Goodbye to good-bye (Hymn to the Hyphen)

Well, first of all it turns out that the hyphen is dead. Prescriptivists among you may want to shed a tear as the new ed of the Oxford Shorter Dictionary is dropping a load of them because, basically, we're all too lazy to be bothered with them. Some words are losing the hyphen and becoming compounds (eg 'bumblebee' rather than 'bumble bee') and some are becoming noun phrases (eg 'ice cream' rather than 'ice-cream'). Do not expect any English teacher to take that as a reasonable excuse any time soon. There are other dictionaries.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2172733,00.html

However, it is a bit of a trend, as this article from The Times four years ago shows:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article880290.ece

So why is this happening? Well, as usual we could probably blame e-language. We're typing, we're going speedily, we can't be bothered to move up an extra line to reach the hyphen on the top row. And it's way down the menu on predictive text. Also possibly search engines have got more sophisticated so they recognise the word whether or not it has the hyphen included. And then it asks 'did you mean...' and really annoys you.

And it could just be regular language change - we all know levels of punctuation have gone up and down according to fashion, just like hemlines. Perhaps, en masse we've all just decided to go for the easier option, without the hyphen.

Smiley Birthday to you

Gosh this feels like a long time since I posted. Which it is. Well, if anyone is still out there, then here is a tiny link relevant to Language and Technology:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/19/smiley_birthday/
which is in fact, just a nice thing to know. :-)

You will all, of course, be thinking to yourselves by now that Language Change has also taken place in the smiley arena and reduced the original design to :) for ease of typing and speed. Is this a mark of degenerating standards, or does it merely show that e-language, like all language tends to change towards the easier and the more useful for speakers. Except when it doesn't.

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.

:)

Your chance to be part of linguistic history....

The British Library are putting together a snapshot of 21st century life - marketed as a 21st century Domesday Book - and they need your help. Forward an email to them during the month of May to be part of a vast archive of email communication... Just think, in five hundred years time, English Language Students could be analysing that email that you sent asking someone else for help with your essay - cos obviously all your emails are very virtuous!

First link = BBC news article about the project. Second is the British Library press release. Go on, make history.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6618039.stm

http://www.bl.uk/news/2007/pressrelease20070503.html

B******* Bingo, or how to think outside the box...

Apparently not everyone has been as swamped with management speak in their lives as I have, so here are a couple of links to places where you may find interesting management speak terms, or not so interesting ones... Beware, the second has a few punctuation errors, particularly in the matter of it's versus its...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/berkshire/content/articles/2005/01/19/voices_management_speak_feature.shtml

http://wossname.thingy.com/newspeak.htm

Read, enjoy, post your own favourites in the comments section.

:)

Email etiquette and coursework bibliographies

Right, this is the second time I've tried to write this.

I was very excited today to find myself, in the shape of this blog, on someone's coursework bibliography. Of course, there's not a fat lot to get excited about on coursework standardisation day, so don't take this as indicative of my usual response...

Email etiquette - article in yesterday's Times at the following link:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/caitlin_moran/article1689442.ece

I'm sure it's worth telling you that the author of this article had her first book published aged 17. Come on, some of you have still got time if you hurry....

:)

Talking of jobs...

This is just a little something to help you start preparing for Lang and Occupation on ENB2:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/skillswise/words/vocabulary/

It's fairly basic, mind you, but worth looking at some of the different subject-specific lexis... :)

Waparrazzi

Just been reading Susie Dent's The Language Report for last year. It's full of current linguistic trends, words coined during the year, and finishes with the OED's word of the year. Brill!
Waparrazzi - members of the public who take photos of celebrities with their mobile phones
flashpacker - posh, rich backpacker in their 30s

word of the year: bovvered! Oh, what a thing it has come to. 2005's was biosecurity - boring! But check out the following: 1982 - kissogram; 1970 - Big Mac; 1963 - Dalek; 1959 - hairspray; 1947 - bikini; 1938 - tweenage (almost unbelievable!); 1937 - hobbit; 1921 - potato crisps; 1913 - migrant labour; 1906 - muckraking. So many words have been going longer than you'd think.

Anyway, this book is great for Language Change, because it actually also talks about why words get more popular, and also for beginning to think about topics for independent Language Investigations for A2, if you're in Year 12. And I'm going to donate my copy to the library when I've finished with it. Enjoy!

Twenty first century acronyms

Some nice examples of language change in this BBC article - acronyms are created to describe particularly modern cultural phenomenons - and some of them are the same as earlier words. Does that make them more likely to catch on or less, do you reckon?

Anyway, there's also a bit on the end for you to add your own if you like.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6435311.stm

enjoy!

Some of these are also relevant for language and technology.

Language and ICT- AS level

The textbook for this module - written by the chief examiner, Tim Shortis, has online support at:
http://www.netting-it.com/

Check it out and see what you think.

In particular, my AS level English Language class should make sure they've looked at 'U11 Texting IT' as their homework for this week (Tues 27th Feb). Post a comment to this blog entry to show you've done your homework and thought about it!