKS TO Language, Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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The English language may be one of the richest in the world. It draws on its unique combination of a Germanic heritage and strong Romance influences to offer speakers a broad range of nuances when expressing themselves. Just consider the difference between a 'hearty welcome' and a 'cordial reception' to see where the possibilities lie.

Yet, as English continues to rise as the world's de facto lingua franca, it's important to also remember its limitations. Languages encapsulate culture. They are an embodiment of the way in which a particular group of people has agreed to communicate. As a result, they reflect those people's experiences of the world through the idioms and expressions that become common parlance.
If you like this, you might also enjoy:
Learning other languages offers insights into the way that other cultures see the world. For someone like myself, gaining those insights can become addictive, and that fixation has led me to study 15 different languages. My recent book, 'From Amourette to Żal: Bizarre and Beautiful Words from Around Europe', explores some of the words that other languages have, but that English doesn't. The following 10 words, for example, describe character traits and behaviours that may be familiar to us all, but that the English language struggles to succinctly express.
1. Sortable / Insortable [adjective] - French
There are certain people in your life, such as friends or relatives, who you would rather meet up with at home than in public. Maybe it's just that every time you go out with them for a meal they end up causing some kind of scene like striking up conversation with the couple in the corner who just want to be left alone, arguing with the waiters, or asking you about your personal life in a very loud voice around others. The French language describes those people as insortable, which means 'un-take-out-able'.

However, those people that you would like to be seen in public with and that don't manage to humiliate you so badly, are the opposite of insortable. They are sortable, or 'take-out-able', because you want to parade around with them everywhere.
2. Polgárpukkasztás [noun] - Hungarian
One thing that may make somebody sortable or insortable, depending on your viewpoint, is this character trait captured perfectly by the Hungarian word polgárpukkasztás. This refers to when people like to do things that really shock people. For example, when Lady Gaga turned up at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards dressed entirely in raw beef.

It's possible to be polgárpukkasztás without being a world famous celebrity, of course. Any individual actions that shock ordinary, middle-class people who are just looking for a quiet life, count. The Hungarian word means 'citizen-explode', and is derived from the rallying cry of the French decadent poets of the late 19th Century to épater la bourgeoisie, or 'shock the bourgeoisie'.
3. Γρουσούζης (groosoozis) [noun] - Greek
It doesn't matter what they do. For some reason, some people just seem to bring bad luck. They're the kind of people whose toast always lands buttered side down. They're the kind of people whose phones miraculously die, even though just a second ago it said they had 51% battery left. Whatever they touch seems to break instantly, and worst of all, there's practically nothing they can do about it.

The Greek language doesn't try in vain to rationalise this predicament any more than it should be. Instead, it simply places those who find themselves in it into a category of their own. A γρουσούζης ( groosoozis) is not just someone who is a bit unlucky sometimes, but someone who is a magnet for misfortune.
4. Mimoso [adjective] - Spanish
Meeting people for the first time in British culture can often be a moment for some awkwardness. As there is no universally established norm for how to greet somebody you don't know, you are forced to assess each person on a case by case basis and make a judgement as to whether or not they'd prefer a handshake, a kiss on the cheek, a bear hug, or just a stilted wave.

We may deduce from this that we have an awkward relationship with physical contact in the UK. Personal space has differing degrees of importance to different people. However, within that spectrum there are those who love giving and receiving hugs, offering supportive pats on the back and express their affection for you by literally reaching out. The Spanish word mimoso perfectly captures those people who are constantly physically in touch with those around them.
5. Pantofolaio [noun] - Italian
Some people may enjoy leaping out of bed at the crack of dawn, putting on their running shoes and kicking off their day of spectacular productivity with a pre-work workout. For others, though, their day may never quite reach these heights of activity. Instead they might choose to roll out of bed at a more leisurely hour. And then, once they're up and about, the only type of footwear they would ever choose to don would be a pair of comfortable slippers, which they'll happily walk around their home in all day, before they take them off again to go back to bed.

Those people who are so lazy that they just spend all day lounging about in their slippers are known as pantofolaio, which essentially means a 'slippers-person'.
6. Ochtendhumeur [noun] - Dutch
The idea of getting to work every day at 9:00 and launching straight into meetings with overwhelming enthusiasm may not appeal to everyone. For some people, even though they may physically be present much earlier, the day only really starts around lunchtime. Before then, you may want to avoid approaching them or aggravating them too much, because simply they are not in the mood.

That foul mood is known in Dutch as ochtendhumeur, or 'morning humour'. So next time you see someone looking grumpy as they sip a cup of coffee in the early hours, don't mistake them for being an inherently hostile or unapproachable person. It's probably just that they've got ochtendhumeur and the moment the clocks strike noon their spirits will begin to lift.
7. Почемучка (pachemuchka) [noun] - Russian
Some people are happy to take life as it is served to them. Others can be slightly more inquisitive, and may instead choose to question everything. Why is the sky blue? Why are there stars in the sky? Why are there only 24 hours in a day? Why do we drive on the left? No matter what you tell them, they are just inclined to constantly ask questions until their insatiable curiosity has been satisfied.

In Russian those people who just won't stop asking "why?" are called почемучка ( pachemuchka), which is extremely hard to translate into English. The word почему means 'why', and the -чка ending is an affectionate way to describe someone. It can roughly be explained as 'little-why-people'.
8. Aktivansteher [noun] - German
In the UK, the art of queuing up tends to be seen as one of those national traits that are as quintessentially British as putting milk in your tea. We pride ourselves on the nobility, civility and patience of awaiting your turn. In reality, though, there is a hidden art to getting through a queue, far more quickly than others.

That person who is able to examine a queue and then quickly spot which line is moving faster than the others, and miraculously manages to find themselves ahead of those they started behind, has got a special name in German: an aktivansteher. This means an 'active queuer', which is another way of saying that when it comes to queuing, they are a pro.
9. Menefreghista [noun / adjective] - Italian
Some people just don't seem to care about other people, other people's problems, or really anything in particular. Nothing gets their blood flowing at all. They seem almost incapable of feeling emotions about things.

Italian has a special word reserved for those people and that attitude: menefreghista. It comes from the expression non me ne frega niente, which means 'I don't care about that at all'. The word menefreghista, therefore, means something like an 'I-don't-care-ist'.

Things that fall into the category of menefreghismo are people being overly arrogant about something, complacency, indifference, and any act that you can imagine was sparked by somebody at some point saying non me ne frega niente. Of course, governments and their policies can also be accused of being menefreghista.
10. Milozvučan [adjective] - Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Sing-alongs in the car are a great time to get to know your friends a bit better. You can all have a good laugh at your dire singing abilities and the fact that none of you really know the words. However, what if it emerges that one of your friends has been sitting on a hidden talent? While the rest of you whine away like stray cats, when that one friend opens their mouth and starts singing it sounds like the music of angels. What would you call that?

In the languages spoken in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, there is a special word for those that are gifted with a beautiful singing voice. They are called milozvučan, which literally means 'sweetly-sounding'.

--
Alex Rawlings is a polyglot and writer, who in 2012 was named Britain's Most Multilingual Student after being tested for fluency in 11 languages. His most recent book is From Amourette to Żal: Bizarre and Beautiful Words from Around Europe. Join 900,000+ Future fans by liking us on , or follow us on or . If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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The 10 personality traits that English cannot name

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The English language may be one of the richest in the world. It draws on its unique combination of a Germanic heritage and strong Romance influences to offer speakers a broad range of nuances when expressing themselves. Just consider the difference between a 'hearty welcome' and a 'cordial reception' to see where the possibilities lie.

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A Guardian article, looking at ten culturally-specific words that denote a specific emotion, concept, or idea. 

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A Guardian article, looking at ten culturally-specific words that denote a specific emotion, concept, or idea. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Do your students agree that these words really “speak volumes about the countries” which produced them? Can we talk about certain words being representative of another country – or is this just to generalise and simplify cultures and societies? What level of meaning is left behind when we translate words from one language to another? Can we understand an idea without having a word for it? What do we translate – words or concepts?

KEY TERMS Culturally-specific terms, Anglophone world

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences

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ne of the many great things about languages worldwide is the sizeable number of words for which there is no real English translation. Often they tell us about concepts and ideas that we are missing out on in the anglophone world.

As the northern hemisphere heads abroad in the coming holiday season, here are a few to be looking out for:

SPAIN: sobremesa

You may have witnessed the ritual, knowingly or not, while on the hunt for a coffee or a cold beer towards the end of another long Spanish afternoon.

Sitting clumped around tables inside restaurants or spilling out on to their terrazas, are friends, families and colleagues, preserved in the post-prandial moment like replete insects in amber.

Lunch - and it is more usually lunch than dinner - will long since have yielded to the important act of the sobremesa, that languid time when food gives way to hours of talking, drinking and joking. Coffee and digestivoswill have been taken, or perhaps the large gin and tonic that follows a meal rather than precedes it here.

The sobremesais a digestive period that allows for the slow settling of food, gossip, ideas and conversations. It is also a sybaritic time; a recognition that there is more to life than working long hours and that few pleasures are greater than sharing a table and then chatting nonsense for a hefty portion of what remains of the day.

The world may not have been put completely to rights by the end of the sobremesa, but it will seem a calmer, more benign place.

Ask Mariano Rajoy. At the end of May, as it became clear that he was going to be turfed out of office in a no-confidence vote, the then-prime minister did something very Spanish: he and his close circle retreated to a private room in a smart Madrid restaurant. Lunch was followed by a seven-hour sobremesa, and, reportedly, a couple of bottles of whisky.

After all, what does the loss of a premiership matter after a fine meal, a good cigar and some booze-soaked reminiscing? ¡Salud! Sam Jones in Madrid

PORTUGAL: esperto/esperta

It feels almost counterintuitive to have to explain what esperto/esperta means, a Portuguese word without true parallel in the English dictionary.

There are words that come close, that encapsulate something of the spirit of this word - and the word itself is spirited. On the ball, quick-witted, with-it, canny, having common sense, intuitive, someone who gets things done: these all help shade in the space occupied by esperto.

I grew up in Portugal and have always felt an undercurrent of admiration, almost affection, for the espertas.

A Brazilian friend, Tatiana, though, warns of a negative sense. Someone esperto can, she says, use his or her instincts to take advantage of others; to trap or fool them into trouble.

Sometimes it's easier to understand something by what it is not. Esperta is definitely not slow, dim, unimaginative. If these characteristics were on a spectrum, esperto would be at one end, with "plodding" at the other.

If you understand it, you probably are. Juliette Jowit

ITALY: bella figura

Before celebrating a confirmation in Sicily last year, my aunt breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that her British niece was dressed appropriately enough so as not to make a bad impression in front of the extended family.

I was also relieved, as it meant I had not inflicted the curse of the brutta figura, which literally translates as bad figure, on my family.

In pretty much all areas of life, whether it be in the way people dress, how they behave, how well their homes are kept or how impeccably a cake is presented and a gift wrapped, Italians strive to achieve the bella figura, or beautiful figure.

Such importance is placed on keeping up appearances and the finer detail that for unwitting foreigners there's a sense of being sized up in everything you do, even going as far as to what you eat and drink and at what time of the day you indulge in such activities.

"What matters is not what you do but how you appear," said an Italian friend, likening it to posting the perfect photograph on social media. It's a tactic that enables people to get promoted at work and politicians to win over admirers while giving the impression that they are achieving something.

"I call it 'selfie and spot'," the friend said. "For example, the politician takes a selfie against a beautiful backdrop, posts it on Facebook with a promise to do something, but then doesn't follow it through. With a good selfie and a good spot, you can survive an entire career without doing anything." Angela Giuffrida in Rome

GERMANY: Feierabend

One of the most misleading, but also most enduring, myths about German culture is that it values hard work over a good siesta. Northern Europeans, the legend goes, have a "Protestant work ethic" that means they get the job done even if it means staying in the office late into the night, while the southern Europeans wave it off with a mañana, mañana.

Anyone who sincerely believes that to be the case has never tried to call a German office at one minute past five. When German workers say Ich mach' Feierabend("I am calling it a day"), it rarely carries an apologetic undertone but usually comes with the confidence of someone claiming an ancient right.

Dating back to the 16 th century, the term Feierabend, or "celebration evening", used to denote the evening before a public holiday, but has come to refer to the free time between leaving the office and bedtime on any working day.

The key to understanding Feierabendis that it isn't time for going to the cinema or gym, but time for doing nothing. In 1880, the cultural historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl described the conceptas "an atmosphere of carefree wellbeing, of deep inner reconciliation, of the pure and clear quiet of the evening".

Germany's adherence to the Feierabendrulebook can frustrate when you are trying to make a work call on a Friday afternoon or buy an aspirin from a pharmacy on a Sunday (Sundays being a 24-hour celebration evening).

