One might say it’s all a bloody mess.
Only not on the the BBC, it seems. Or maybe you can - no one seems to know.
No sooner had Andrew Marr uttered the word during his interview with David Davis on Sunday than he immediately apologised.
The confusion arises, academics suggested, because no one properly understands the etymology of “bloody” and therefore whether it was ever right to consider it a swear word.
According to Patrick Hanks, former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionaries, the term may have once been a swear word but began a “process of normalisation” some decades ago, driven by its usage in Australia.
Many scholars believe the word is best understood as an “intensifier” used to add emphasis to the noun or adjective it precedes.
“As a swear word these days I think an Australian would laugh at you, but then they talk about ordinary human beings as “b------s”.
In Australia “bloody” is extremely widely used, largely free of any offensive connotations, while in the United States the word is also not considered offensive but is hardly used at all.
Dr Emma Byrne, a neuroscientist and author of Swearing Is Good For You, said the presenter had clearly used the word for the purpose of intensifying his point, but added: “The problem with broadcasting is swearing is so culturally dependent.”
And I think this phrase also represents an interesting syntactic variation. With the verb 'go,' we would naturally expect an adjective succeeding it (e.g. 'go hard') or even an adverb after 'go,' but 'full summer' in this phrase interestingly would act as an adverb, as in 'go' how? full summer ! ;D
Australia is more culturally diverse than ever before. Nearly half of the population were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas, according to the latest census data. And as our diversity continues to evolve, so too does our language.
In 2016, there were over 300 separately identified languages spoken in Australian homes.
Ingrid Piller, Professor of Applied Linguistics at Sydney's Macquarie University, says multiculturalism is altering the way English is spoken in Australia.
“English is the language of Australia but it's becoming a kind of Australian English with influences from all kinds of other languages. And that’s really different from the other Englishes: American, British."
Professor Piller says it is a challenge for many migrants.
"Many of the migrants we've done language learning with, they come from highly educated backgrounds and have very good formal English that they'd learnt before they came to Australia," she said. "But then they had experiences where they just didn't understand."
"Cultural borrowings" are beginning to flourish, Professor Pillar said. "We see Arabic words, like 'halal,' making it into the Australian dictionary - 'yalah', 'habib', those kind of words.
On the streets of Sydney, SBS News found evidence that "cultural borrowings" were alive and well. Almost half of Sydneysiders have a parent who was born overseas, and many non-Arabic speakers appeared to be aware of the meaning of common expressions like 'habib' and 'yalah'.
How multiculturalism is changing the way we speakWow, what a great article. So applicable to so many areas of EngLang.
Wow! Such a great list and January isn't even finished yet!Feel free to add some of your examples and linguist quotes too! (if you're doing English Language this year)
Slang continues to flourish. It’s also clear there’s no sign that we’re about to give up our shortenings – as seppo, firie and trackie daks attest, Australians still love abbreviations.
Every few years there’s a furphy that our beloved “Strine” slang is doing a Harold Holt.
The nature of slang that there will always be a turnover of terms – today’s cobber is tomorrow’s mate, ranga for a redhead replaces blue/bluey, bogan replaces ocker and so on.
As a rule of thumb... we can say that as soon as dialects become not mutually understandable... then they become languages.
Accent has to do, simply, with pronunciation... it's not enough to make a separate dialect.
If it was just about... communication... we'd all be speaking the same language... we'd have a sort of vanilla English... but it's not just about that, is it? It's about a whole lot of identity stuff. So you'll always have different varieties evolving.
How or where do i find these examples? Do i just need to apply the metalanguage stuff ive learnt to articles i read listen to on raidio, tv social media, etc. And post it here?That's exactly right!! :)
2. Kate Burridge: "Women's fashion is a euphemism for fashion created by men for women."I've gotta say I can't find anything on the internet attributing this to Burridge; are you sure it's a Burridge-ism?
Found an article where David Crystal links pronunciation to social identity...Great example!
“Pronunciation… expresses identity… gives us a clue about a speaker’s ethnic group, social class, education or occupation.” – David Crystal (13 Jan 2018)
The Queer Eye franchise is no stranger to coining new words: in 2003, the original series popularised the word zhoosh, meaning "to finesse or tweak".
Zhoosh (sometimes tszuj or joosh) exposes a difficulty in English orthography: our alphabet has no specific letter representing the word's initial and final sound.
One of Van Ness's more creative abbreviations — where, in Van Ness-speak, the phrase struggles to function becomes strugs to func — fits perfectly in the social media age, where many proudly bray about just how hard adulting is.
But it is Van Ness's inventive pronoun use that is of most interest to the structure of English.
"I know hyaluronic acid doesn't sound like a healing restorative angel baby," he writes in one Instragram post, "but she really is".
As an inanimate object without any visible gender, conventional grammar would suggest hyaluronic acid should take the third person singular pronoun it, rather than she.
For much of the past century, the perception of the English pronoun system as "fixed" has led to any mooted changes being accompanied by a degree of social anxiety.
They is another pronoun whose use betrays high anxiety. When they, conventionally a plural form, refers to a singular antecedent, reactions can be spicy.
