The 10 most scandalous euphemisms

A BBC article about euphemisms and their origins.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22470691

The people who hate other peoples bad grammar

A BBC article about why people hate bad grammar
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22403731

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22464422

an article about adding the suffix "-gate" to name a scandal

Brilliant quotes from Chomsky

A brilliant forum on Reddit where Chomsky promised to answer any question from the field of linguistics. Lots of useful quotes and ideas

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/13buz0/dr_noam_chomskys_answers_to_questions_from/

Some interesting/funny videos

A great youtuber has made some funny videos about trying to understand Americanisms and his American friend trying to understand English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnhzA9GrF1o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGf9nk7RTI

link to the AQA English Language B site

http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/a-level/english-language-b-2705

Happy Joe?

other useful revision blogs

http://amyjonesenglishlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/
http://natasharaffill.blogspot.co.uk/
http://scribble-spot.blogspot.co.uk/?view=classic
http://pheaventenglish.blogspot.co.uk/
http://graycharlotte4.blogspot.co.uk/
http://ellebenthamsorohan.blogspot.co.uk/
http://annaenglishlanguage.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.a2englishlanguagejottings.blogspot.co.uk/
www.sianacaine.blogspot.com
http://sixteensecondsbeforesunrise.blogspot.co.uk/
http://jamest-english.blogspot.co.uk/ 

CLA revision notes

The first year sees babies working on speech sounds. By the time they are six months old they are making the characteristic burbling sounds we associate with ‘baby talk'. The first year can be roughly divided up into the stages: crying, cooing and babbling. Click the stages in the timeline to find out more.

 The first sound a human baby makes is to cry. Often known as vegetative noises, this is the only way it can express pain, pleasure or hunger. It is an instinctive noise and is therefore not considered a language.

A baby's brain development is in front of its body development and it therefore has to exercise the 100 different pairs of muscles it takes to produce speech sound. Cooing (or gurgling) is a sound development that occurs at around six to eight weeks old. Babies experiment with ‘coo', ‘goo' and ‘ga' and gradually gain more and more control over their speech organs (or vocal cords).

Babbling begins at six to nine months old. It is not learned or copied but pre-programmed. The work-out of the vocal cords means babies repeat syllables over and over. Combinations of vowels and consonants, such as ‘ma', ‘pa', ‘da', are produced and repeated and therefore ‘mama' and ‘dada', known as reduplicated monosyllables, often sound like adult language, and proud parents believe it is baby's first word.

The second year of development sees an increase in the ability to manipulate speech sounds and more of a shaping of sound into familiar pronunciations. The second year can be roughly divided up into the stages ‘one-word', ‘two-word' and ‘telegraphic'. Click the stages in the timeline to find out more.

At this stage, children begin to concentrate on building phonemes into words, beginning largely with nouns, that reflect their needs and interests. Often words for objects a child encounters everyday are the first. Basically, they build a personal vocabulary to deal with their world. Single words convey more than one meaning - “milk!” may mean “I want some milk.” or “I've spilt some milk.” Words used in this way are called holophrases. They substitute a complex grammar.

This stage, during which the major speech pattern is of two-word utterances, happens around 18-24 months old. This is particularly significant because here young children are demonstrating an understanding of the rules that govern how we communicate meaningfully. An example of a two-word utterance might be “Daddy ball!” which could mean a variety of things including “Daddy get the ball”, “That's Daddy's ball” and “Daddy throw the ball”.

A few months after the two-word stage (age varying from child to child) comes what is known as telegraphic stage. Children begin to utter increasingly complex multi-word sentences and grammatical words and endings are also present. This speech is considered to be ‘telegraphic' or like a ‘telegram' in that it includes all the important function words, leaves out ‘little' words like conjunctions, auxiliary verbs and prepositions.

By year three, children are effective language users: still needing to practice, still needing to develop additional lexis, but fundamentally with the building blocks for all future language use. At this stage they begin to crack the code of implied meaning: to understand that, sometimes, language contains messages which can seem to contradict their face value statements.