But as a philosophy, it underpins the proudest achievements of the German labour movement and may just explain why the country has some of the highest productivity levels in Europe: to truly cherish the evening, you make sure you get the job done before five o'clock. Philip Oltermann in Berlin

FINLAND: sisu

Sisu is an untranslatable Finnish term that blends resilience, tenacity, persistence, determination, perseverance and sustained, rather than momentary, courage: the psychological strength to ensure that regardless of the cost or the consequences, what has to be done will be done.

It originates from the word sisus, meaning "intestines" or "guts"; Daniel Juslenius, author of the first Finnish-language dictionary in 1745, defined sisucunda as the place in the body where strong emotions live. In a harsh environment and with powerful neighbours, it was what a young nation needed.

Sisu is what, in 1939-40, allowed an army of 350,000 Finns to twice fight off Soviet forces three times their number, inflicting losses five times heavier than those they sustained.

More prosaically, it has helped Finns get through a lot of long, lonely, dark and freezing winters, building in the process one of the wealthiest, safest, most stable and best-governed countries in the world. It is not all good, of course. Sisu can lead to stubbornness, a refusal to take advice, an inability to admit weakness, a lack of compassion.

It has become a bit of cliché in Finland - a brand name for trucks and strongly-flavoured sweets. Research shows it holds little appeal to the young. But ask a Finn to define the national character, and it's the word most still reach for. Jon Henley

IRAN: Ta'arof

Ta'arofis a Persian word that has no English equivalent, referring to the art of etiquette ubiquitous in everyday Iranian life.

"You go first," says Mr A as he meets Mr B at the doorstep, as they try to enter a building. "No, it's not possible, you go first," Mr B insists in response. Ta'arof dictates a ritual that may see them both waiting for a couple of unnecessary minutes before one steps forward to enter.

It is an etiquette that is seen almost in all aspects of Iranian life, from hosts insisting on guests taking more food from the table, to the exchanges in the bazaar. "How much is this carpet?" asks Ms A after choosing her favourite in the shop. "It's worthless, you can just take it," responds the seller, quite disingenuously.

Although Ms A in reality cannot take the carpet out of the shop without paying for it, the seller might insist up to three times that she should just do that, until the amount of the price is finally mentioned.

The awkward exchanges may have originated out of politeness; ultimately, they may work to the seller's favour, as the buyer feels a certain obligation to respond to such deference with a purchase, even if the final price is more than she expected.

Another example: you are walking with a friend and you end up doing Ta'arof, asking him to come to yours for lunch, even though you don't have anything prepared and you don't really want him to accept.

The friend insists out of Ta'arof that he wouldn't come because he knows you're tired and doesn't want to be a burden, even though deep down he really wants to have lunch at your place.

"Oh, don't Ta'arof," you say in a Ta'arof asking your friend not to Ta'arof. He ends up accepting your reluctant Ta'arof. You're a bit irked, but you'll have to be all smiles. Not all Taa'rofs are insincere; some are, some aren't. You'd Ta'arof even if you badly want something, saying you don't want it; you'd Ta'arof if you really hate something, pretending you want it. Saeed Kamali Dehghan

RUSSIA: тоска (toska)

Leave it to Russia to serve up the melancholy: toska translates as yearning or ennui. Except it doesn't, because no English word can accurately reflect all the shades of the word, to paraphrase Vladimir Nabokov.

What can toska (pronounced tahs- kah) mean? Spiritual anguish, a deep pining, perhaps the product of nostalgia or love-sickness, toskais depression plus longing, an unbearable feeling that you need to escape but lack the hope or energy to do so.

Visually to me, toska conjures up an endless field of birch on the edge of St Petersburg, in the dead of winter when the clouds never part, and it's only light for five hours a day anyway.

Toska is the stuff of great literature. Evgeny Onegin, the foundational Russian novel-in-verse about superfluous men, unrequited love and duels? Loads of toska.

Anton Chekhov wrote an entire short story called Toska about a cabman who recently lost his son and searches for someone to talk to about his grief. He ends up talking to his horse. All that broodiness in the great (and not-so-great) Russian novels? You get the picture.

So why choose toska for this list of positivity? Because if the Russian soul s the place where great emotions reside, then toska pays the rent. Without toska there cannot be delirious happiness, endless heartfelt conversations at 4am at the kitchen table, boundless generosity at obvious personal expense.

Toska is a sign that your emotions go beyond logic and that you are really, truly living your emotions. Perhaps you've felt toska and you didn't realise it, but it's a good thing: it means you've got a little bit of the Russian soul in you. Andrew Roth in Moscow

JAPAN: shoganai

As inhabitants of an archipelago that is regularly struck by earthquakes and tsunamis, and - as recent events have tragically demonstrated - floods and landslides, it is little wonder that the Japanese have a well-developed sense of fatalism. Any verbal reflection on humans' powerlessness to control nature's most destructive forces often elicit the phrase shoganai.

The expression, meaning, "it can't be helped," is Japan's catchall response to any situation, large or small, over which people believe they have no influence. A more voguish translation might be "it is what it is". A French person would immediately recognise it as a version of "c'est la vie".

It could be heard, delivered with deep reflection, amid the rubble of the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami and, in resigned tones, after Japan's agonising exit from the World Cup in Russia.

Shoganai, and its synonymshikata ga nai, are verbal coping mechanisms that apply equally to unwelcome developments in everyday life, from getting struck in a traffic jam to having to spend Friday evening at the office.

With its roots in the Zen Buddhist belief that suffering is a natural part of life, it could perhaps be described as Japan's version of the serenity prayer - a personal and communal recognition that, on occasion, passive acceptance of an unfortunate truth is far easier than trying to deny it.

But resigning oneself to one's fate with a muttered "shoganai" has its drawbacks. Some observers of Japanese culture note that it is too often applied in situations in which humans have more influence than they think.

For much of the seven decades since the end of the second world war, there has been a general acceptance of the dominance of the conservative Liberal Democratic party, even among liberal voters. Some have pointed to its role in allowing the rise of Japanese militarism in the first half of the 20th century.

Shikata ga nai is, then, partly to blame for weaknesses at the heart of Japan's democracy, allowing one party to dominate even, as is the case today, when it is mired in scandal.

In a country with few energy resources of its own, nuclear power was for decades the beneficiary of the shoganai mindset, one that accepted the construction of dozens of nuclear reactors along the coastline as a necessary evil.

It took Fukushima to prove that Japan's lauded sense of fatalism can sometimes be downright dangerous. Justin McCurry in Tokyo

NETHERLANDS: polderen

Het poldermodeland its associated verb, polderen, derive from the Dutch habit of working together to reclaim parts of their country from the sea. Since the Middle Ages, everyone on the same polder, regardless of religion, politics, class and local rivalries, has had to cooperate in maintaining the complex but vital system of windmills and dykes that kept their land dry.

The term, which has been defined as "pragmatic cooperation despite differences", has been used since the mid-1970s to describe the kind of consensus political decision-making common in the Netherlands, which has been governed by coalitions for over a century, since no single party has ever held a majority.

In policymaking, the concept is exemplified by a Dutch institution known as the Social-Economic Council, a tripartite forum in which government, employers' federations and unions air their differences, generally reaching consensus on issues such as wage restraint, working hours, job creation and productivity.

In politics, Dutch governments - the latest, a coalition between four parties with widely different views, took a record 208 days to hammer out - are the embodiment of the poldermodel, which has come in for increasing criticism, particularly from the radical right, since the financial crisis of 2008.

Politicians such as Thierry Baudet of the nativist, right-wing Forum for Democracy argue the poldermodel has led to a "political cartel" in which endless compromise has robbed the major parties of all distinguishing features and left them incapable of taking essential decisions. Jon Henley

CHINA: tiáo 条

How do we categorise or classify things, thereby imagining them as one thing and not another? Unlike French or German, gender does not provide categories in Chinese, which groups things by something else entirely: shape.

Tiáo is one of at least 140 classifiers and measure words in the Chinese language. It's a measure word for long-narrow-shape things. For example, bed sheets, fish, ships, bars of soap, cartons of cigarettes, avenues, trousers, dragons, rivers.

These measure words embrace the ways in which shape imprints itself upon us, while playfully noticing the relationships between all things. The measure word kē 颗 (kernel) is used for small, roundish things, or objects that appear small: pearls, teeth, bullets and seeds, as well as distant stars and satellites.

Gēn 根, for thin-slender objects, will appear before needles, bananas, fried chicken legs, lollipops, chopsticks, guitar strings and matches, among a thousand other things. "Flower-like" objects gather under the word duo 朵: bunches of flowers, clouds, mushrooms and ears.

It's endlessly fascinating to me how we attempt to group anything or anyone together, and how formations change. Philosopher Wang Lianqing charts how tiáowas first applied to objects we can pick up by hand (belts, branches, string) and then expanded outward (streets, rivers, mountain ranges).

And finallytiáo extended metaphorically. News and events are also classified with tiáo, perhaps because news was written in long vertical lines, and events, as the 7th-century scholar Yan Shigu wrote, arrive in lists "one by one, as (arranging) long-shaped twigs".

Onwards the idea broadened, so that an idea or opinion is also "long-shaped news," and in the 14th century, tiáo was used for spirit, which was imagined as straight, high and lofty. In language, another geometry is at work, gathering recurrences through time and space. Madeleine Thien
What is your favourite word, concept or idea in the country you live in? Let us know in the comments, or at theupside@theguardian.com

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10 of the best words in the world (that don't translate into English)

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As millions head abroad, our correspondents pick out the words that for them speak volumes about the countries they love and live in

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A Conversation article, looking at the concept of ‘enthymemes’, a term first used by Aristotle to refer to the way words and ideas can be interpreted in different ways by different cultures. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the concept of ‘enthymemes’, a term first used by Aristotle to refer to the way words and ideas can be interpreted in different ways by different cultures. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great source for understanding not only how the meaning of words is mutable, but also how our perspectives prompt us to interpret language in a completely different way. What does this tell us about the level of ‘shared knowledge’ within language? Do we, ultimately, all speak a different language? Can language ever provide us with a framework of consensus about the world, or does the fact that it is constantly changing prevent this from ever occurring? Do words have an inherent meaning, or do our perspectives determine them? Can – and should – words be interpreted in different ways?

KEY TERMS Enthymemes, Identity wars

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences

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America is in the middle of a battle over the meaning of words like ‘diversity’

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Aristotle coined the term “enthymeme” to refer to arguments, words and ideas that are broadly accepted among the people of a nation. So what happens when enthymemes start to disappear?

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A BBC video on whether we conceive of the world differently in different languages.

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A BBC video on whether we conceive of the world differently in different languages.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a very useful video that looks at a lot of issues in a short space of time. First of all, what does the video seem to be asserting in terms of ‘cognitive diversity’, and the role of language in establishing that? Second, how convinced are you by this argument – and how effective do you think the evidence gathered is? Finally, many of the participants draw on their own empirical evidence to support this idea. How do your personal experiences support or refute this idea, and how valid is it to draw on this form of evidence?

KEY TERMS Whorfian hypothesis, Labels, Gendered language, Thinking for speaking hypothesis, Grue term, Cognitive diversity

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, Knowledge & the knower

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Do we think differently in different languages? - BBC Ideas

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How much of an impact does the language you speak have on how you actually think?

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A Conversation article, arguing that using the metaphor ‘alive’ to describe the nature of language is deeply misleading. 

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A Conversation article, arguing that using the metaphor ‘alive’ to describe the nature of language is deeply misleading. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE “The history of languages is inextricable from the history of societies”. Why do we often miss this point, and what are the implications of doing so?

KEY TERMS Metaphor, Complexity, Power, Relationship, Autonomous entity, Cognitive shortcut

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, History

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" Living", "evolving" and " dead ": we often talk about languages as if they were living organisms.

The reason for this use of a metaphor to talk about language lies in the deep complexity of language as a concept. But treating language in this way can have drawbacks: it can lead us to misunderstand the relationship between language and society.

The fundamental mechanism of metaphor is that it treats something as if it were something else. This typically happens with concepts that are complex or abstract, in order to pin them down to something we can understand more easily. We use metaphors to treat these concepts as if they were something more concrete, more tangible and that we are more familiar with.

For example, if we talk about "wasting" or "saving" time, we treat time as if it were a commodity. Or, if we say that we're "going through" a difficult period, we're treating time as if it were space through which we move.

Like time, language is one of these really complex concepts, and that's the reason why we often talk about it as if it were a living organism. In a recent radio interview, I myself said that languages are "alive". But there lurks a potential problem here.

Metaphors are so much part of our every day discourse that we don't even notice them. For this reason, metaphors can be incredibly powerful.

They are so entrenched that they actually determine our understanding of the concepts they refer to. The risk then is that metaphors may lead to understanding certain concepts in a fundamentally distorted way.

