I'm literally lowkey a telly star now

I was on the telly recently! It may just have been the local station, but it's a start. Media stardom beckons! If you want to watch it, it's here.

It's a funny thing, being asked to talk about some research that's not your own and that you may not have actually read (as I hadn't, in this case). I was talking about what the papers had been calling 'gradable adverbs'. As I attempted to explain, it's the adjectives that are gradable and the adverbs that do the grading, so you can describe something as hideously old or bizarrely purple. We are apparently, says a linguist from Lancaster with a book to promote, using less of these and this shows we're becoming more confrontational. Furthermore, this is something we are learning from the Americans. Ding ding ding, all the boxes ticked for a news story: language is fundamentally changing, it reflects a deep and sweeping cultural change, American English is ruining our language.

I haven't read the original research, as I say, so I don't know how much of this Paul Baker actually says. I also couldn't really comment on the veracity of British usage following US usage by around 30 years. But I could say that we definitely are not losing all our adverbs, and it definitely can't be ascribed to us becoming more confrontational. I did agree with my interviewer that the words we are losing are the 'posh' ones (frightfully, awfully and so on), and there is, I'm sure, a link between your desire to sound posh and how direct your attitude is.

But we've got LOADS of these adverbs. We use them all the time. Kind of and sort of and a bit are pretty common, as is pretty, really, etc. They go in and out of fashion. You can check corpora, as Baker did, to find out what ones were preferred in a certain type of text at a certain point in history, and you can do other kinds of searches of online corpora to find out what's going on right now.

Two that I really wanted to mention and didn't manage to are literally and lowkey.

I can't believe that all the papers missed the chance to moan about literally as well, and can only assume that (as evidenced by them using the meaningless phrase 'gradable adverb') that they don't really know what an adverb is so didn't realise that it is one. Anyway; it is.

Literally gets a lot of column inches (or whatever the online equivalent is). People get upset because other people use it as an intensifier rather than using it to mean what they think it should mean. Other better people than me have written about why worrying about this is a fruitless activity, and why the peevers aren't using the literal meaning anyway (=to do with letters) and the slackers aren't using it figuratively (go on, try it - try replacing literally with figuratively. It won't make sense because that's not what it means) so I won't try. But what it is is an intensifier, exactly like what Baker says we are losing, although it's a bit more versatile in terms of its syntax. So there's one more new one we can all adopt.

Lowkey is not so familiar to me; I've never heard it in the wild, I don't think. I've seen it written, online, so it's obviously used by people outside my own social circle (=young people, probably). Gretchen McCulloch has written about it and gives some examples. It means kinda, so it's a 'downtoner' of the kind Baker also says we are losing. There's something more going on, I think, as one of Gretchen's examples has it combined with an intensifier af (= as fuck):

When you're lowkey sad af but trying not to care

But there's another one. We've got tons of these. Come on, people. Use your adverbs. Those adjectives need grading!

Twitter makes girls more aggressive!

Or not. As usual it's a Daily Mail article ranting about something that has no substance and which it knows nothing about in any case. It's published an article saying that using Twitter and Facebook make girls, especially, speak in a 'curt' manner with 'terser sentences'. Actually, it doesn't even say that. It says that this phenomenon applies to young people's languge generally, but that it's more evident in girls because they 'communicate more'. Oh, and it's not a linguist who's said that, it's Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign (no, no idea what it's got to do with them - they campaign for removing jargon and legalese from public communication).

We should be clear: before I point out that this claim has no basis, the Mail basically does that itself by using the phrases 'it is claimed' and 'research shows', but never actually saying who claims it or what research it was. The Telegraph is even worse, repeating the story by quoting the Daily Mail, and saying 'experts believe'. All of this is clear indication that the journalist or some news/publicist person has made it up.

Let's begin. Citing Twitter and Facebook as being the culprits of degrading young people's language is dubious to start with. Young people use other types of online communication far more than these largely adult media. What you mean is 'whatever online communication young people use these days'.

Using 'terser sentences' or being 'curt' may well make a person appear 'aggressive'. But what are the measures by which these girls' speech is being judged as 'terser' or 'curt'? Shorter, maybe? Than what?

Marie Clair says this:

To any outsider, there aren’t those pleasantries that there were when you wrote a letter to someone.

No - because we've all worked out that it's a bit daft writing 'yours sincerely' in a facebook comment. It's all about register. If these girls don't know how to write a letter properly, well, that's another problem and one that should be addressed, but it's not Twitter's fault.