Children are sophisticated language users by year four. They understand that language carries a multiplicity of meanings, that it can be manipulated and that different audiences require different language use including variations in lexis and intonation. In other words, by year four, their use of language is purposeful

A critical factor in year five is that it is the age that most children start school. So here we see a shift from spoken language as the complete focus to written language: learning to read. This shift towards literacy sees children beginning to make links between print and meaning.

Obviously, the age 13 is still a long way off for Sam, but it's important to mention that beyond this age his language learning ability may actually begin to decline. Some researchers believe that around the age of 13, children's ability to acquire language may begin to decline. Lenneburg et al propose that there is a period during which children are predisposed to acquire language. They also believe that there is a ‘cut off' age (around 13 years) after which acquisition is not possible.

______________________________________________________________________

What is generally agreed is that the vast majority of children acquire language by going through the same series of stages.

Over-extension

Children over-extend word meanings. This means that they will extend the meaning of one category of item more broadly than it should be. An example of this might be calling all round fruits ‘apples' when they are perhaps oranges, kiwis or cherries.

 Under-extension

Children under-extend word meanings. This means that they will not accept that there are more examples of a category of item than the particular one that is familiar to them. So, for example, ‘dog' is used for the family pet but does not apply to any other dog, thus narrowing the word's meaning.

 Morphology is the study of how single words are constructed and how they might be changed to perform a particular function in a sentence.

 Noun plurals

It is generally accepted that children acquire language through an in-built ability to recognise the patterns that exist. However, these patterns are not always straightforward and there are exceptions, so children inevitably make mistakes.

Verb tenses

Young children's speech will reflect some application of regular patterns, for example, adding ‘ed' to form past tenses. However, as yet, irregularities will not form part of their understanding, so birds ‘singed' and children ‘runned' are completely understandable, if not completely accurate sentences.

_______________________________________________________________

Imitation & reinforcement theory (Skinner, 1957)
Skinner was a proponent of the theory that children acquire language by imitating the way others speak. When the child is successful at producing words it is praised. This approval motivates the child to repeat the action thus learning words.
This theory has now been largely discredited. The task of acquiring language is such a vast one – children acquire tens of thousands of words and complex rules of grammar and syntax within a very short space of time.
Further flaws in this theory are revealed if we consider the mistakes children make in their grammar usage. They clearly do not imitate statements such as “I cleaning my tooths”. This is not a sentence formation which would have been praised by an adult.

Innateness theory (Chomsky, 1965)
Noam Chomsky argued against Skinner's theory. He reasoned that children have an innate ability to acquire language through what he called a ‘language acquisition device' (LAD).
Chomsky claimed that all languages have a different surface structure - French and English sound different from each other through their differing intonations and stresses. However, he felt that all languages share the same deep grammar structure, or linguistic universals - subject–verb-object. His theory suggests we are pre-programmed with this deep structure. Chomsky's theory explains how children can understand sentences they've never heard before.
Critics such as Bard and Sachs (1977) argue that children don't learn to speak automatically. They need to communicate and interact with others – innateness alone is not enough.

Cognition theory (Piaget, 1966)
The cognition theory links stages in language acquisition with stages of cognitive development. Piaget observes that children initially view themselves as the centre of the universe believing that objects exist only in relation to themselves. At around 18 months children begin to realise that objects have an existence that is nothing to do with them. A big growth in vocabulary occurs at this time and proponents of the cognition theory suggest that these events are linked - children are compelled to find names for things they now know exist. Piaget's theory shows a relationship between language and thought – though the theory only seems to stand up for the first 18 months of a child's life. Studies show that some children whose mental development is retarded can speak fluently. Here it seems that word order, meaning and grammar have not been subject to the child's general cognitive development.

Critical period hypothesis

This theory suggests that there is a critical time in a child's life, during which time they are capable of acquiring language. However, this time is limited – evidence suggests that the cut off age is around 13 years.

Language change revision notes

Influences on language change :

Youth culture
mobile communications
newspapers
other languages
television and radio
the internet

Youth culture 1950s

The jazz era of the 50s introduced many familiar slang terms such as ‘cats', ‘chick' and ‘rock 'n' roll' which originally denoted sex. ‘Cool' - denoting ‘good' - is still widely used as a colloquialism today and ‘hot' extends to mean very popular or successful. Many youth slang terms go back further: the American slang term ‘dude' dates back to the 1880s, denoting a smart, fancifully dressed man.