Testing the metaphor

I'm going to put the "language is alive" metaphor to the test by considering two fundamental elements of life: birth and evolution.

Birth is easily dealt with. Simply, languages don't have a point of departure, a beginning, that can be compared to the birth of a living being.

Scholars often talk about the " birth", the " roots", or the " origins " of a language, but these are not starting points.

Rather they are historical periods during which a particular society acquires an identity for itself, and therefore a name, and that name begins to be used for the language they speak, too.

One of the earliest records of the name English - Englisc - referring to both the people of England and their language dates back to the ninth century, in a text by King Alfred. But obviously this is not the moment when people began to speak this language - nor is there one.

This is what the language that King Alfred called "English" looked like:

Ða ic ða gemunde hu sio lar Lædengeðiodes ær ðissum afeallen wæs giond Angelcynn, & ðeah monige cuðon Englisc gewrit arædan, ða ongan ic ongemang oðrum mislicum & manigfealdum bisgum ðisses kynerices ða boc wendan on Englisc ðe is genemned on Læden Pastoralis, & on Englisc Hierdeboc.

(When I realised how the knowledge of Latin had decayed throughout England, and yet many could read English writing, I began, among other various and manifold troubles of this kingdom, to translate into English the book which is called in Latin Pastoralis, and in English Shepherd's Book.)

English speakers today find it impossible to understand the meaning of this passage without specific knowledge of the language in which it is written.

So, if this does not represent the "birth" of English, could it be taken as evidence of how the language has "evolved" through the centuries?

We could, but the problem is that it leads us to objectify languages. In other words, it leads us to think of King Alfred's language as if it was the same object as the language we speak now - just a very archaic form of it.

Ultimately, it considers the English language (or any other language) as an autonomous entity, an independent being that simply exists in its own right.

People, not language

In reality, languages are integral to what we do as social animals. Societies change through migratory flows, invasions, technological advancement.

And, as they do so, they also alter the ways in which they use language. Agency rests in the speakers of a language, not in the language itself.

King Alfred's English did not become King Charles III's English as a consequence of language's own natural propensity to evolve. Language has no such propensity.

Language does nothing. It isn't born, it doesn't grow, it doesn't evolve, it doesn't adapt to the changing environment. It is people who do all these things.

While the living organism metaphor can be a convenient cognitive shortcut, the misconception that it may cause is that the roles of people and languages are inverted. And this becomes a problem, for example, when we discuss language in relation to social justice and inequality.

If we say that " English is taking over the planet ", we may be placing emphasis on the wrong aspect of the issue. It is not the language itself that is too powerful. The problem lies in the extreme imbalance of power and wealth in the world, a direct legacy of four centuries of colonialism.

If we describe the history of languages like the growth of plants, we miss the point that the history of languages is inextricable from the history of societies and the often unequal relationships between them.

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Language isn't 'alive' - why this metaphor can be misleading

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Languages don't have a beginning that can be compared to the birth of a living being.

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A brilliant New Humanist article, looking at the development of the exclamation mark, and its psychological impact on readers. 

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A brilliant New Humanist article, looking at the development of the exclamation mark, and its psychological impact on readers. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What examples does the article give of social media use of exclamation marks? Which historic events had an impact on the development of the exclamation mark - and why? What is the present status of the exclamation mark, specifically, the way it faces ‘competition’ from emojis? Overall, offer students this quote: “! shakes us awake… it can provoke outrage and panic… it also has a softer side… soothing tensions and bringing people together.” Do you agree that punctuation plays a crucial role in the communication of ideas between people?

KEY TERMS Cognitive study, Evolution of language, Power, Context, Natural home, Interpretation

LINKS TO Language, Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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A Conversation article, looking at the history of the term ‘y’all’, and how it is becoming mainstream.

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A Conversation article, looking at the history of the term ‘y’all’, and how it is becoming mainstream.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Ask students to give their impressions of the term ‘y’all’. What does it mean? What are its connotations? Where does it come from? Then move onto the article. Why is ‘y’all’ a ‘useful’ term in the English language? Why did it pick up negative connotations? In what way are the distant origins of the term surprising? Why does the term seem to be becoming ‘American’ rather than ‘Southern’ - and what is driving this? Overall, how and why does language change over time?

KEY TERMS Quintessential, Slang, Vulgar,

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, History, Knowledge & the knower

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Southern Living magazine once described "y'all" as "the quintessential Southern pronoun." It's as iconically Southern as sweet tea and grits.

While "y'all" is considered slang, it's a useful word nonetheless. The English language doesn't have a good second person plural pronoun; "you" can be both singular and plural, but it's sometimes awkward to use as a plural. It's almost like there's a pronoun missing. "Y'all" fills that second person plural slot - as does "you guys," "youse," "you-uns" and a few others.

I'm interested in "y'all" because I was born in North Carolina and grew up saying it. I still do, probably a couple dozen times a day, usually without intention or even awareness. As a historian who has researched the early history of the word, I'm also interested in how the word's use has changed over the years.

Like something a 'hillbilly redneck' would say

"Y'all" might serve an important function, but it has acquired negative connotations.

Back in 1886, The New York Times ran a piece titled "Odd Southernisms" that described "y'all" as "one of the most ridiculous of all the Southernisms."

That perception has persisted. Like the Southern dialect in general, the use of "y'all" has often been seen as vulgar, low-class, uncultured and uneducated. As someone noted in Urban Dictionary, "Whoever uses [y'all] sounds like a hillbilly redneck."

In a more recent New York Times essay, writer Maud Newton said that she associated the word with her father, who "defended slavery, demanded the subservience of women and adhered to 'spare the rod and spoil the child.'" He also demanded that his children say "y'all" rather than "you guys." She grew up hating the word.

At a time when many Americans are calling for the removal of Confederate monuments and opposing the Lost Cause mythology, "y'all," with its Southern overtones, might make some people uncomfortable - a misguided reaction, perhaps, but one that has been felt by both those who hear it and those who say it.

Imagine 'y'all' with a British accent

The word has not always had such negative connotations.

The etymology of "y'all" is murky. Some linguists trace it back to the Scots-Irish phrase "ye aw"; others suggest an African American origin, perhaps from the Igbo word for "you" brought over by Nigerian-born slaves. According to the "Oxford English Dictionary," the word first appeared in print in 1856, and all of its examples are sources connected to the American South. Michael Montgomery, a noted linguist, said that early use of the word "is unknown in the British Isles."

But recently I used some of the new digital literary databases to search for older uses of the word, and I found over a dozen examples. They were all in dramatic or poetic works dating back to the 17th century and published in London. The earliest "y'all" that I uncovered was in William Lisle's "The Faire Æthiopian," published in 1631 - "and this y'all know is true."

My examples push "y'all" back 225 years before the citation in the "Oxford English Dictionary," and they show that the word appeared first in England rather than the United States.

I think it's important to point out that it originated in a more formal context than what's commonly assumed. There are none of the class or cultural connotations of the later American examples.

I should also note that there is almost a centurylong gap between the last known usage of this British version of "y'all" and the first known usage of the American version. Scholars may well decide that these versions of "y'all" are essentially two different words.

Still, there it is, in an English poem written in 1631.

'Y'all means all'

Ironically, at the same time that some people have shied away from using "y'all," the word seems to have grown in popularity. An article on exactly this topic, published in the Journal of English Linguistics in 2000, was titled " The Nationalization of a Southernism "; based on scientific polling, the authors suggested that "y'all" will soon be seen as an American, rather than Southern, word.

There might be several reasons for this. One is that African American use of the word in music and other forms of popular culture has made it more familiar - and, therefore, acceptable - to those who didn't grow up with it.

Second, "you guys," another common alternative for the second-person plural pronoun, is losing support because of its sexist connotations. Are females included in you guys? How about those who identify as nonbinary?

Maud Newton eventually came to embrace "y'all." When she moved to Tallahassee, Florida, after law school, she found that "in grocery stores and coffee shops, on the street and in the library, everyone - Black and white, queer and straight, working-class and wealthy - used y'all, and soon I did, too."

"Y'all means all" - that's a wonderful phrase that seems to be popping up everywhere, from T-shirts and book titles to memes and music. A song written by Miranda Lambert for Netflix's "Queer Eye" beautifully captures the spirit of the phrase:

 You can be born in Tyler, Texas, Raised with the Bible Belt; If you're torn between the Y's and X's, You ain't gotta play with the hand you're dealt ... Honey, y'all means all.

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'Y'all,' that most Southern of Southernisms, is going mainstream - and it's about time

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Southern Living magazine once described "y'all" as "the quintessential Southern pronoun." It's as iconically Southern as sweet tea and grits. While "y'all" is considered slang, it's a useful word nonetheless. The English language doesn't have a good second person plural pronoun; "you" can be both singular and plural, but it's sometimes awkward to use as a plural.

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A Conversation article, looking at how punctuation has been adapted as a central tool of Black activism. 

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A Conversation article, looking at how punctuation has been adapted as a central tool of Black activism. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE First, get students to grasp the general gist of the article - how can punctuation be used to “extend, contradict and play with meaning”? Then think about the way this power can be harnessed, and used in the context of activism. What does this tell us about the role of language in changing the world, informing people of viewpoints, and persuading them to help move society forward?

KEY TERMS Power, Dominant narrative

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, Politics

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Playing with syntax, capitalization and punctuation marks can upend narratives put forth by the mainstream media. Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision via Getty Images

Using punctuation and capitalization as a form of protest doesn't exactly scream radicalism.

But in debates over racial justice, punctuation can carry a lot of weight.

During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, mainstream news organizations grappled with whether to capitalize the first letter of "black" when referring to Black people. Of course, writing "Black" was already common practice in activist circles. Eventually The Associated Press, The New York Times, USA Today and many other outlets declared that they, too, would capitalize that first letter.

It turns out the push to capitalize "black" is only the most recent way Black writers and activists have pushed back against entrenched power through ostensibly bland elements of writing.

As I discuss in my recent book, " Jim Crow Networks: African American Periodical Cultures," Black activism in the media can take a variety of forms - some more subtle than others.

Seemingly unimportant elements of writing have long been adapted as tools of Black activism. Much like the recent drive to capitalize "black," activists have deployed punctuation to question the legitimacy of confessions, criticize justifications made for lynchings and highlight the undervaluing of Black expertise and knowledge.

The power of punctuation

Punctuation was developed in the 3rd century B.C. to visually separate sentences and improve comprehension. But punctuation can do more than clarify. It can extend, contradict and play with meaning.

Think of the difference between ending a sentence with an exclamation point and with an ellipsis, or the way emoticons made of repurposed punctuation can be used to denote sarcasm or add playfulness and emotion.

This makes it a useful tool for activists who seek to upend dominant narratives.

Quotation marks convey suspicion

A push to capitalize has actually happened before.

In the 1920s, influential Black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote to The New York Times and Encyclopedia Britannica to argue that the word "negro" ought to have its first letter capitalized.

A decade later, to counter racism in the white press, the Black press used quotation marks when reporting on the case of a young man named Robert Nixon, who was convicted of murder.

In 1938, the white-owned Chicago Tribune notoriously described Nixon - who would serve as the basis for protagonist Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright's 1940 novel " Native Son " - as an "animal" whose "physical characteristics suggest an earlier link in the species."

However, the city's influential Black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, covered the case differently, reporting Nixon's claim that his confession was the result of police coercion. In a 1938 article, the Defender included a subheading that declared, "Nixon Also Refutes 'Confession'."

These simple quotation marks signaled doubt over the legitimacy of this confession, while teaching newspaper readers to be suspicious of so-called legal facts.

As sociologist Mary Pattillo notes in her book " Black on the Block," the Defender's strategic use of quotation marks called into question official accounts of Nixon as a murderer. In doing so, the paper highlighted the unfair treatment of Black people by the media, police and court system.

The code of the question mark

Similarly, Black activists used question marks to criticize mainstream accounts of events during the Jim Crow era.

In her 1892 pamphlet " Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases," anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells used question marks in parentheses on four occasions to interrogate descriptions of crimes supposedly committed by Black Americans.

For example, she wrote, "So great is Southern hate and prejudice, they legally(?) hung poor little thirteen year old Mildrey Brown at Columbia, S. C., Oct. 7th, on the circumstantial evidence that she poisoned a white infant."

She also quoted from one of her earlier newspaper editorials in which she discussed the lynchings of eight Black men by saying that, in each case, "citizens broke(?) into the penitentiary and got their man." The question mark casts doubt on this "break-in" and suggests that the perpetrators were, in fact, aided and abetted by law enforcement in murdering these men.

These simple question marks subtly undermined a legal system that sought to cast the murders of a young girl and eight men as just responses. Wells indicted not only the legal system but also the white press, which was often an accomplice to racial violence.