Apparently girls 'communicate more than males'. Well, I've no idea if that's true. Seems like one of those claims that doesn't really stand up, but maybe it's true. Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say it is. (Still doesn't excuse the use of 'males' when she means 'boys'. They're not animals.) But I think 'Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford' (gasp! they asked an expert!) is more likely to be right when she says, in a different part of the article,

The teenage years are a period of life where you find linguistic innovations of all kinds, and girls are generally ahead of the curve. People often put down as ‘girls’ language’ something that’s actually going to spread through the whole speech community.

The article also says this:

Professor Cameron said it could be right that teenagers’ language styles in general are getting more aggressive, however there is no ‘hard evidence’ of this at present. Hard-core swearing is still most associated with adolescent and young adult, working class males.

So what she basically said was 'no, there is no evidence for this claim'. Which actually entirely contradicts the whole message of the article, but what the hell, let's include it anyway - no one will notice (and actually the commenters don't notice).

Anyway, let's all calm down with this article which says that there is no evidence that texting harms spelling, and might even be good for it, and this one in which Carol Ann Duffy says texting is good for poetry.

Thank heavens for Michael Rosen

It's good to see that sometimes, an article about 'grammar' can appear in the media and it's not a complete load of codswallop. Michael Rosen, who I already knew to be an intelligent and sensible chap, has performed this feat in the Guardian. Sadly, the sub-ed has added a headline which rather over-simplifies his point (I suppose that's the sub-ed's job) and this has led to numpties in the comments who've missed the point. 

The article is called 'Sorry, there's no such thing as correct grammar', and responds to the fact that some bloke called Martin Gwynne is giving 'grammar lessons' in Selfridges, reported in the Telegraph. The Telegraph commenters are even more of a bunch of mud-for-brains, immediately leaping on spelling and punctuation errors of their fellow commenters:

How can I criticize the grammar in this blog post? Only on minor points ... there's no need for a hyphen between an adverb and an adjective when there's no possible ambiguity (easily-accessible; privately-published). 

"How can I criticize the grammar in this blog post?" By going to America. Here in the UK, old bean, it's "criticise".

 Anyhoo, back to the Rosen piece. What is refreshing is that he says this:

Whereas linguists are agreed that language has grammar, what they can't agree on is how to describe it. So, while there is a minimum agreement that language is a system with parts that function in relation to each other, there is no universal agreement on how the parts and the functions should be analysed and described, nor indeed if they should be described as some kind of self-sealed system or whether they should always be described in terms of the users, ie those who "utter" the language, and those who "receive" it (speakers and listeners, writers and readers etc).

It would be nice if he made us sound a little bit less like an argumentative rabble who can't sort out what their own discipline is about, but he's broadly right. His main point is his last one, and he seems to be firmly of the opinion that language should always be described in terms of its users (he and I differ on this point, but we won't fall out over it).


He also says, quite rightly, that

In fact, we would neither be able to speak nor understand if we didn't know [grammar]. 

He also notes (again, quite accurately) that there are two meanings of 'learning grammar': 

whether we get to know grammar in order to be "correct", or in order to describe what people say and write.

Of course, what this Gwynne person is teaching (though the Telegraph doesn't say) will certainly be the former. As Rosen says,

People attending his classes will feel immensely pleased that they have been told what's right and will probably spend a good deal of time telling other people they meet or read where and how they are wrong.

And he is very down on this, arguing quite vociferously that it's not right to allow 'grammar' to become something that belongs to an elite, leaving the others to feel that they are doing it wrong. He makes what seems to be a proposal for teaching everyone how to write and speak standard English:

If we are serious about enabling those who want to acquire what we have called standard English then first we should be honest about change and its lack of encoded rules. Then, together with them, we should look closely at how such people's speech and writing diverges from the kind of English that they would like to acquire. There will always be social reasons for this and knowing these helps people take on the dialects they don't fully speak or write.

I think he's saying that rather than tell people 'you're wrong, this is the right way', we should instead accept the differences but ensure people know that they are non-standard. He is arguing against a 'grammar police' and suggesting that language should be more open, that the reasons for it varying should be known, and that variation should be embraced. I think he's saying that everyone should study linguistics. Well done that man.


