Mind your slanguage, and don't be an erk. YOLO | Mind your language | Media The borderline-cult film Mean Girls contains an amusing insight into young people's eagerness to leave their linguistic trademark on the world. Schoolgirl Gretchen Wieners describes any pleasant situation as "fetch" in an attempt to coin a new term for cool: "It's, like, slang from … England." Anti-hero Regina George shoots her down: "Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen. How many potential new slang words have been dumped for not being sufficiently cool? Yes, yoof speak can be well annoying. Yoof slang is often regarded as attention-seeking, dramatic, lazy, neurotic and puerile. It's refreshing, then, that the new fourth edition of Tony Thorne's Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (Bloomsbury) takes a different approach: "Slang, considered objectively, is not a defective or substandard form of language, but one that creatively mobilises all the technical potential of the English language." Scoff we may, but Thorne has a point. Etymologies for older slang terms are fascinating.
Existential Crisis & Tiny Disasters. {Poem} Via Kalee Prueon Oct 23, 2014 Every moment: Choice. A crisis of conscience In this modern marvel Civilized world of ours… Which energy efficient lightbulb? The one requiring hazmat to clean up its deadly dust Or the one made an ocean away by poorly paid labor. I think about him every now and then… Sometimes when I pump gas into my tiny Toyota. I drive by yet another hill, Flattened sides, vent pipes, dull grassy slope. I think about the unknown pea green dangers of treated wood,About Chinese labor, Chinese wood, Chinese cargo barges Pulling into port in the depressed city of Aberdeen, Washington. Goddamn all these tiny disasters, These daily battles, These lightbulbs and batteries, And toxic greens, And men wearing union tees And magnificent trees and collapsing bees And electricity fees. Love elephant and want to go steady? Sign up for our (curated) daily and weekly newsletters! Editor: Cat Beekmans Photo: Francisco Anzola/Flickr About Kalee Prue
Pidgin, patois, slang, dialect, creole — English has more forms than you might expect There are probably as many terms for different kinds of English vernacular as there are vernaculars themselves: pidgin, patois, slang, creole dialect and so on. But while we usually think of the vernaculars as oral versions of the English language, they're making their way into the written word as well. “There's a really interesting paradox going on, where you're taking something that's constantly changing — and that people don't expect to see written down — and you're making it codified and setting it down for a wider audience," says Dohra Ahmad, editor of an anthology of vernacular literature called "Rotten English." M. “You can’t write it exactly as the person speaks it," she says. She writes both in dialect and in standard English, with her characters switching back and forth between the Englishes. “As people from the Caribbean, we inhabit a spectrum of language, and you actually hear it when you go into the cultures," Philp says.
Allen Ginsberg’s “Celestial Homework”: A Reading List for His Class “Literary History of the Beats” Click for larger image “Argh, you’re all amateurs in a professional universe!” roared Allen Ginsberg to a young class of aspiring poets in 1977 at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Only three years earlier, in 1974, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman launched the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg taught at Naropa until his death in 1997. This “celestial homework” is the reading list that Ginsberg handed out on the first day of his course as “suggestions for a quick check-out & taste of antient scriveners whose works were reflected in Beat literary style as well as specific beat pages to dig into.” It’s a particularly Ginsberg-ian list, with a healthy mix of genres and periods, most of it poetry—by Ginsberg’s fellow beats, to be sure, but also by Melville, Dickinson, Yeats, Milton, Shelley, and several more. Related Content: Allen Ginsberg Reads His Famously Censored Beat Poem, Howl W.H.
From the mouths of teens - This Britain - UK - The Independent "Check the creps," says the other. "My bluds say the skets round here are nuff deep." "Wasteman," responds the first, with alacrity. "You just begging now." The pair exit the vehicle, to blank stares of incomprehension. Later, this dialogue is related to Gus, a 13-year-old who attends an inner London comprehensive; he wastes no time in decoding it. ''Safe just means hi,'' he says briskly. There's more: butters means ugly, hype is excitement, bare is a lot, cotching is hanging around, and allow it is a plea to leave something or someone alone. Sick? "No, sick is good," he says patiently. Gus and his ilk have been caught up in an emerging linguistic phenomenon. The dialect is heavy with Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean inflections; words are clipped, as opposed to the cockney tendency to stretch vowels (thus face becomes fehs, as in "look a' mi fehs"), and certain words - creps, blud (thought to relate to blood, as in brother) and sket, are Jamaican in origin. And that's not nang? Air Bait Ballin'
W.H. Auden’s 1941 Literature Syllabus Asks Students to Read 32 Great Works, Covering 6000 Pages According to Freud, neurotics never know what they want, and so never know when they’ve got it. So it is with the seeker after fluent cultural literacy, who must always play catch-up to an impossible ideal. William Grimes points this out in his New York Times review of Peter Boxall’s obnoxious 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, which "plays on every reader's lingering sense of inadequacy. Page after page reveals a writer or a novel unread, and therefore a demerit on the great report card of one’s cultural life.” Then there are the less-ambitious periodical reminders of one's literary insufficiency, such as The Telegraph’s “100 novels everyone should read,” The Guardian’s “The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list,” the Modern Library’s “Top 100,” and the occasional, pretentious Facebook quiz etc. based on the above. Grimes’ reference to a report card is relevant, since what we’re discussing today is the instruction in grand themes and “great books” represented by W.H. W.H.