[ Over 106,000 readers rely on The Conversation's newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Afrofuturist questions

The writer, editor and activist Pauline E. Hopkins similarly used question marks within parentheses in her early Afrofuturist novel " Of One Blood."

The novel - which contains depictions of a leopard attack, a lost African city and a ghost - was serialized in the pages of the Colored American Magazine from 1902 to 1903. At one point, the protagonist, a Black doctor, brings a patient back to life. Yet the responses to this miracle display ambivalence:

"The scientific journals of the next month contained wonderful and wondering (?) accounts of the now celebrated case, - re-animation after seeming death."

Much as Wells used the question mark to dismiss the official accounts of lynchings, Hopkins deploys it to undermine the scientific establishment and cast doubt on the journals for their stunned and disbelieving responses to the medical marvel.

For Hopkins, the question mark worked to demand respect for Black expertise and knowledge.

Punctuation's possibilities

Punctuation activism can be an important companion to on-the-ground activism. It reveals language's capacity to transform the world. At the same time, it exposes language's often hidden role in maintaining structures of power.

Certainly, punctuation - like language overall - is typically used in less radical ways. But these examples of early 20th century Black writers, activists and journalists point to punctuation's possibilities in questioning entrenched power structures and laying claim to alternative futures.

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How Black writers and journalists have wielded punctuation in their activism

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Using punctuation and capitalization as a form of protest doesn't exactly scream radicalism. But in debates over racial justice, punctuation can carry a lot of weight. During the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, mainstream news organizations grappled with whether to capitalize the first letter of "black" when referring to Black people.

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A Guardian article, questioning whether swearing is still taboo. Note, this article uses very explicit language!

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A Guardian article, questioning whether swearing is still taboo. Note, this article uses very explicit language!

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE How has our opinion of swearing changed over time - and what does this tell us about the way society has developed? What does Timothy Jay mean when he says, “The offensiveness of any word is entirely dependent upon context”? Why does Emma Byrne worry about certain swear words losing their impact? What evidence is there that swear words can be therapeutic? Overall, offer students this quote: “swearwords deliver far more than the sum of their parts” What does Emma Byrne mean by this? Do you agree that it is a vital component of the way we use language to communicate ourselves?

KEY TERMS Easily offended, Shock value, Acceptable, Power, Context, Taboo, Vent

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, History

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If it were the 14th century, your name was Robert Clevecunt and you lived on Pissing Alley, you wouldn't have hesitated to tell anyone your name or address. Such words were common enough to be unremarkable. It is easily offended 21st-century humans who would change our name by deed poll and lobby the council to change its road signs.

However, we may be becoming more relaxed about swearwords. It was reported last week that an employment judge, presiding over a case of unfair dismissal and discrimination, had decided that using the phrase "I don't give a fuck" in a "tense" meeting was not necessarily significant. "The words allegedly used in our view are fairly commonplace and do not carry the shock value they might have done in another time," said the judge.

Swearing is everywhere. It is on TV, on social media, in music. Young children use "WTF" and "OMG". For many of us, workplace swearing seems so normal that it doesn't even stand out any more (this was one theory, in that employment tribunal, as to why others in that meeting couldn't remember if that particular swearword was used).

Parents report teenage children dropping the F- and C-words at home far more freely than they did at the same age. Dorothy, 65, whose daughter is 22, is shocked by the extent of her child's swearing. "The F-word is quite common in her conversations. I was concerned she would use it in the wrong situation, but she moderates it around older people. With her friends, and with her brothers, it's not a thing that bothers them - it's acceptable." She used to ask her to stop, but then gave up. Dorothy, who admits to using words such as "bloody", never swore like that in front of her parents. "Good grief, no."

A 2021 survey for the British Board of Film Classification found that three-fifths of people said strong language was part of their daily lives, while one-third used such language more than they did five years ago. A 2020 report by Ofcom, the TV and radio regulator, found that swearing-related complaints had halved in five years; a year later, swearing accounted for only 1% of complaints, reflecting a "trend of increasingly relaxed attitudes about the use of swearwords" (this did not include slurs and discriminatory language).

This isn't to say that anything goes - witness the broadcasters braced for impact whenever they need to mention the chancellor Jeremy Hunt, or Krishnan Guru-Murthy, who was taken off Channel 4 news for a week for being overheard, off-camera, using the C-word to describe Steve Baker, the Northern Ireland minister.

The shambolic few weeks of Liz Truss's tenure as prime minister gave rise to some good swearing - not quite the magnificent creations from The Thick of It, but punchy nonetheless. "I am fucking furious and I don't give a fuck any more," the then deputy chief whip, Craig Whittaker, was reported to have said; a German news clip of apolitical correspondent recounting it verbatim went viral. During the economic turmoil that was unleashed, the Financial Times reported that allies of Truss described stories of tensions between her and the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, as "weapons-grade bollocks".

Has swearing finally lost its power? Timothy Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and a swearing expert, sighs. "I've been answering that question for 50 years," he says. "The offensiveness of any word is entirely dependent upon context. All of us carry the calculus for who, what, where and when. If I went in my dean's office, I wouldn't swear in there; a student wouldn't swear in there, but they would swear in a dorm room or a bar."

In a copy of Vanity Fair from the early 20th century, the word 'damn' was disguised with dashes

Richard Stephens, a senior lecturer in psychology at Keele University, agrees: "It is nuanced. I think what the judge was saying [in the tribunal ruling] was that, in the specific context of that conversation, the F-bomb wasn't too offensive, but it's all about context. Within that situation, it's using swearing as a linguistic tool, as opposed to using it as an insult, or to offend or belittle people. We swear for many different reasons - to show emotion, to show we really mean it, sometimes for humour, to intensify what we're saying. It is still very context-driven." As Karyn Stapleton, a senior lecturer in communication at Ulster University, says, there have always been workplaces where swearing is acceptable and, in fact, "part of the culture".

"We are exposed to more swearing than ever in history - all of the media that we consume," says Jay. "However, that doesn't mean that the average person swears more. Again, it depends on the context." Language evolves and taboos weaken. Stephens found a copy of Vanity Fair from the early 20th century in which the word "damn" was disguised with dashes. "Then, that was an unprintable word, but now we're comfortable with that. I think we are more comfortable with the four-letter words now than we have been." What is driving that? "This is just my opinion, not a research-informed answer, but society is becoming more open and we're freer with language like we're freer with lots of other things."

But it is not right to say swearing has entirely lost its power. "Even though we are in quite a comfortable place with swearing and four-letter words, you're never quite sure how a swearword is going to land, so it's still a risk to pop one into the conversation. It's that unpredictability that helps to keep swearing current."

In her book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, Melissa Mohr - she of Pissing Alley and many other brilliant examples - writes that, in the English middle ages, there was little taboo around bodily functions or sex, so some of the words we find most offensive now would not have been considered so. Things started to change in the 14th century. "Combined with the rise of Protestantism, and with it a strain of puritanism, this civilising process slowly transformed innocuous words into what modern observers would recognise as obscenities."

Mouthing off ... swearing can produce responses such as increased sweating and raised heart rate. Photograph: Sergio Mendoza Hochmann/Getty Images. Posed by a model

Religious swearwords, or profanities, were considered most offensive. In the early 17th century, Mohr says, parliament passed an act making it illegal to use references to God mockingly, including shortened versions such as "zounds" (meaning God's wounds). Then, over the next couple of centuries, there was a decline in the shock power of profanities, but a rise in obscenity - anything bodily - that the Victorians considered so horrific that the power in those words lives on today.

The big swearwords are relatively unchanged. "It's all convention," says Jay. "Institutions of power - school, church, your parents, the media, the sports team you're on - set standards, then police these standards and punish people who break the rules. That's why we've maintained all of these words over the years." The church has lost its power, which is why most people consider it completely harmless to say or hear "oh my God", whereas you would never have heard it, says Jay, in early radio broadcasts.

What worries Emma Byrne, the author of Swearing Is Good for You, is that as words such as "fuck" lose their impact, worse words might take their place. "Swearing tends to lose its power as it loses its taboo status," she says. "The terms that remain taboo tend to be slurs, derogatory terms for other people, and I would much rather the bodily functions stayed as our outlet."

People use swearwords to overthrow restraint. Swearing helps you nudge over to a don't-hold-back mindset

Richard Stephens

A huge number of racist, homophobic, ableist and misogynistic terms are used regularly online - and the words change, says Byrne, to evade filters and hate speech laws. "The bodily functions unite us - there's something about 'fuck' and 'shit' that we can relate to on one level or another. I'm very concerned as to what's left if those words are no longer considered taboo. Slurs are used as weapons in a way that 'fuck' and 'shit' never were."

More encouraging is the emergence of a nuanced approach in professional life, she says. "I think workplaces are becoming more aware of the distinction between swearing and abuse. You can be swearing with your colleagues about 'how fucking stressful this quarter's been', or you can consistently undermine and belittle someone and never use a swearword at all. One of those I would say is OK and the other is not. Taking our focus off swearing and putting it more on bullying and abuse is something to be welcomed."

Stephens' research has shown that swearing has benefits - which in itself may make people more comfortable with it. In one study, he got participants to dip their hands into ice-cold water and repeat either a swearword or a neutral word, to see if swearing helped them cope with the pain. It did. "They'll keep their hand in the water longer in the swearing condition," he says.

The researchers also tested the effect of swearing on strength, testing the force people create using a hand-gripping device. "People will grip that with more force when they're repeating a swearword over repeating a neutral word," says Stephens. "We're still not sure how it works, but it's looking like it's something to do with being disinhibited. People use swearwords to overthrow restraint, stop being so controlled, be a little bit freer, not overthink, that sort of thing. Swearing helps you just nudge over to a bit more of a don't-hold-back mindset."

Cold, hard evidence ... the Royal Institution re-creates Keele University's ice-water test.

Jay has shown that, contrary to widespread belief, swearing is not the refuge of those who are lacking in vocabulary. "Swearing is a wonderful evolutionary advantage - for humans to be able to express their emotions abstractly. It allows me to vent, it allows me to express frustration, anger, but also surprise, joy. It allows me to express that and communicate it to you very effectively. When you say 'fuck you' to someone, it's almost like punching them, but it's not punching them."

Young children, he says, "progressively learn how to express their anger, which originally is very physical - tantrums, biting, scratching - and then it becomes much more abstract. I can yell 'fuck you' to someone across the street and I don't have to hit or bite them." As offensive or upsetting as it might be, he says, "it's better than shooting someone. We have enough of that crap here [in the US]."

Swearing can produce responses such as increased sweating and raised heart rate and is thought to be processed differently from other forms of language. "Somebody swearing for humour, or to express frustration with some third party, is possibly processed differently from the automatic, emotional, maybe pain-driven, swearing," says Stapleton. It may be associated with strong childhood and adolescent memories and the responses to those, he adds. This could include a parent telling you off for swearing, but it could also be positive - "maybe bonding with peers, or receiving acceptance or admiration".

Children start using swearwords as soon as they start talking, says Jay, but he isn't convinced this is new, more that now we have more ways of observing them. Different cultures have similar kinds of swearwords. "In places where you have a strong presence of the Catholic church, you have a lot of religious profanities," says Jay. "But everybody has sexual terms, scatological terms, ancestral allusions - bastard, motherfucker, son of a bitch - and animal names."

Even chimps might swear. "The two things that are sufficient for swearing to emerge are a taboo and the means to express it," says Byrne. For the chimps that were studied, that was bowel movements and learning a sign for "dirty". "They used that sign as a way of expressing frustration, of telling someone they're not happy with them, and also joking. They have a really scatological sense of humour and would wind up the humans by basically doing what my six-year-old does, which is say 'poo' all the time at the table.

"I loved that, as soon as you have a taboo and the means to express it, at least in one other species, we've seen that used in the same way as we use it."

Her favourite example of swearing, though, she says with a laugh, tells us much about how swearwords deliver far more than the sum of their parts - how they can convey frustration, intensity, shock and humour, but also sufficient emotion regulation and language skills, where once there would have been an angry physical reaction. It was when her toddler turned to her, looked her dead in the eye, and said: "Mummy, get me out of this fucking highchair."

This article was amended on 9 February 2023. An earlier version said that a viral German news clip featured a newsreader. This should have said political correspondent.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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A judge ruled last week that using the F-word in work meetings was now 'commonplace'. So is it acceptable to say whatever we like, wherever we are?

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An FT story, which looks at how RyanAir used a test written in Afrikaans to test whether passengers were really South African.  

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An FT story, which looks at how RyanAir used a test written in Afrikaans to test whether passengers were really South African.  

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What have South African passengers been asked to do when travelling on RyanAir flights, and why? Why has this ‘unconsciously triggered’ reactions from many passengers? What does it reveal about the importance of being culturally aware, and having an understanding of history? Overall, what does the article indicate about the role language plays in determining our identities, and the consequences of cultural insensitivity?