Youth culture 1960s

The ‘Peace and Love' era of the 60s spawned a new youth slang lexicon: the establishment was ‘square' and ‘hippies' ‘turned on, tuned in and dropped out'.

Youth culture today

Youth subcultures develop specialised neologisms. Click Play to hear a clip from ‘Hold the sanity' by Brighton rap band Nonconformists. Try to pick out the following examples of rap slang. ‘Spitting' is rapping. ‘Blessin' is using your skill to good effect. ‘Dropping' refers to how a DJ might "drop a tune" etc. ‘Fat' - as in "Noncons' fat" - just means good/top-quality, etc. (sometimes written "Phat!").

Mobile phone texting

What does YDntUCL mean? Mobile phones are influencing language change. Approximately one billion text messages a month are sent in the UK and with them a ‘mutant' form of English has evolved. Abbreviations are characterised by shortened words where vowels are frequently omitted or substituted for numbers and capitals. You've probably guessed that ‘YDntUCL' is an abbreviation of 'Why didn't you call?'

A text essay

In Scotland much controversy arose in 2003 when a 13 year old girl submitted an exam essay written in abbreviations. The opening read: "My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we usd 2go2 NY 2C my bro..." The girl explained she found it "easier than Standard English". Concern was raised by the Scottish Qualifications Authority that users can't differentiate when this kind of usage is appropriate and when it isn't.

Newspaper devices

The language of newspapers influences change. The press is a commercial concern, so many tabloids package news as ‘product' using persuasive techniques borrowed from advertising to entertain and ‘sell' their information through the use of rhetoric. This has led to the development of journalese: puns, clichés, alliteration, emotive language and rhymes are used in headlines for maximum impact.

 Newspaper bias

The 2003 Gulf War, saw references to ‘Chemical Ali' and ‘Comical Ali'. The name ‘Chemical Ali', was earned by an Iraqi leader after his authorisation of chemical warfare. He was dubbed ‘Comical Ali' after his seeming repeated denial of events taking place. This demonstrates the power of language in media use to shape our versions of reality.

Telephone – non-verbal mannerisms

The invention of the telephone has revolutionised verbal communication. Traditional telephone calls lack a visual channel, so facial expressions and eye contact are absent. However, try watching someone make a phone call - most conversations are accompanied by lots of facial expressions, gestures and mannerisms!

Telephone – verbal characteristics

There is greater emphasis on non-verbal features such as prosody - how we emphasise our words, and vary our pitch, stress, intonation and volume. People often develop a ‘telephone voice' marked by an elevated register to signal politeness and social prestige and non-fluency features such as pauses, fillers and stammers sometimes develop when leaving answer phone messages! Click Play to listen to Jill's message.

TV and radio varieties

Television has had a huge influence on contemporary change, exposing people throughout the world to many varieties of English including American and Australian. In 50s Britain, the RP and standard lexis and grammar of ‘BBC English' helped establish a variety associated with prestige and learning though, increasingly, more regional accents are featured.

TV, glottal stops and upspeak

Upspeak, a 'trendy' accent found in youth culture, is characterised by rising intonation. It seems to have spread through the influence of Australian soaps and Californian ‘Valley Girl' speak. Estuary English, a slightly elevated form of cockney, contains the glottal stop. It has spread partly due to soaps like ‘Eastenders'. Click Play to listen to Kat and Alfie in Eastenders. (Listen out for Kat's glottal stop when she says the word ‘matter'.)

The Internet

The Internet could be described as ‘interactive billion-channel TV' allowing people across the globe to communicate instantaneously. There is no editorial control or censorship, so anyone can create a personal webpage, reflecting their individual language style. News Groups, Message Boards and Chat Rooms have allowed the spread of American English (e.g. ‘theater'), specialised slang and jargon across the world.

Email

In most social contexts, email is a mixed mode, blending the spontaneity and fragmentation of speech with the premeditation and planning of writing. Informal email is often characterised by deviant spellings (kewl), acronyms (RAM), abbreviations (BRB, be right back) and smileys or emoticons :o).

David Crystal has argued (1997):
"A world of unchanging linguistic excellence... exists only in fantasy."