He does also say this, however, which seems to contradict his point, which is that we can teach people standard English, and also be basically wrong (emphasis mine):

many people... imagine that because it is called standard, it is run by rules and that these rules are fixed. I've always understood rules to be regulations that are drawn up in some agreed list. They are fixed (until such time as they are amended) and they are enforceable. In fact, there is no agreed list, a good deal of what we say and write keeps changing and nothing is enforceable. Instead, language is owned and controlled by everybody and what we do with it seems to be governed by various kinds of consent, operating through the social groups of our lives. Social groups in society don't swim about in some kind of harmonious melting pot. We rub against each other from very different and opposing positions, so why we should agree about language use and the means of describing it is beyond me.

Well. No agreed list, all right. No one sat down and said 'let's put the subject first, and let's have objects following the verb. We'll have a negation particle, I think, and let's form questions by changing the word order'. But as I've said repeatedly, language is run by rules. It simply is a set of rules - that's pretty much its definition. Not in the sense of rules that have to be learnt and followed, but more like instructions. Like a computer programme: it comprises a set of instructions, which it follows in order to run. If the rules are wrong (altered in some way, like missing the final bracket off an html command), the programme crashes. We actually use the word 'crash' in syntax to describe what happens if some linguistic rule is not satisfied. 

Linguistics in the news - really!

Normally when I write of linguistics being in the news, what I mean is that there is a news item with a linguistic angle that I can write about, or that some news item is about language and I can discuss the 'proper' linguistics behind it. This time, the BBC has attempted a genuine linguistics item.

Shallow Fry

Heh. The post title is a reference to Stephen Fry, so I will now probably receive hate mail for daring to criticise the sainted National Treasure. In his defence, before we start, he didn't write Fry's Planet Word, but he did put his name to it so he has to answer for it.

The programme mentioned above is a BBC2 series currently running, on language. The second episode is the one linked to above, and the first episode is here. I think the first episode was better, actually, but both have the same good and bad points. I'll begin with what's good about these programmes.

Na'vi

One of the people I met at LAGB had learnt Na'vi, the fictional language of the film Avatar. I haven't seen the film, because it looks abysmal, but I have read about the language. The director, James Cameron (yes, he of Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss and Titanic - you get the idea) wanted a realistic-sounding language for his aliens to speak. And, almost unbelievably, he very nearly managed to ask a linguist. The creator of Na'vi, Paul Frommer, is not actually working as a linguist, but he did do a doctorate in linguistics so kudos to Cameron, I suppose.

Anonymous from Stratford

There's a new film out called Anonymous, which puts forward the well-discussed theory that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (the so-called Oxfordian theory). This is not a widely-accepted theory, by the way, and the film has caused a bit of a ruckus among people that care about this kind of thing.

You literally take them literally

Literally gets a lot of bad press. It's a word in a state of confusion. It's busy getting a new meaning as a kind of intensifier, but it's also stubbornly hanging on to its old meaning of 'in actual fact'. (Really and actually have gone further down this road.) This allows pedants to say things like:

Really? You literally exploded with excitement? That must have caused a mess.

And so on. The Oatmeal does a good comic of it, actually. Part of it's here, but there's more of it, including the punchline, at The Oatmeal:

So, on Eight Out of Ten Cats (Channel 4) the other night (12/08/2011), I heard one of the panellists, the comedian Jon Richardson, tell a story which included two uses of the word literally.

[The footballer Wayne] Rooney said "We literally don't know when a game's over", and they're so thick you take them literally.

Both uses of literally appear in that story. First of all, Rooney says it in the new sense, using it as an intensifier. But then Jon uses it in the old sense, meaning 'at face value'. But he can't have noticed, so much have the two senses diverged, that Rooney has already used it, because it takes all the sting out of his joke. He means, 'they said this, not meaning it literally, but they're so stupid it might actually be true'. But if Rooney's already said literally, then you've got no humour in trying to take them literally unless the word has lost all of its original meaning. There's nothing very unusual in that, metaphors lose their meaning all the time and we cease to notice them, but not usually when the original sense of the word is also used in the same sentence.

Oh no, Starkey, not again

David Starkey, the historian and broadcaster seems to have put his foot in it yet again. After he got into a spot of bother at Jamie's Dream School by insulting one of his teenage pupils in what seemed a largely unprovoked attack, he's done it again, and worse this time.

He was on BBC2's Newsnight, and gave an odd speech saying that he thought the problem was that "the whites have become black", and that the fact that young people are using "this wholly false language" of Jamaican patois means that this is "a foreign country". Here's Geoff Pullum at Language Log to deal with this properly.