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KEY TERMS Enforced use, Exclusionary, Unconscious triggering

LINKS TO Language, History, Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences

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News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

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A Conversation article exploring the ways in which (human) drivers communicate using an intuitive and informal common language of the road, and the extent to which this will be accessible to cars driven by machines, rather than people.

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A Conversation article exploring the ways in which (human) drivers communicate using an intuitive and informal common language of the road, and the extent to which this will be accessible to cars driven by machines, rather than people.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great story for considering both values and language, prompting us to ponder the nature of language (how much of it is written and unwritten; how much of it is based on rules, and how much of it is intuitive, etc.), and its role in defining ethical systems. Students can ponder the question posed by the writer of the article: “How much knowledge about our societal and linguistic values are built into the system? How can driverless cars learn to interpret hand and auditory signals?” To what extent is language intuitive, and based on unseen rules?

KEY TERMS Hand gestures, Sociolinguistic cues and values

LINKS TO Language, Technology

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In cities and countries around the world, drivers use a range of hand signals to communicate with other drivers. Lightspring/Shutterstock.com

Recently, while on my way to the University of Pittsburgh's campus, I made a quick " Pittsburgh left " - taking a left turn just as the light turns green - while facing a driverless car.

Instead of jolting forward or honking - as some human drivers would be tempted to do - the car allowed me to go. In this case, the interaction was pleasant. (How polite of the car to let me cut it off!)

But as a sociolinguist who studies human-computer interaction, I started thinking about how self-driving cars will communicate with the human drivers they encounter on the road. Driving can involve a range of social signals and unspoken rules, some of which vary by country - even by region or city. How will driverless cars be able to navigate this complexity? Can they ever be programmed to do so?

What driverless cars can do

Here in Pittsburgh, Uber has tested self-driving cars with a backup driver behind the wheel; in Phoenix, Waymo's cars operate in a limited part of the city without any backup driver at all.

We know the driverless cars are equipped with a technology called LIDAR, which creates a 360-degree image of the car's surroundings. Image sensors can interpret signs, lights and lane markings. A separate radar detects objects, while a computer incorporates all of this information along with mapping data to guide the car.

Although ideally autonomous vehicles will be able to "talk" to one another in order to allow smoother navigation and reduce crashes, this technology is still in the early stages.

But any autonomous vehicle will also need to be able to interact with traditional cars and their drivers, as well as pedestrians, bikes and unforeseen events like lane closures, disabled stop lights, emergency vehicles and accidents.

The complex language of driving

This is where things can get murky.

For example, if you're driving and pass a speed trap, you might flash your headlights at drivers coming in the other direction to let them know. But flashing headlights can also mean "your high beams are too bright," "you forgot to put your headlights on" or "go ahead" in situations where it's unclear who has the right of way. In order to interpret the meaning, a person will consider the context: the time of day, the type of road, the weather. But how would an autonomous vehicle react?

There are other forms of communication to help us navigate, ranging from honks and sirens, to hand signals and even bumper stickers.

Of course, humans use all sorts of hand gestures - waving a car in front of them, indicating that another driver needs to slow, and even giving the finger when angry. Sounds can communicate love, anger, arrivals, departures, warnings and more. Drivers can express total disapproval with a hard, extended hit of the horn. Of course, emergency sirens encourage drivers to make way.

But specific meaning can vary by region or country. For example, a few years ago, Public Radio International ran a story about the language of honking in Cairo, Egypt, which is "spoken" primarily by men. These honks can have complex constructions; for example, four short honks followed by a long one mean "open your eyes" to warn someone who is not paying attention.

AP Photo/Hassan Ammar

In Pittsburgh, people tend to honk before going through a short, narrow or curvy tunnel. In Morocco, where I'm originally from, drivers perform varied honks when passing; they'll honk once before passing to secure cooperation, again as they pass (to signal progress), and lastly after they pass to say, "thank you." Yet this might be confusing - or even perceived as rude - to drivers in the U.S.

Written communication also plays a role between cars and drivers. For example, signs such as "Baby on Board" or "Students on Board" are supposed to encourage the drivers following these vehicles to be even more careful. Bumper stickers like "Caution: Wide Right Turn" or "This Vehicle Makes Frequent Stops" can be critical to safety.

What if there's a communication breakdown?

Vehicles can be taught to "read" road signs, and thus presumably can be taught to recognize common warnings on bumpers.

Yet navigating construction sites or accident scenes may require following directions from a human in a way that cannot be programmed. This creates a huge opportunity for error. Because hand signals vary widely from region to region (and even person to person), autonomous cars could fail to recognize a signal to go or, more catastrophically, could mistakenly follow a hand gesture into a barrier or another car.

This gives me pause: How much knowledge about our societal and linguistic values are built into the system? How can driverless cars learn to interpret hand and auditory signals?

Google cars can apparently recognize hand signals on bikers, but what if the biker doesn't use standard signals? Who gets to embed the algorithm in the machine, and how are sociolinguistic values assigned?

In my experience, the self-driving car was very polite and didn't honk or otherwise chastise me for my behavior (though the human passenger did communicate his displeasure with a gaze). But had I waved it in front of me, would it have been able to respond appropriately? A 2015 story in Robotics Trends described how a bike and a Google car got stuck in a standoff when the car misread signals from the biker.

Cities (and countries) possess a variety of sociolinguistic cues. It remains to be seen if the engineers working on driverless cars will be able to program these subtle - but important - differences into these vehicles as more and more appear on the roads.

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Driverless cars might follow the rules of the road, but what about the language of driving?

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Recently, while on my way to the University of Pittsburgh's campus, I made a quick " Pittsburgh left " - taking a left turn just as the light turns green - while facing a driverless car. Instead of jolting forward or honking - as some human drivers would be tempted to do - the car allowed me to go.

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A Conversation article, exploring how we communicate experiences that are too terrible to be put into words. 

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A Conversation article, exploring how we communicate experiences that are too terrible to be put into words. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What research did Greta Uehling carry out between 2015-17? She identified three main ways in which people tried to express their trauma: a visceral rather than cerebral process, a tendency to dissociate, using objects to signify what happened. Summarize each one, and provide examples to support your responses. Overall, in order to understand the experiences of other people, why do we need to listen to how people say things, in addition to what they say?

KEY TERMS True, Unverbalized memories, Visceral vs. cerebral, Perspective, Somaticizing, Embodied language, Dissociation, Inhumanity, Otherworldly quality, Powerful

LINKS TO Language, Knowledge & the knower, Human sciences, History

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As the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine approaches, one thing is clear: The destruction the war has wreaked upon Ukrainians over the last 12 months is so catastrophic that the country will be dealing with the humanitarian consequences for the foreseeable future. One of the consequences is trauma.

As an anthropologist, I have long sought ways to describe my interviewees' narratives in ways that are true to what they experienced. This is particularly challenging after shocking, painful or overwhelming experiences, which are often difficult for survivors to describe in chronological order - or sometimes, to describe at all.

Still, abundant research shows that unverbalized memories are not necessarily lost. Often, they return in the form of flashbacks and physical sensations. Survivors may find themselves reaching, consciously or unconsciously, for different ways to describe their experiences.

I did extensive ethnographic research in Ukraine between 2015 and 2017, crisscrossing the country to understand what was happening to civilians after Russian-supported troops began the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine. During my research, many people related their experiences of war in terms of their embodied sensations and material possessions.

The body knows

Ukrainians often described their decision to leave areas of active military conflict as a visceral, rather than cerebral, process. A woman I call "Zhenia," for example, lived through the epic siege of the Donetsk airport in 2014. Although her family planned to stay, that changed one night when her husband saw a mortar from a missile strike land down the street from their high-rise apartment while he was standing on their balcony.

But they didn't need to talk about it. Zhenia remembers thinking that her husband's skin looked almost green from shock. Then, he threw up in the bathrooom. By the glances they exchanged, she knew it was time to pack their bags.

From her perspective, their bodies "knew" the time had come - it was an embodied form of knowing. She and many other displaced Ukrainians told their stories by referring to physical changes they experienced: tightening in the diaphragm, shortness of breath, an upset stomach, diarrhea, pain in their bones. Young people in good health described their hair going gray and teeth suddenly beginning to fall out. Psychologists might call this "somaticizing": when mental and emotional distress expresses itself physically.

Anthropologists have long debated how best to communicate about pain and violence in a way that honors survivors' experiences without being voyeuristic. In my 2023 book, " Everyday War," I address the challenge by giving voice to the embodied language the people I spoke with used, relating their lives to me by talking about their bodies and possessions.

Surviving the surreal

Among survivors of horrific experiences, there is also a tendency to dissociate. Dissociation refers to the sense of detachment from reality that occurs when the ways we typically make sense of our experiences are inadequate to what is happening.

War crimes exemplify humanity at its worst, and ordinary words often feel insufficient to describe what people witness. It is not uncommon for individuals who have survived war and conflict to describe feeling detached from reality and other people. Many experience the world in which they are living as unreal, dreamlike and distorted.

In Ukraine, people I spoke with who had been affected by the war painted a world so uncannily altered by violence that it felt as they were living in a science fiction drama: The previously familiar became very strange.

A woman who had been displaced from Donetsk, "Yuliya," told me she left after an otherworldly quality seemed to overtake her city. She compared her time in the city to a science fiction movie she had seen about the Soviet Union, in which high-tech sonic waves were used to subdue the population. Others described the Russian occupiers as bestial, monstrous and "zombies." "Valya," for example, described the mercenaries who entered her town as an "animal horde" because their activities were so indiscriminate.

Researchers in other countries where people are suffering from widespread trauma show survivors using similar language. In South Africa, people talked about human inhumanity to others in terms of "zombification."

In " Everyday War," I use Yuliya's term, "sci-fi," because so many people described having to make sense of what seemed like life on another planet. Here again, Ukraine is not unique. For example, in accounts of the civil war in Sierra Leone, recovering child soldiers report seeing not water but blood flowing from the tap.

The power of objects

A third way people spoke of traumatic experiences was in terms of objects. A single mother of five girls, "Fiona," fled Luhansk when the Russians stationed near her rural home began going on shooting sprees during their safety patrols in 2014. She began selling household items to generate funds for bus tickets to a safer location.

Fiona's description of these items was very detailed and took up most of our conversation. At first, I was perplexed as to why she wanted to go over the make, year and model of items like toasters and washing machines. She was more eager to talk about these appliances, it seemed, than her experiences or her children.

Eventually, I understood that these everyday objects, now sold, were icons of the life they had lost. Describing appliances was a way for Fiona to communicate about her family and its migration, easier than trying to discuss heavy emotional experiences head-on.

Another man who had fled his home, who I call "Leonid," told me what he most longed for was the collection of matchbook cars he had to leave behind. The picture he displayed on his phone showed the cars lined up, still in their packaging, on a shelf in his home.

A humanitarian worker counseled him to overcome his sense of despair by purchasing new ones. What Leonid was saying, however, was more complex. As he was fleeing, he had also photographed innumerable real cars that were crushed by tanks, shredded by mortars, or incinerated by fire. Our conversation made clear that he longed for the toy cars because they represented everything the real cars in his actual world were not: safe, whole and protected. Talking about the toy cars was a way to describe - in condensed form - a whole set of powerful emotions.

When the war ends, Ukrainians may return to the places they had to flee, but both their inner and their outer worlds have changed. This means anyone intent on understanding will need flexible ways to listen. For anthropologists, it is vital to listen to not only what people say, but how they say it.

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When there are no words: Talking about wartime trauma in Ukraine

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Trauma can affect how people remember and describe experiences. Many survivors express their pain through objects and physical symptoms, an anthropologist explains.

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A Big Think article, which explores linguistic determinism, making reference to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

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A Big Think article, which explores linguistic determinism, making reference to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This is a great introduction to linguistic determinism - and could be explored after reading or viewing Nineteen Eighty-Four (there’s a short clip within lesson 3.5). How does the article summarize linguistic determinism? What arguments does the article offer against the idea that thought requires language? Why does the writer argue that it is “ethically imperative” that we discard linguistic determinism - and do you agree?

KEY TERMS Linguistic determinism, Imagination

LINKS TO Language, The arts

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Newspeak: Why silence defeats “thought crimes” in Orwell’s 1984

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In Orwell’s dystopian novel, the government uses Newspeak to control thoughts by controlling language. But thoughts do not require language.

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A Conversation article that explores what the legal basis of emojis are - and whether they can be used as evidence in court. 

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A Conversation article that explores what the legal basis of emojis are - and whether they can be used as evidence in court. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Students can consider what emojis are for, and how they differ (do they differ?) from ordinary language. Is one form of communication more ‘accurate’ than the other - and why? Next, think about how we draw on written language in court - why might emojis not provide us with the precision or accuracy that we need when it comes to the application of the law? Finally, if emojis are accepted in this way, how will it change our perception of them?