Research by Dr Berenice Mahoney in 1997 has revealed that you are twice as likely to be found guilty of a crime if you speak in a broad Birmingham accent

Trudgill (1983): "Different varieties of the same language are objectively as pleasant as each other but are perceived positively or negatively because of particular cultural pressures... Standard and prestige accents acquire their high status directly from the high-status groups that happen to speak them..."

How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand

WIRED Magazine, Michael Erard 23-06-08

The targeted offenses: if you are stolen, call the police at once. please omnivorously put the waste in garbage can. deformed man lavatory. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

But what if these sentences aren't really bad English? What if they are evidence that the English language is happily leading an alternative lifestyle without us?

Thanks to globalization, the Allied victories in World War II, and American leadership in science and technology, English has become so successful across the world that it's escaping the boundaries of what we think it should be. In part, this is because there are fewer of us: By 2020, native speakers will make up only 15 percent of the estimated 2 billion people who will be using or learning the language. Already, most conversations in English are between nonnative speakers who use it as a lingua franca.

In China, this sort of free-form adoption of English is helped along by a shortage of native English-speaking teachers, who are hard to keep happy in rural areas for long stretches of time. An estimated 300 million Chinese — roughly equivalent to the total US population — read and write English but don't get enough quality spoken practice. The likely consequence of all this? In the future, more and more spoken English will sound increasingly like Chinese.

It's not merely that English will be salted with Chinese vocabulary for local cuisine, bon mots, and curses or that speakers will peel off words from local dialects. The Chinese and other Asians already pronounce English differently — in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. For example, in various parts of the region they tend not to turn vowels in unstressed syllables into neutral vowels. Instead of "har-muh-nee," it's "har-moh-nee." And the sounds that begin words like this and thing are often enunciated as the letters f, v, t, or d. In Singaporean English (known as Singlish), think is pronounced "tink," and theories is "tee-oh-rees."

English will become more like Chinese in other ways, too. Some grammatical appendages unique to English (such as adding do or did to questions) will drop away, and our practice of not turning certain nouns into plurals will be ignored. Expect to be asked: "How many informations can your flash drive hold?" In Mandarin, Cantonese, and other tongues, sentences don't require subjects, which leads to phrases like this: "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"

One noted feature of Singlish is the use of words like ah, lah, or wah at the end of a sentence to indicate a question or get a listener to agree with you. They're each pronounced with tone — the linguistic feature that gives spoken Mandarin its musical quality — adding a specific pitch to words to alter their meaning. (If you say "xin" with an even tone, it means "heart"; with a descending tone it means "honest.") According to linguists, such words may introduce tone into other Asian-English hybrids.

Given the number of people involved, Chinglish is destined to take on a life of its own. Advertisers will play with it, as they already do in Taiwan. It will be celebrated as a form of cultural identity, as the Hong Kong Museum of Art did in a Chinglish exhibition last year. It will be used widely online and in movies, music, games, and books, as it is in Singapore. Someday, it may even be taught in schools. Ultimately, it's not that speakers will slide along a continuum, with "proper" language at one end and local English dialects on the other, as in countries where creoles are spoken. Nor will Chinglish replace native languages, as creoles sometimes do. It's that Chinglish will be just as proper as any other English on the planet.

And it's possible Chinglish will be more efficient than our version, doing away with word endings and the articles a, an, and the. After all, if you can figure out "Environmental sanitation needs your conserve," maybe conservation isn't so necessary.

Any language is constantly evolving, so it's not surprising that English, transplanted to new soil, is bearing unusual fruit. Nor is it unique that a language, spread so far from its homelands, would begin to fracture. The obvious comparison is to Latin, which broke into mutually distinct languages over hundreds of years — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian. A less familiar example is Arabic: The speakers of its myriad dialects are connected through the written language of the Koran and, more recently, through the homogenized Arabic of Al Jazeera. But what's happening to English may be its own thing: It's mingling with so many more local languages than Latin ever did, that it's on a path toward a global tongue — what's coming to be known as Panglish. Soon, when Americans travel abroad, one of the languages they'll have to learn may be their own.