Like any community in the world, people who play video games have collaboratively created their own language and slang. Many of these words are international, but different languages have different ways of talking about play.
Anyone who writes about games is constantly brushing up against the limitations of the words we use to describe them ("gameplay", "mechanics", "content", "consumer", "level" - even "gamer"). I strongly believe that the way that we talk about games actually limits the way we think about them.
Such is the dominance of the English language in game development across the western world that many languages simply use the English loan word when referring to people who play video games: Gamer. Sometimes it's incorporated into native syntax - in German, there are expressions like "Gamersprache" (a word for "gaming slang").
Another cool bit of gaming slang from Paraguay: If someone on your team is no good, they might be called a "paquete" or "paquetón" - a package/big package. Geddit? Because you have to carry them.
There's more variation when you look at the different words for finishing, beating or completing a game, and this can reveal some interesting cultural differences. Even in the English-speaking world, North Americans talk about "beating" a game where Brits talk about "finishing" one.
Interestingly, because gamer culture is primarily located online, there's much less variation between gamer culture and language across the globe than there is in, say, sport, or other primarily offline pursuits - but it also means we speak a shared language.
RPG might be an English acronym, but its meaning is understood all over the world.
I've gotta say I can't find anything on the internet attributing this to Burridge; are you sure it's a Burridge-ism?I'm really very sorry! It's not a Burridge-ism. I must have looked at the wrong image or must have collected it wrongly in my Burridge tab.... :(
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/may/18/why-do-people-interrupt-it-depends-on-whom-youre-talking-to
A great little article on attitudes towards interruptions in conversation and how they change based on gender!
But it does — the tiny H on “(h)aitch” divides the nation. The pronunciation has become something of a social password, a spoken shibboleth distinguishing in-groupers from out-groupers. Those with social clout set the standards for what’s “in” and what’s “out” — no H has the stamp of approval.
Aitchers’ reactions are often visceral. Someone once reported to us an encounter with haitch is like an encounter with fire ants.
The story of the weakly articulated H is murkily entwined with the story of its name. Long gone from Old English words like hring “ring”, hnecca “neck” and hlūd “loud”, it would have disappeared entirely if writing hadn’t thrown out a lifejacket.
And so, the English youth restored H to words like hat, and even at the start of many French words like humble, which had entered English H-less (the Romans pronounced their Hs, but the French dropped theirs). Spellers who weren’t quite sure whether or not to include H added a few extras along the way — umble pie (“offal pie”) turned into humble pie.
Many letters of the alphabet are phonetically iconic; their names represent the sound they make. In places where letter names are learned before letter sounds, such as Australia and the US, these letter names can facilitate children in learning letter sounds and, ultimately, word reading. The letter sounds that are easiest to remember are those that begin with their corresponding letter, such as B, D, J, K, P, or T.
Jargon Examples
In EngLang Powerpoint reading for homework, use of jargon in electronics promotion interested me.
Found product page for recent phone - Huawei Mate 10 Pro https://consumer.huawei.com/au/phones/mate10-pro/
Many examples in article, but this caught my eye...
"certified by TÜV Rheinland"
Reader is left knowing that their phone's battery would be certified by some German company which sounds reputable.
The writer establishes expertise through this and successfully promotes the merits of the phone through jargonistic language.
**This is my first post on the forum so happy to take any formatting advice/feedback from moderators etc. :)**
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-multiculturalism-is-changing-the-way-we-speak
Great article on ethnolects, how Aussie colloquialisms are important to understand to assimilate and borrowings from diff languages reflecting multicultural Australian identity - early 2018
https://theconversation.com/where-are-you-from-is-a-complicated-question-this-is-how-young-australians-answer-99644
Interesting article on how language is used to create a perception/identity/ portray yourself in a certain way
-July 2018
It's hard to think of a word that's more shocking than cunt. Rarely said aloud—unless it's as abuse—it's a word almost guaranteed to cause discomfort.
But cunt didn't always register as a pejorative. For most of history, in fact, cunt was a powerful, positive word used to describe female genitalia. And maybe it's time to reclaim it as such.
It's unclear exactly where the word came from, but all of the possible origins were either benign (the Latin "cunnus", meaning vulva or "cuneus", meaning wedge) or body positive (in ancient Egypt, "kunt" referred to respected women in the community). In fact, cunt only took a turn for the rude relatively recently, in Victorian times, when women's sexuality was seen as something to be hidden and not celebrated.
The word appeared in a dictionary of coarse language in 1785—defined as "a nasty word for a nasty thing"—and then didn't resurface in mainstream culture until the '70s, when feminists campaigned to make the word taboo.
"There's a vast difference in the wounding capacity of… male and female sex organs," says Monash University linguistics professor Kate Burridge. "Prick means 'stupid, contemptible', whereas cunt means 'nasty, malicious, despicable.'"
- ‘Bringing home the bacon’ offensive to vegans - Are vegans going too PC? (published December 6 2018)
Emoji aren’t ruining language: they’re a natural substitute for gesture Lauren Gawne, the conversation