KEY TERMS Evidence, Forensic linguistics, Expert testimony

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, Technology

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Yayayoyo/Shutterstock

Emojis have become ubiquitous in text communication - messages are peppered with smiley faces, hearts and other graphic icons. They were first drawn by graphic designer Shigetaka Kurita, and generated by a Japanese communications firm called NTT DoCoMo in the late 1990s. Now they're everywhere.

But would you be quite so quick to insert an emoji into a message if you thought it might be interpreted as a threat or might offend the receiver? What if that smiley face could land you in court? Or bind you legally to a contract you never formally signed?

There's a growing body of case law from around the world - including the United Kingdom, New Zealand and France - where courts have been called on to interpret emojis as evidence. This, in turn, has seen a rise in academic literature on the subject. That includes research in the field of forensic linguistics, which we both study.

The phrase "forensic linguistics" was first recorded in 1968 by professor of linguistics Jan Svartvik, who was analysing the language in a set of legal statements. Forensic linguist John Olsson, defines the discipline as

... the interface between languages, crime, law, where law includes law enforcement, judicial matters, legislation, disputes or proceedings in law, and even disputes which only potentially involve some infraction of the law or some necessity to seek legal remedy.

Globally, forensic linguists are called on to offer expert testimony on emojis as evidence. Contentious emoji use hasn't made too many headlines in South Africa yet, but given instances elsewhere in the world, it's likely that forensic linguists may soon be called into play in the country's courts quite soon. That's why forensic linguists in South Africa should keep abreast of new developments around emojis as evidence.

We held a two-day colloquium at Rhodes University in South Africa where forensic linguists and legal practitioners interested in language and the law discussed international developments. We also explored the ways that emojis might be interpreted in the context of South Africa's cultures and languages.

Similar colloquiums will be held with the legal fraternity to ensure judges and magistrates are able to interpret emojis and the importance of calling forensic linguists as expert witnesses.

Emojis in other courts

Forensic linguists are called as expert witnesses in court cases to provide linguistic analysis of legal documents and other forms of oral and documentary evidence - including emojis. They can identify authors based on the language used in a document or statement. They can also provide legal interpretation or translation in a court room.

Read more: Forensic linguistics holds promise for South Africa's legal system

The US probably leads the way in terms of cases where emojis have been proven to defame others. In one circuit court case, the plaintiff alleged that the "tongue out" emoji insulted and defamed him on social media platforms. The court held that the emoji was intended to insult, ridicule, criticise and denigrate. This interpretation took place in relation to the facts and other circumstances of the case.

The interpretation of emojis, where the true intention of the sender is in question will be determined by other surrounding facts and circumstances, including the nature and tone of other communication, the relationship and surrounding factors. This will have to be carefully interpreted in multilingual settings and where communication is taking place across cultures.

In France in 2016 a man was convicted of threatening his ex-girlfriend and was sentenced to three months in prison. The charges were brought based on a text message in which the man sent the gun emoji. The court held that the gun emoji translated to a

... death threat in the form of an image

Sometimes emojis have held people to contractual obligations in court. In civil cases in the US, courts have interpreted the "thumbs up", "fist bump", "handshake" and "glasses" emojis as constituting an agreement or an intention to enter into a contractual agreement.

The interpretation of emojis will require specialised knowledge in a legal setting and forensic linguists are therefore necessary in court rooms to impart their expert opinion and assist the courts the interpretation of this evidence. With emojis being a form of non-verbal communication linguistic and legal expertise. In courts around the world, forensic linguists are proving to be of vital importance in ensuring that justice is fair and accessible. Their role in a multilingual and multicultural South African courtroom will prove to be vital with the interpretation of emojis.

Interpretation

One of the big issues that forensic linguists will have to contend with in South Africa, as in any multicultural society, is that of cross-cultural barriers. These may unintentionally place the sender of an emoji in an awkward - and even legal - dilemma if the recipient interprets it differently from the intended meaning.

For example and based on our own understandings and subjective beliefs and ideas, some emojis may be offensive, racist, culturally insensitive and homophobic. The monkey emoji may be viewed by a recipient as being racist, given the dark history of comparing black people to monkeys. A pig emoji may be read as insulting or degrading.

Of course these sorts of misunderstandings aren't limited to South Africa. In Italy, pinching your fingers together means "What do you want?" Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit corporation that "standardises software and the representation of text internationally" has said the meaning of this emoji will not be misunderstood as "everyone knows the Italians talk with their hands". But in India, for instance, the same gesture is a way of asking whether someone is hungry. The thumbs up sign, meanwhile, tells people in some parts of the world that everything is in order; elsewhere, it's an insult.

Emojis are here to stay. And they will no doubt start to crop up in cases in South Africa's courts, if the global examples are anything to go by. Forensic linguists can play a valuable role in guiding courts as they seek to interpret emojis as evidence.

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Forensic linguists explore how emojis can be used as evidence in court

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Forensic linguists are called as expert witnesses in court cases to provide linguistic analysis of legal documents and other forms of oral and documentary evidence - including emojis.

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A Conversation article, looking at the evolution of political catchphrases, expressions, and insults in the United States. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the evolution of political catchphrases, expressions, and insults in the United States. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE This short and approachable article shows how language develops in both the political and wider worlds. It also introduces us to a useful lexicon of terms related to language that are worth learning. What examples does it give of the way phrases, slang, and insults appear and are used? What does this suggest about the evolution of language and who controls it? Does this support a descriptivist or prescriptivist approach to language?

KEY TERMS Verbal legerdemain vs. mondegreens, Minced Oath, Linguistic reappropriation

LINKS TO Language, Politics

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During an interview with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown on Oct. 2, 2021, NBC sportscaster Kelli Stavast made a curious observation. She reported that Talladega Superspeedway spectators were chanting "Let's go Brandon" to celebrate the racing driver's first Xfinity Series win.

In reality, however, the crowd was shouting a very different phrase: " F-k Joe Biden," a taunt that had become popular at college football games earlier in the fall.

The deliberate misinterpretation of the crowd's chant was a deft bit of verbal legerdemain on Stavast's part. Although she hasn't publicly explained herself, it seems likely that she was defusing the obscene, politically charged epithet so as not to offend her network's sponsors and viewers.

The phrase, however, quickly took on a life of its own. It provides an interesting example of how language and politics make strange bedfellows - for conservatives and liberals alike.

Making the unacceptable acceptable

Judging from recordings of the interview available online, it is unlikely that Stavast misheard the crowd's chant. If she had, her error would be classified as a mondegreen, which is a slip of the ear. Examples include mishearing Elton John's " Tiny Dancer" as "Hold me closer, Tony Danza."

The enthusiastic adoption of the phrase by President Joe Biden's detractors suggests that "Let's go Brandon" is best described as a minced oath. These are euphemisms used in place of a taboo or blasphemous expression.

Such oaths have a long history in English; an early example is "Zounds," a euphemism for "God's wounds" that started being used around 1600. "Darn" in place of "damn" emerged by 1800, while "heck" and "shoot" became popularized by the 1870s and the 1930s, respectively.

Minced oaths have also been used extensively on television. In these cases, the goal is to circumvent constraints imposed by a network's standards and practices, with certain terms used by characters in place of profane language, whether it's " frack" in "Battlestar Galactica, " fork" in "The Good Place" or " fudge" in "South Park." Even Homer Simpson's oft-repeated cry of dismay - "D'oh!" - is a minced oath for "damn."

Taking language back

The "Let's go Brandon" phenomenon also illustrates the process of linguistic reappropriation or reclamation.

Some Biden supporters are turning the phrase into one of support for him. And as a variant, some of the president's supporters have begun to employ, "Thank you Brandon."

This is itself a callback to the earlier " Thanks, Obama." Republicans often used the phrase to sarcastically criticize the 44th president, but it was later reappropriated by Democrats who used the phrase literally. The dizzying linguistic arms race eventually rendered the phrase meaningless.

As with minced oaths, there's an equally long history of insults being adopted by the groups being disparaged.

During the English Civil Wars, for example, Parliament supporters mockingly referred to the backers of Charles I as "Cavaliers." In a feat of verbal judo, the royalists adopted the moniker to refer to themselves. By doing so, they drained away the epithet's negative connotation.

A similar process has occurred for the use of the word "queer." Once a highly offensive slur directed at gay people, the LGBTQ+ community adopted and rehabilitated it.

Several other cases of linguistic appropriation have recently occurred in U.S. politics. A good example is " Nevertheless, she persisted." Republican senator Mitch McConnell first used it to rebuke Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, who read from a letter by Coretta Scott King during a confirmation hearing after McConnell had warned her not to.

Warren's supporters quickly seized upon the slogan, proudly using it to celebrate women who resist being silenced. Chelsea Clinton went on to publish a series of books honoring women entitled "She Persisted."

Republicans have proved just as adept at this as Democrats. In 2016, when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that half of Donald Trump's supporters could be put in a " basket of deplorables," the Trump campaign released commercials using it. Clinton's words were played over clips of Trump's admiring supporters.

A universal phenomenon

These phenomena aren't limited to U.S. politics. Citizens in repressive societies employ coded criticism as a way to challenge authority.

Following the crackdown on dissent after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, demonstrators in China smashed glass bottles in public places to protest the policies of leader Deng Xiaoping. Although the connection is lost on those who don't know Chinese, "Xiaoping" and "little bottle" are pronounced the same way in Mandarin.

NASCAR's concern with its family-friendly image has caused its president, Steve Phelps, to distance the organization from the ongoing "Let's Go Brandon" imbroglio. And a Southwest Airlines pilot is under investigation for using the phrase while airborne.

Others, however, have been happy to make use of the association. On Nov. 18, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, made a point of signing bills outlawing COVID-19 vaccine mandates in an unincorporated community nearly 300 miles from the state capital.

Its name?

Brandon, Florida.

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'Let's Go Brandon' and the linguistic jiujitsu of American politics

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During an interview with NASCAR driver Brandon Brown on Oct. 2, 2021, NBC sportscaster Kelli Stavast made a curious observation. She reported that Talladega Superspeedway spectators were chanting "Let's go Brandon" to celebrate the racing driver's first Xfinity Series win.

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This BBC article thinks about how words change over time, and how certain terms help to reflect the reality of contemporary society.

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This BBC article thinks about how words change over time, and how certain terms help to reflect the reality of contemporary society.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE There are some great words to consider here; do students agree that they provide us with genuine insights about contemporary society? Which words would they add? What does this tell us about the power of words, and the knowledge that they convey? Is the limitation of using language to understand culture the fact that words can always be interpreted in different ways? Why do the meanings of words change over time? What knowledge is encapsulated in a single word? Can individual words give us an insight into modern society?

KEY TERMS Post-truth, Doublethink, Newspeak

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, Politics

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In George Orwell's famous prognostication of the future (a dystopia, of course), what he calls 'doublethink' (cheerful violation of logic) and 'newspeak' (ideologically contorted language) run rampant, and all citizens are under heavy surveillance. Looking back on this now, one is struck by how quaint his whole vision was, because in the age of the internet and super-connectivity, all of these things have been raised to sophisticated arts that, instead of being forced on us, have quietly colonised our lives. In the spirit of Orwell I offer a new speak for our new age, the century of 'hyper' and 'virtual' and 'post' this and that (how he would have laughed and cried at the idea of a 'post-truth'!), where the struggle over meaning and authenticity have partly relocated to cyberspace, to a realm of infinite (im)possibility, just as our identities have.
More like this: - Will we stop speaking and just text? - The ancient 'viral memes' still with us - The rebirth of Cornish and other lost UK languages
It used to be said that to name something is to begin understanding it. I'm not sure that holds anymore in the world-wide 'web' of meaning we now inhabit (or are trapped in), with its exponentially increasing complexities. Nevertheless, I have tried to choose words and concepts that should have some staying power, for a decade or two at least.

Catfishing
This word would make more sense if it referred to fishing for cats, but in actuality it refers to people who construct false identities online and, whether out of boredom, loneliness or malice, lure other people into continued messaging correspondence, thereby building false relationships with them (the apparent source of the term 'catfish' is a 2010 documentary called Catfish, whose verity, ironically enough, has been questioned). There are two ways of looking at this. 1. The internet/cyberspace is wonderful, because it gives people the freedom to augment or totally change their identities, and this is a marvellous new dawn for human expression, a new step in human evolution. 2. Nah, it's a false dawn, because the internet is essentially a libertarian arena, and as such an amoral one (lots of 'freedoms' but with no attendant social obligations); it is a new jungle where we must watch our backs and struggle for survival, surely a backward step in evolution. I lean toward the latter. If some of us are reduced to catfish lurking on the bottom of the Mississippi river, are we not all reduced to catfish?