More on the language of the riots

This time, it's about the slang the rioters use (article from the BBC).

They call the police 'feds', obviously borrowed from US TV and films, where it's been used for ages to refer to the FBI. Of course they know the metropolitan police are not the FBI, but the term seems to have been adopted and broadened to refer to police officers.

They talk of defending your 'yard', apparently a West Indian term for your home (presumably after the government yards in trenchtown, as sung about by Bob Marley, and the origin of the term 'yardie'). The BBC attributes this mix of slang to Multicultural London English, a mixture of the cultures that are either found in the city or enter consciousness through the media.

There are two terms cited that I don't know at all:

Another, widely reported in the aftermath of the chaos, urged everyone to "up and roll to Tottenham [expletive] the 5-0". There were myriad references as well to the "po po".

 Is 'the 5-0' a reference to Hawaii 5-0? Seems unlikely somehow, given how long ago that was on TV, but Urban Dictionary tells me this is the correct derivation.

'Po po' I'd never heard, but the BBC article says it's from The Wire. I've never seen The Wire, because I'm an idiot, and because I was busy watching Battlestar Galactica when it was on, so there's a lot of Baltimore street slang that I'm not aware of. This is my own failing, and I freely admit it. Urban dictionary just says it means police, though one entry does suggest that it means 'pissed off police officer'. I'm not sure I'm buying that, though; it smacks of folk etymology.

Rioters, terrorists, protesters, whatever

The Guardian newspaper has an article about the word the media is using for the rioters currently causing havoc in some of the UK's cities. I used the word 'rioters' - it seems quite neutral to me, as they are undoubtedly rioting. But the controversy the Guardian describes (or creates?) is over the use of the term 'protesters'.

Apparently the BBC was calling them protesters early in the proceedings, and this is fair enough because after the first night, it still seemed like it was a protest that had gone too far. It began over the shooting by police of a man called Mark Duggan, a shooting which we still know nothing about (why it happened, whether it was unlawful etc.) because it's still being investigated by the IPCC so no one can talk about it. Some people in Tottenham took to the streets in protest, and somehow it became a rioting-and-looting.

This has since escalated, and on the second night it was clear that people weren't protesting about this shooting, they were just taking the opportunity to loot shops of expensive clothes and electronics. You don't protest about a shooting that you don't know anything about by stealing yourself a new hifi. And they came out dressed for crime, in balaclavas and so on.

So, not protesters then - now they're definitely rioters.

By the third night, things had really got scary. Police stations in Nottingham had been petrol-bombed, shops in several cities had been emptied of all their stock, burnt out, and otherwise destroyed. People were terrified. In Salford they shut the shops on the fourth day and boarded up the windows, because they were scared of being looted and burnt down.

So - are they now terrorists? Some Tweeters have being saying so, but that's Twitter: you can always rely on finding some nutters to quote. Other choice terms include 'scum', 'thugs', 'criminals' and so on. 'Criminals' is certainly accurate, as there's no doubt crimes have been committed. Hundreds of people have been arrested and many charged. The UN, as the Guardian says, defines terrorism as:

"acts ... designed to create a state of terror in the minds of a particular group of people or the public as a whole for political or social ends". (The UN also makes clear that "having a good cause" makes no real difference).

 Whether there's a deliberate aim to create a state of terror or not, I don't think it's for 'political or social ends' (vague as that is, I don't think wanting free stuff counts as social ends). You could say it's making a point against the police, because people feel like they have no rights or whatever, but it seems like that's an excuse for a lot of these people. They do hate the police, but this isn't an organised campaign, just an opportunity to cause trouble. Not terrorists then.

The media all seem to have settled on 'rioters' as a name which is accurate (unlike 'protesters' and 'terrorists') and not subjective or heavily value-laden (like 'thugs' or 'scum').

RP RIP?

There was a good programme on BBC Radio 4 this week, in the Archive on 4 series. It'll be available here for a few days.

Melvyn Bragg discusses Received Pronunciation, and like all of his programmes on language, it's thorough, accurate and interesting. He's one of very few broadcasters who manage to talk about language without annoying linguists (at least, he doesn't annoy me). The programme is about the decrease in the use of RP in Britain. It covers a wide range of topics, including attitudes to accents, history of accents and so on. Well worth a listen.