An interesting article on the BBC website about the return of puns in comedy. The author, Gareth Edwards, describes a pun as the “moment when the beautifully knitted cardigan of language catches on the nail of reality and ever-so-slightly unravels.”I once entered a pun contest. I submitted ten entries in the hope of winning a prize. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.
Simon Heffer, Associate Editor of the Daily Telegraph, has published a new book entitled ‘Strictly English. The correct way to write…and why it matters.’According to the blurb on the inside cover, Heffer “makes an impassioned case for an end to the sloppiness that has become such a hallmark of everyday speech and writing, and shows how accuracy and clarity are within the grasp of anyone who is prepared to take the time to master a few simple rules.”This is an extract from a recent interview with self-appointed media expert Iain Dale.Q. At what point did the English language reach perfection beyond which further evolution is unacceptable?”A. When all ambiguities, in grammatical terms, were eliminated. Which I think, really, by the early nineteenth century, they were. It was when we invented the passive voice, when we stopped saying ‘a house is building’, you would say: “well building what?” We now say the house is being built. In Jane Austen, it’s always ‘the house is building’, or ‘was building’. I think that grammatically we had got it pretty well sorted out by the middle of the nineteenth century. Note I said ‘sorted out’, not ‘sorted’. We don’t want to go into this... ‘innit’. The meaning of words always evolves, and I don’t object to that. It’s one thing for words to evolve where something needs a new meaning, where you have something that there’s no word to describe it so you borrow a word to do it. What I don’t accept is that for reasons of ignorance we should use a word that we shouldn’t use. I heard a man on the BBC when I was writing the book about seven or eight months ago, say: “Yet again they are flaunting the rules”. And I thought: “You don’t mean that. You mean flouting the rules”. I remember looking it up in the Oxford English dictionary, which I invite any of you to do, and it does say that in recent years flaunt has often been used for flout. Well why? Flout’s a perfectly good word. If you can’t be bothered to use flout or can’t be bothered just to sharpen your brain to the extent that you can pick the word flout out of a box and use it instead of the word flaunt.
According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, Enid Blyton has fallen out of the top ten list of children's authors for the first time in decades because, supposedly, youngsters cannot relate to her language.Revised editions of the Famous Five have modernised some of the language and names used in order to attract a new generation of readers. “Mother” and “Daddy” have been replaced with “Mum” and “Dad” and words such as “golly”, “rather” and “awfully” have been removed completely.Where will such wanton sacrilege end? Will Shakespeare have to get down wiv da kidz?Rather than dumbing down the language of story telling, perhaps we should consider raising children’s reading standards instead?
From the BBC website, Michael Rosen gives a brief history of a language that has grown to world domination with phrases such as “cool” and “go to it”.
Another day, another seminar at the British Library! On Wednesday we were treated to a ‘celebration of swearing and profanity’ with Peter Silverton, author of Filthy English, Graham Dury and Simon Thorp from Viz magazine and Ian Martin, writer and swearing consultant on the TV series ‘The thick of it.’There may well have been an educational aspect to this. Or it might just have been a good excuse to say f*ck and c*nt rather a lot!
On this occasion, the temptation to buy their books proved irresistible! The new Viz book is entitled Das Krapital - an updated version of Roger’s Profanisaurus with such entries as: “Shatkins n. Rapid astonishingly affective diet based on the somewhat controversial theory that the most effective way to lose weight is to acquire a bacterial stomach infection by the intake of meat only, especially 2am burger bar fayre.”
Peter Silverton’s book is, according to the blurb, “the story of our bad language and its three-decade journey from the fringes of decency to the working centre of a more linguistically liberal nation.” Peter kindly gave me a free music CD, so with absolutely no risk to my integrity, and without breaking my non-endorsement rule, I am happy to urge you all to buy his book here!
Monday’s seminar at the British Library was somewhat tedious. Fortunately the opposite was true on Tuesday when the guest speakers were Craig Brown, who writes the diary page for Private Eye, and authors John Crace and Sebastian Faulks.Yes, they all had books to plug, but they treated the audience to a reading of some of their best works and a discussion of how they set about writing their masterpieces. Pure genius.Hopefully, the British Library will make a podcast available.
As part of its Evolving English exhibition, the British Library held a seminar on 6th December 2010 to discuss the future of the English language. The guest speakers were Robert McCrum and Nicholas Ostler.The seminar lasted 90 minutes and can be summarised as follows: Robert McCrum plugged his new book ‘Globish; How the English Language became the World’s Language’ and Nicholas Ostler plugged his book ‘The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel’.On 13th December, Jonathon Green plugged his new book presented a talk on Slang. Perhaps for the people who stayed, the second half was more interesting.
Talking to an audience at the British Library, Professor David Crystal explores the evolution of the English language, from everyday colloquial English to formal speech, regional dialects and international variants.Download the podcast from the British Library here.File size 32 Mb (approx). Talk duration: 1hr 25.
The Daily Telegraph reports that twenty languages used in Britain, including Old Kentish Sign Language, have become extinct or are in imminent danger of so doing.Full story here and here.
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