Woke
As in 'roused to political self-awareness', with the hopeful connotation that one won't be going back to sleep anytime soon. (Remember how rappers used to wear big, old-fashioned alarm clocks on chains around their necks? The kind of alarm that makes you sit bolt upright.) The term originates in the US black civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, although the 2008 Erykah Badu song Master Teacher is supposed to be the most important recent source. The term has made a second-wave comeback recently (on TV, with Donald Glover's 2016 series Atlanta (season 1 went out in 2016); and 2017's Dear White People), as African Americans in the US came to the realisation that racism never really went away, it just camouflaged its fundamental failure of empathy as tolerance - this is a contention of the US Black Lives Matter movement that gathered strength after the shooting in 2013 of the 17-year-old African-American boy Trayvon Martin. From there the term has been making the short jump to other second- (eg LGBT) and third- (eg feminism) phase civil rights movements equally lulled by the illusion of tolerance. The goal is to go beyond feeling tolerated to being fully accepted and welcomed.

The new weird
An emerging genre of speculative, 'post-human' writing that blurs genre boundaries and conventions, pushes humanity and human-centred reason from the centre to the margins, and generally poses questions that may not be answerable in any terms we can understand (hence the 'weird'). It is associated with people like Jeff Vandermeer and M John Harrison in fiction, but the approach is bleeding into television narratives (see Westworld or Noah Hawley's innovative series Fargo and Legion). Vandermeer's Annihilation is heavily influenced by recent ecological thinking which takes the view that humanity is a blip in geologic history: even considering the potential catastrophe of global warming, the Earth existed long before us, and it will exist long after (see the 'hyperobject' entry elsewhere here). In his 2002 book Light, Harrison imagines a universe where human physics is encroached upon by alien physics that coexist and are equally or more potent. Westworld posits machine intelligences that overthrow their masters, unleashing a radically non-human order.

Deletion
This word is likely to be bandied about much more frequently in the decades ahead, as social media users realise that the websites they are on are not merely neutral 'platforms' for 'social interaction' but more like a kind of flypaper to which people and all of their personal data stick. Moreover, these websites are specifically designed to be addictive - there is a vast literature on the infernal psychology being deployed by Silicon Valley companies against social media users. No less a luminary than Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of digital innovation in the world and a granddaddy of Silicon Valley (he was born in 1960), points out many serious problems with social media, but the most straightforward one is that there is plenty of research that suggests social media fundamentally makes people unhappy. His solution is simple: delete your accounts.

Autofiction
Writing that merges autobiography and fiction, and freely transgresses other genre boundaries as well. The term was coined in the avant-garde literary world of France in the 1970s, but it has come to be applied to contemporary fiction dominated by the author's unreliable subjectivity. (The point being that all subjectivity is unreliable.) Writers of this sort might be Chris Kraus (whose 1997 novel I Love Dick became a cult feminist classic, spawning a 2017 TV series) and Maggie Nelson with The Argonauts - as well as WG Sebald, Sheila Heti, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner, Nell Zink, Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante (at a stretch). The approach has strongly influenced Lena Dunham, the creator of the TV series Girls, and has given rise to a genre of introspective (navel-gazing) television. At its best, it produces remarkable insights. Critics of the approach, such as Elif Batuman, blame it on the sort of writing taught in the privileged milieu of contemporary creative writing programs (with guiding principles such as 'write what you know', 'find your voice'), decry its wilful disregard of history, and lament it as narcissism that panders to the 'me' generation.

Shadow banking
Thinking about this is likely to give you a headache, but as John Lanchester points out, this is at the top of the list of informed concerns about the global financial system. Lanchester - a superb translator of finance-speak into layman's terms - argues that we need to understand the jargon-filled language of the economic elites, because otherwise they will write their own rules. Shadow banking consists of any financial transactions carried out by institutions that don't have a formal banking licence, in other words institutions that are not directly regulated or overseen by government bodies. Examples of these are credit card companies, insurance companies, PayPal, the institutions within banking that lend money back and forth between banks. We can, if you want, add to this the vast dark-financial realm of over-the-counter (OTC) transactions (including derivatives that are almost too complex for anyone, inside or outside the business, to understand) that are technically between two parties and therefore off government radar. Nobody knows how large this sector is, but current estimates put shadow banking at $160 trillion (£124 trillion) and OTC transactions at $532 trillion (£412 trillion), or roughly twice and six-and-a-half times the GDP of the entire Earth, respectively. Both sectors were of course heavily involved in creating the 2008 crash, and both have remained almost unaltered since then.

Digital design ethics
Referring to the 'attention crisis' - the fact that no one can take their eyes off their smartphones - James Williams writes that "the liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time". He observes that widely-used platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter are basically advertising companies, and they are developing a science of attentional capture whose main aim is to exploit vulnerabilities in our willpower and manipulate us into buying things. Our smartphones give these companies an easy conduit into our heads. Williams is currently a researcher in design ethics at the Oxford Internet Institute; he is part of a pushback against 'Big Tech' that is asking difficult questions about how our minds are being rewired for commercial purposes. His argument that the social contract, the idea of human rights, should be extended to cyberspace is gaining traction. Was the creation of the internet not supposed to be the dawn of a technological and informational utopia? Even its father, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, is convinced it is failing us.

Masculinity
We used to think we knew what masculinity meant, but now it is going out of focus. A rapidly changing context is the cause. There was a time when you'd ask a man what masculinity was and his response would be something like 'not feminine' (pejorative) and 'not queer' (pejorative). Note all the negativity. These days it is increasingly a good thing to be a woman (new, broad definition) and to be queer (new, broad definition). Both are eating away at the old territory occupied by masculinity, according to writers such as Hanna Rosin, Cordelia Fine or Grayson Perry. What's left is something of a void, aka 'the crisis of masculinity'. The challenge ahead for men is to formulate what they are, and want to be, rather than what they aren't. How to open up this frontier? I have a suggestion. For generations feminists and queer activists have been fighting to draw attention to masculinity's toxic side-effects. At long last, mainstream men seem on the verge of accepting that there is a problem. It remains for us all to take this a step further, and work to understand how this toxicity has also been poisoning men on the inside.

Ghosting
In the 2017 film A Ghost Story, directed by David Lowery, a happy man dies suddenly in a car accident and ends up being a ghost. He returns to his family home to linger spectrally under a generic bed sheet with eyeholes cut in it, a ghost of a ghost, and watch helplessly as his family continues life without him; and then, after they move out and others move in, as life in general continues without him. Hovering in his bathetic sheet, he is the essence of loneliness. He is trapped in a supernatural realm, with no human traction, as much haunted by as he is haunting obsolete relationships. He sometimes manages to express his frustration by smashing a few dishes or throwing some books, reduced to a mere poltergeist. Maybe the stark truth is that he has been 'ghosted': no one has been returning his text messages and DMs and he is trapped in digital limbo, condemned forever to float around as a ghost emoji? In any event, if you find yourself waiting around under a sheet for no apparent reason, I suggest you take the sheet off and find something better to do.

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In George Orwell's famous prognostication of the future (a dystopia, of course), what he calls 'doublethink' (cheerful violation of logic) and 'newspeak' (ideologically contorted language) run rampant, and all citizens are under heavy surveillance.

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Writing for The Atlantic, John McWhorter reminds us (if we needed it) that language is a “constantly shifting terrain”.

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Writing for The Atlantic, John McWhorter reminds us (if we needed it) that language is a “constantly shifting terrain”.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE We’ve seen many times articles and sources explaining how the development of language over time means that we should be unafraid of the meanings of words changing. How does this impact the way we use words to express ideas and knowledge? Why does the meaning of some words seem to become more powerful over time, and some words seem to lose their vitality? How and why does language change over time? Are ‘language rules’ meaningless given the way language is constantly in a state of development?

KEY TERMS Linguistic norms, Social media, Singular they, Linguistic purists, Euphemism treadmill, Linguistic taboos

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences

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John McWhorter expects linguistic norms to change even faster in coming years-and he argues that we can be less bothered by attendant demands than we are today.

In American culture these days, the linguistic terrain is constantly shifting, says the Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter. Even people who think of themselves as enlightened, morally scrupulous actors feel that there are constant demands to adopt new, unfamiliar linguistic habits or to jettison words or constructions they've grown used to their entire lives.

He sympathizes. He generally dislikes change. But "we need to get used to the linguistic insecurity I think all of us are suffering these days," he argued in a lecture Monday, "and open up to the fact that part of being a concerned, conscious speaker of American English in these times is to get used to constant change and constant demands that we revise what we thought before."

In his view, the rise of social media, especially since 2009, is causing the sorts changes that have always characterized language to happen with increasing rapidity.

In the future he expects change will occur even faster. "We're talking to one another constantly, not just listening to Walter Cronkite talk to us." But, he reassured his audience, "I think if we look at these things through a certain lens, we can actually learn to like it." If attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival, co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, were skeptical, he had three examples to persuade them.

First, consider the singular they.

It's long been a common construction, if one upon which pedants look down, as in the sentence, "Tell each student that they can hand in their paper a day late."

That's natural for most speakers.

But lately, an effort by individuals to use "they" as their singular gender pronoun rather than he or she has taken off. "That's different, and that takes effort," McWhorter said, "if you've spent a whole life using 'they' in a different way." He shared his own experience in a face-to-face conversation with an individual who wanted to be referred to with the singular third-person pronoun. While doing his best to comply, he said, he messed up a bunch of times. And he understands why some feel that it is an idiosyncratic, willful imposition.

However, he urged the audience to compare the trouble it takes to get used to that new way of speaking with a different counterintuitive rule most already try to follow.

"There is no child speaking English who naturally says, 'Billy and I went to the store,'" he said. "They say 'Billy and me.'" They are corrected by adults, even though, by McWhorter's lights, "that rule is nonsense." To purists who invoke the subjective and objective cases as they are used in Latin, he asked, "Who broke the lamp?" Anyone who answers, "I," he said, sounds like they're from another planet.

Still, he said, in lots of other cases we've all learned to catch ourselves, to use the less natural but formally correct word between "I" and "me," even if we still often slip up. We could think of sentences like "They will join us for dinner, set one more place" the same way. "I think that we're up to it," he said.

Example two concerned "the euphemism treadmill," the process by which a once not-disrespectful word like cripple takes on a negative connotation and is replaced by handicapped ... which takes on negative connotation and is replaced by disabled ... which is itself in the process of being replaced by differently abled.

When McWhorter was in college, he said, politically correct wasn't a pejorative. By the time he reached graduate school, people had begun to say, "I'm not PC, but..." distancing themselves from a term that had taken on baggage.

Because of social media, he said, "the euphemism treadmill is going to start going faster, and I think we need to get used to it." For example, it's only recently that he noticed the term "woke" being used beyond black Americans in just the way that "politically correct" was used before it was a pejorative. And already, he observed, it is beginning to take on the same baggage as PC once did.

As he sees it, understanding why this happens, and that it will inevitably keep happening to lots of different words, can perhaps ease the perceived burden of keeping up.

Finally, he turned to profanity, an area where, in his estimation, American culture is lagging behind a way that language has already changed for the better.

He sees taboos against the familiar four-letter words, like damn, shit, and fuck, as antiquated vestiges of bygone times when religious taboos, or taboos against sex and excretion, were utterly different than they are today-they make little sense, he argues, in a society where it's perfectly acceptable to be an open atheist and where many people revel in body positivity and sex positivity. The taboo words make no sense given the dearth of substantive taboos around that to which they refer. For that reason, he refuses to teach his young daughter that it is wrong to say "shit" but okay to say "poop," or that it is wrong to say "fuck," though he explains that she should understand the lingering sensitivities of others to those words and take care when and where to use them.

In contrast, he argued, today's truly profane words-and rightly so-are the n-word and the c-word, words where he is glad to see locutions like the ones I just used because he can make a strong logical and moral case for using them. "That is not something you want The New York Times to have on top of the page. I wouldn't want my children to ask me what it is. I can't be flippant about it," he explained. "I'm telling my children that those words are profane. Why can't you use them? Because they're evil ... The reason we don't say those words is that we don't slur against groups of people ... You work against tribalism."

I suspect McWhorter is correct when he posits that, in coming years, linguistic change is "going to go faster than most of us ever thought was possible." I hope he is additionally correct that, amid the inevitable disagreements about substance and manners and competing values, "we can learn to almost enjoy it if we have a better sense of why these things are happening."

I would only caution readers that the "we" almost certainly won't be universal-that change will be easiest for cognitive elites with strong verbal skills, for young people, for people in whatever social-media circles most influence new norms, and for people who, for whatever reason, are psychologically comfortable with difference and diversity and rapid social change.