Paul Baker - What is polari? What is Polari? Polari is a more recent spelling. In the past, it was also known as Palari, Palare, Parlaree or a variety of similar spellings. It is mainly a lexicon, derived from a variety of sources. Some of the most common include rhyming slang, backslang (saying a word as if it's spelt backwards), Italian, Occitan, French, Lingua Franca, American airforce slang, drug-user slang, Parlyaree (an older form of slang used by tinkers, beggars and travelling players) and Cant (an even older form of slang used by criminals). Polari can be classed as a language variety, a sociolect, or an anti-language. While it was mainly used as a lexicon, some of the more adept speakers were so good at it, that it resembled a language, with its own grammatical rules, distinct to English. Who used it? Mainly gay men, although also lesbians, female impersonators, theatre people, prostitutes and sea-queens (gay men in the merchant navy). How many words are there? What words were in it? Why did people use it?
WAR POEMS AND POETS OF TODAY AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR CREOLE ENGLISH AND BLACK ENGLISH by Mark Sebba Department of Linguistics and English Language Lancaster University Lancaster LA1 4YT, England e-mail: M.Sebba@lancaster.ac.uk © 2002 Mark Sebba "Black English" can refer to two different language varieties: (1) the type of English used by people of African and Caribbean descent who live in Britain; (2) the language of African-Americans (negroes) in the United States. In another unit you were introduced to pidgin languages and their characteristics. When a pidgin becomes a creole, it may change its character somewhat. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Most of the creoles used in Europe (unlike the creole variety of Tok Pisin, for example) have their origins in the slave trade which involved four continents: Europe, Africa and North and South America. The Great Circuit Ships left English ports such as Liverpool, Lancaster, Bristol and Cardiff with cargoes of manufactured goods which they traded for slaves along the African coast. The African Element in Sranan Tongo lobi love /lVv/ bigi big /bIg/
The Edge of the Sky: An Unusual and Poetic Primer on the Universe Written in the 1,000 Most Common Words in the English Language by Maria Popova “Perhaps the All-There-Is is not all there is.” “If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it,” pioneering anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote in the 1979 volume Some Personal Views, “one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one’s subject matter.” What emerges is a narrative that explains some of the most complex science in modern astrophysics, told in language that sounds like a translation of ancient storytelling, like the folkloric fables of African mythology, the kinds of tales written before we had the words for phenomena, before we had the understanding that demanded those words. The story is peppered with appropriately lyrical illustrations by French artist Antoine Déprez. Doctor Einstein was to become one of the most important student-people ever. At the beginning, all the matter drops were hot and moved around quickly. Share on Tumblr
Linguistics Research Digest: Multicultural London English London English has a new pronoun. Young people living in multicultural areas of the inner city use man as an alternative to I. Sometimes the meaning could be indefinite: in the caption to the picture Alex’ man pronoun could perhaps be replaced by you (in its general sense of ‘anyone’) or even one; but in other examples, like (1) below, man refers quite unambiguously to the speaker. Here Alex is telling his friend what he’d said to his girlfriend, who had annoyed him by bringing along her friends when he had arranged to meet her. (1) didn’t I tell you man wanna come see you . How has this new pronoun developed? (2) what am I doing with over thirty-six man chasing me blud (Alex) (3) and I ended up hanging around with bare bare man (Roshan) Man is not the only new plural form of the noun: mens, mans and mandem are also heard in London, as well as the expected men. (4) aah man that’s long that’s kind of long (Roshan)
Multicultural London English 'Oo' One of English’s most rapidly evolving dialects is what is known as Multicultural London English (MLE). In a nutshell, MLE is a ‘young’ dialect (one might mark the birthday cutoff at 1970) that incorporates elements of Caribbean English and other ‘non-native’ influences. Although it is associated with Britons of African descent, it is spoken by inner-city Londoners of many ethnicities. In some ways, MLE reverses the direction London English has been traveling for the past century. There is something clearly ‘London’ about this young man’s speech, yet he hardly speaks ‘classic Cockney.’ *In Cockney, the vowel in ‘face’ shifts toward the /ai/ in ‘price.’ *In Cockney, the vowel in ‘price’ shifts toward the /oy/ in ‘choice.’ *In Cockney, the vowel in ‘goat’ moves towared the /au/ in ‘mouth.’ Yet in one respect, Multicultural London English does not reverse Cockney trends. Why is this vowel so typically ‘London’ when most other vowels of MLE are different from Cockney? **Fought, C. (1999).