Friday 11 May 2007

Blair's Linguistic Legacy

This is a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph listing 100 words which weren't in use before 1997:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/10/nblairdec310.xml

What I think is interesting is that there are many more than 100 words which have come into use in the last ten years - how have they chosen these? It seems to be quite politically motivated; there is a definite Telegraph readership bias evident here. It exemplifies attitudes to language change, and how that attitude can be disseminated with no coherent sentences at all. Semantically these words are just words, but pragmatically as a list they say 'Blair is bad' and 'Bring back the good old days', and 'political correctness gone mad!' (a favourite Telegraph reaction!).

Also at least some of them were in use before 1997, but they may not have been widespread. Institutional racism for one. Have a look, see what you think.

:)

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