Anyone can grasp the most basic taboos against the most hateful language. But for other linguistic change-even the wisest or most moral-those best positioned to embrace the new should treat with forbearance those who lag behind.

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The Futility of Standing Athwart Language Yelling 'Stop!'

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John McWhorter expects linguistic norms to change even faster in coming years-and he argues that we can be less bothered by attendant demands than we are today. In American culture these days, the linguistic terrain is constantly shifting, says the Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter.

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A Conversation article, looking at the use of the word ‘like’, and arguing that it isn’t a lazy feature of language-use.

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A Conversation article, looking at the use of the word ‘like’, and arguing that it isn’t a lazy feature of language-use.

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE Is any aspect of language superfluous?

KEY TERMS Linguistic filler

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences

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Use it at your peril. Shutterstock

The latest series of the television show Love Island is over, with Amber and Greg now snuggling up as the most recent winners - at least until the winter version starts in January 2020.

As well as bringing us a fresh group of islanders and a new villa to admire, the January series is likely to throw up many of the same linguistic debates as previous series.

Yes, you read that right - linguistics. For nary a season of Love Island, or any programme predominantly aimed at young people, may pass without a flurry of grumpy think pieces on the protagonists' language habits. And few linguistic habits cause as much ranting from those seeking to protect the fair English tongue as use of the word like.

After several decades of like-bashing, which long predate Love Island's arrival on our screens, commentators, headteachers and professors all continue to denounce the "excessive" use of the word like among "the young".

But seeking to protect English grammar from like is misguided for one crucial reason: like has a grammar, too. And by understanding the grammar of like, we can learn a lot about what it means and what it contributes to someone's speech.

Like it or not

To shed light on like 's grammar, I've built what is known in linguistics as a corpus. A corpus is a representative sample of language as used by certain speakers. We can then examine this corpus to understand how language is used - rather than relying on our perceptions, opinions and memories.

My corpus is not based on Love Island, but on a programme with similarly young participants - and audience members - that has also attracted much criticism for its participants' language use: the BBC's make-up competition Glow Up.

After transcribing the show and removing the kinds of like that are broadly "accepted" - that is the verbs, nouns, quotatives and those used for comparisons - I found that participants used like 229 times in eight episodes. That's about 29 uses of like per episode, or one every two minutes.

First, it was notable that like was rarely either preceded or followed by a pause. So even though this use of like is regularly dismissed as a meaningless, lazy filler, it doesn't, in fact, behave like um or er. In the programme, the participants knew what they wanted to say, and using like was part of that.

We can further understand the meaning of like by noticing that there are places in an utterance where like can appear and places where it sounds really unnatural. According to the Glow Up corpus, here's where like might appear in an utterance such as "I am going to create a beautiful look in 15 minutes":

Like, I am going to create a beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am like going to create a beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am going to like create a beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am going to create like a beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am going to create a like beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am going to create a beautiful look in like 15 minutes.

And here are the places where like never, or very rarely, appears:

I like am going to create a beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am going like to create a beautiful look in 15 minutes.

I am going to create a beautiful like look in 15 minutes.

I am going to create a beautiful look like in 15 minutes.

I am going to create a beautiful look in 15 like minutes.

I am going to create a beautiful look in 15 minutes like.

Of course, we can't assume that this kind of like never appears in the positions marked in the second set of examples. But a large scale study of North American English speakers also found that speakers regularly produced utterances like the first set of examples but didn't produce utterances like the second set, making my finding somewhat stronger.

Like, then, can't just be used anywhere, but it can still appear in about six different places in our example sentence - so what is it doing?

The meaning of like

The corpus shows us that an utterance that starts with like always follows on from another utterance. The speaker who starts an utterance with like in this way might be adding their support to what someone else has just said, or emphasising that they really believe something that they have just said themselves. For example:

Dom: This is bloody marvellous. Like this is really beautiful. You have won me over 100%.

Or:

Leomie: Nah well done, Nikki. Like the eye, the colour, like it proper worked.

BBC

Like in the middle of an utterance is similar, but subtly different. It may be used to highlight the part of the utterance that's telling us something new and relevant, or that the speaker thinks is most interesting or important. You might think that this would mean that like could highlight any and every part of a sentence but, as we've already seen, like can highlight certain types of constituents (combinations of words and phrases), but not others.

Ellis: I'm layering up the powder to kind of get, like, this velvety finish

Stacey: Is Ellis putting, like, a gluestick on his eyebrows?

BBC

In both cases, then, speakers use like to make sure that their message is properly understood by the person they're speaking to, both in terms of its content and how it fits into the conversation.

We can make an analogy between like and how intonation is used in English. We could remove it from an utterance and that utterance would still be grammatical, but it wouldn't convey its message in the same way. It could also sound really odd in the context of a conversation.

English speakers use and interpret both like and intonation without thinking about it consciously. Intonation has also been a target for language commentators who decry, for example, "uptalk", when a speaker uses rising intonation at the end of their utterance.

But why do like and uptalk annoy people so much? Alexandra D'Arcy at the University of Victoria in Canada argues that the multi-purpose nature of like might be part of its downfall. Because all of the uses of like are pronounced in the same way, its apparent repetition makes it stand out.

More generally, though, these language gripes just seem to be a proxy for demeaning certain groups that share characteristics other than their (perceived) language use - they tend to be young, female and not in positions of power.

If we criticise a person or group based on how we think they speak, we not only draw attention away from what they're saying, but we're likely to stop them from wanting to speak (up) at all. Language prejudice is real and needs to be called out.

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'Like' isn't a lazy linguistic filler - the English language snobs need to, like, pipe down

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The latest series of the television show Love Island is over, with Amber and Greg now snuggling up as the most recent winners - at least until the winter version starts in January 2020.

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A Conversation article, looking at the use (and resistance to the use) of the gender neutral French pronoun ‘iel’. 

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A Conversation article, looking at the use (and resistance to the use) of the gender neutral French pronoun ‘iel’. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE The French language is often a battle ground between progressives and conservatives - or, as the article puts it, between those advocating societal evolution, and those supporting normativism. Students can first explore the use of the pronoun ‘iel’ in the French language, and how it is being used. Why do some people oppose its use? How has the director-general of Le Robert responded to the criticisms levelled at his dictionary, and how does this fit into a clash between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language? Finally, to what extent does language reflect our political (and other) views (draw on that term ‘ideologemes’)? Can language be used in an objective way, or will it always be defined by our perspectives and biases?

KEY TERMS Wokism, Inclusive writing, Societal evolution vs. normativism, Ideologemes

LINKS TO Language, Human sciences, Politics

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Spirited public debate over language is a very French passion.

So it's no surprise that when the online edition of Le Robert, the famous French dictionary, chose to include the gender-neutral pronoun "iel" - a combination of the French pronouns "il" (he) and "elle" (she) that corresponds to the singular "they" in English - a furious controversy erupted.

MP François Jolivet accused the dictionary of succumbing to "wokism" by including the pronoun and its defintion, while the minister for education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, tweeted: "Inclusive writing is not the future of the French language".

When asked for her opinion on the issue, the president's wife, Brigitte Macron, incorrectly remarked that there are only two pronouns in the French language. (As well as the uncontroversial "on" meaning "one" or the casual "we", La Grande Grammaire du Français mentions many more.)

Yet contrary to the assertions of the most emotional commentators, the editors of Le Robert do not constitute a "militant armada" determined to abuse the French language, but simply a team of lexicographers who, with patience and method, observe changes to the lexicon and then decide whether to include new words in their editions.

The dictionary does not impose

In a clarification issued after the "iel" decision went viral, the director-general of Le Robert, Charles Bimbenet, wrote:

Le Robert's mission is to observe the evolution of a diverse French language in motion and to report on it. Defining the words that describe our world helps us understand it better.

The reality is more simple than the critics of Le Robert make out: first of all, if the occurrences of "iel" remain rare, they are sufficiently regular to merit this entry - like a multitude of other technical or regional terms that are used in specific contexts, without creating a stir.

Two other new recent additions are "klouker" (to stuff oneself), a borrowing from Breton, and the more scientific "perfluoré" (when a carbon chain is totally fluorinated).

And as Bimbenet pointed out, the fact that "iel" is in the dictionary does not mean that it is imposed on speakers. Many words are in the dictionary without being used. The purpose of the dictionary is not to force the use of words, but simply to propose an inventory of common, widespread and emerging linguistic practices.

How words become controversial

French linguists have made significant efforts in recent years to expand the public understanding of how language evolves and to remind us that there is not one but many French languages spoken not just in France but all over the world.

But these initiatives are clearly not always enough to calm the passionate reaction when a simple pronoun makes an entry into a dictionary.

Read more: Pas de souci! The French war on saying 'no worries'

The problem goes beyond "iel". Debates about the French language tend to replay old quarrels between societal evolution and normativism - in other words, a clash between old and new, or conservatives and progressives. In recent years, the appearance of the word "kiffer" (to like or enjoy something) has provoked debates because of its slang origins, while "start-up" has been accused of being an English import.

For a linguist like me who specialises in discourse analysis, it is not so much "iel" itself that sparks interest, but the conversations that are built around the pronoun, notably on the side of those who are angered by it.

Words can always be used to satisfy various intentions - in this case political ones. These uses lead to the transformation of words into what literature scholar Marc Angenot called ideologemes, a term that explains how certain words can become loaded with ideological meaning to the extent that they can no longer be considered neutral.

Thus, if "iel" becomes an ideologem, it is not so much as a pronoun - it was conceived and proposed to respond to obvious grammatical deficiencies that do not exist in other languages - but as a linguistic practice understood through social and political presuppositions it is given.

In other words, it is the way opponents of "iel" denigrate it that transforms it into an object of ideological controversy, while its creation constitutes a simple contraction designed to fill a grammatical gap.

Iel is a choice

No one is forcing people to use "iel" with a gun to their head. But paradoxically, by making the pronoun the focus of attention, its critics are inevitably helping to make it more popular.

Of course, everyone has the right to dislike the pronoun, to find it useless or unattractive - speakers' judgements about their own language are an inevitable and perfectly normal sociolinguistic fact.

But this judgement should not prevent other speakers from creating and using new words - as has been the case for as long as languages have existed. All words are literally invented at some point.

"Iel" is not a paragon of "le wokisme" - an increasingly common word in France which is not yet in the dictionary itself, and is a direct import of the English "woke" with a suffix allowing it to be Frenchified (the famous "-isme"). It's interesting to note in this context that the most fierce opponents of this maligned pronoun accuse it of being an anglicism, all the while invoking "wokisme".

This is proof, if any were needed, that languages evolve by influencing each other, mutually enriching one another for the greater happiness of the speakers.

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No need to 'iel': why France is so angry about a gender-neutral pronoun

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Spirited public debate over language is a very French passion. So it's no surprise that when the online edition of Le Robert, the famous French dictionary, chose to include the gender-neutral pronoun "iel" - a combination of the French pronouns "il" (he) and "elle" (she) that corresponds to the singular "they" in English - a furious controversy erupted.

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A Guardian article, reporting on a new law in France that bans English tech jargon. 

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A Guardian article, reporting on a new law in France that bans English tech jargon. 

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UNPACKING THE SOURCE What is the ‘Académie Française’, and why is it so keen to maintain the ‘purity’ of the French language? Do you agree that anglicisms could create ‘barriers of understanding’? Link this story to the concepts of ‘descriptivism’ and ‘prescriptivism’ that we explore in language - which side of this debate does the Academie belong on? Overall, what does this issue indicate about the relationship between language and society?

KEY TERMS Language purity, Debasement, Degradation

LINKS TO Language, Technology, Human sciences

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French officials on Monday continued their centuries-long battle to preserve the purity of the language, overhauling the rules on using English video game jargon.

While some expressions find obvious translations – “pro-gamer” becomes “joueur professionnel” – others seem a more strained, as “streamer” is transformed into “joueur-animateur en direct”.

The culture ministry, which is involved in the process, told AFP the video game sector was rife with anglicisms that could act as “a barrier to understanding” for non-gamers.

France regularly issues dire warnings of the debasement of its language from across the Channel, or more recently the Atlantic.

Centuries-old language watchdog the Académie Française warned in February of a “degradation that must not be seen as inevitable”. It highlighted terms including train operator SNCF’s brand “Ouigo” (pronounced “we go”) along with straightforward imports such as “big data” and “drive-in”.

However, Monday’s changes were issued in the official journal, making them binding on government workers.

Among several terms to be given official French alternatives were “cloud gaming”, which becomes “jeu video en nuage”, and “eSports”, which will now be translated as “jeu video de competition”.

The ministry said experts had searched video game websites and magazines to see if French terms already existed. The overall idea, said the ministry, was to allow the population to communicate more easily.

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France bans English gaming tech jargon in push to preserve language purity

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Government officials must replace words such as ‘e-sports’ and ‘streaming’ with approved French versions