language change and slang
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Posted by Michael Rundell on November 30, 2011
My colleague Finn Kirkland has mentioned his problems with the word serviette. I have a battered copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary dating back to the 1920s, which includes this entry: serviette n. (vulg.) table-napkin Note the ‘vulg.’ label (short for ‘vulgar’). The dictionary’s Introduction explains: “This qualification implies that the use of the word [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 24, 2011
In its most familiar sense, jargon means specialised, often technical vocabulary associated with a particular type of work or area of activity. For example, there’s scientific jargon, medical jargon, airlinese, and business speak (the last of which I’ve written about before). Jargon is part of a sublanguage, and is subject to forces of change just [...]
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Posted by Dan Clayton on November 21, 2011
Class English month continues with a guest post by one of our regular contributors, Dan Clayton. Dan is a middle-class grammar school boy who has tried to talk like a Cockney for the last 15 years after failing to talk like a working-class northerner before that. ___________ When Jarvis Cocker wrote the lyrics to Pulp’s [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 15, 2011
Last week I wrote about the traditional prestige of the RP accent, and how its privileged status reflects class consciousness. My focus was on pronunciation, but the distinction extends beyond the RP accent to vocabulary, grammar, and so on – to the standard English dialect. Standard English is an important and useful variety of English, [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on November 02, 2011
Impact is part of the core vocabulary of English, ranking as a three-star red word in Macmillan Dictionary. Yet it is subject to constant dispute and ire, appearing frequently in lists of pet peeves and inspiring lengthy discussions in usage dictionaries. Why is this? The noun first denoted a physical strike or collision, such as [...]
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Posted by Orin Hargraves on November 01, 2011
Moving on from theatre and acting to music, subcultural English month brings you a guest post by Orin Hargraves, an independent American lexicographer and author of books about English, including Slang Rules!, a lesson book for English learners about American slang. _____________ The music that we call rap today can be heard in nearly every [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on October 19, 2011
Slang, I wrote recently, is a perennially active frontier of language, where words and usages emerge, spread, mutate, and typically fade – though some are eventually assimilated into the common vocabulary. Overlapping with slang is thieves’ cant, the old jargon of the underworld. The more general sense of cant is insincere talk: affected language often [...]
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Posted by Dan Clayton on October 18, 2011
Subcultural English month brings you a guest post by Dan Clayton on the topic of street slang. Dan has taught English Language A level for the past 10 years in south London and is currently working as a Research Fellow at UCL’s Survey of English Usage on the Teaching English Grammar in Schools project. He [...]
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Posted by Natalie Hunter on October 07, 2011
Discussion of online English here on Macmillan Dictionary Blog comes to a close with a guest post by Natalie Hunter. Natalie grew up wanting to be a teacher, and is addicted to learning and research. As a result she is grateful for the invention of the Internet because it allows her to spend some time [...]
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Posted by Stan Carey on September 28, 2011
No doubt you’re familiar with the following line from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on self-reliance: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. In a comment to my recent post about hopefully, Marc Leavitt quoted it in relation to the strange persistence of outdated and unfounded rules of grammar and usage. Most people know [...]
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