How the internet is changing language

By Zoe Kleinman, Technology reporter, BBC News

'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

 The web is a hub of neologisms

In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.

At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".

"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.

"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.

"Yes.”

"He was some kind of singer?"

Continue reading the main story

Technology and culture

This is the third of a five-part series exploring the intersection between technology and culture

Fashion buzz for stylish circuits

How pushing pixels came of age

"Yes."

"It's a joke?"

"Yes."

The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.

But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.

"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.

"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

Super slang

One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.

It is often used to voice disapproval or anger towards another commentator, says Svitlana Pyrkalo, a producer at the BBC World Service Ukrainian Service.

 Rickrolling is the redirection of a website address to a video of popstar Rick Astley from 1987

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

Word play

For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

 LOLcats have become a 21st Century internet phenomenon

"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.

"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.

"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."

Txt spk

One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.

In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.

Continue reading the main story

“

Start Quote

Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic”

End Quote

Fiona McPherson

Senior editor, Oxford English Dictionary

They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.

Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".

But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The secret of their success is their longevity.

"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.

She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.

Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.

Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.

"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.

"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

Word thief

There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.

Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.

 Website internetslang.com lists 5,090 English language acronyms in use.

But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.

Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.

"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.

"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."

For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.

"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.

"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.

"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well."

Armageddon isn't upon us

The meaning of words is seeping away as our language changes. But it's not the end of the world

David Mckie. The Guardian. 31-8-2006

Language evolves. For years there was a gap in the dictionary where a word describing statistical distributions with notably different variances ought to have been. But then some ingenious person came up with a word that's been known and loved ever since: heteroscedasticity. So when the other day I came across the word heteronormativity, which I don't recall ever meeting before, it caused not the slightest qualm. It is not to be found in any of my (slightly outdated) dictionaries, which have nothing between heteronym (a word of the same spelling and pronunciation as another, but having a different meaning) and heteroousian (of unlike essence; sometimes in the context of the Father and Son in the Trinity). But the new word's meaning was clear: it indicated a society, or perhaps a climate of opinion, where heterosexuality was the norm and homosexuality the exception.

I think these considerations may explain why the readers' editor of this newspaper has been repeatedly called into action to point out that there's no such expression as "legs akimbo". Arms akimbo, certainly: akimbo means "with hands on hips and elbows out" ; but you can't do that with your legs, even if you call on your knees to play the part of your elbows. Yet contributors to the Guardian continue to write of legs akimbo, suggesting that such a posture exists, but lacks a word to define it. It is time one was invented, possibly echoing akimbo without implying any kind of equation. "Legs armando" perhaps, or "legs palumbo", might serve.

There are other words, though, which need to be protected, since without such protection their meaning seeps away. A powerful example of this is "disinterested", which originally meant having nothing to gain or lose from a given situation. One might say, for instance, that Lord Falconer, who was arguing at the weekend that Tony Blair ought to stay in office and not, as others advocate, stand down soon as leader and open the way for Gordon Brown, was not entirely disinterested in this matter, since no one ever elected him, and his whole political career has been built on his friendship with Blair, who was once his flatmate. But unfortunately if you say nowadays that Falconer is not entirely disinterested, many assume that you mean that he isn't entirely bored.

I'm a little concerned in this context about the word "challenging", which used to mean offering a challenge, and still does when, for instance, the secretary of state for communities describes the present debate about multiculturalism as "challenging". In other circumstances, though, it's increasingly used to mean "dire". Thus the present state of Iraq clearly deserves the epithet "dire", but supporters of Blair and Bush prefer to describe it as "challenging". Companies reporting rotten results avoid calling them "dire" by saying that they are "challenging". The original meaning is being unduly stretched to afford a convenient euphemism. This kind of linguistic practice may not be wholly dire, but it's certainly challenging.

Another word which may very soon need a spell in intensive care is "Armageddon", a term which has increasingly crept into our discourse within the past year, and not always justifiably. This is a solemn word, which the Guardian's house dictionary, Collins, defines as the final battle at the end of the world between the forces of good and evil, as described in the book of Revelation. It does allow a second meaning - a catastrophic and extremely destructive conflict, such as the first world war. The rate of use this month has been swelled by the showing on television of the film of this name in which the world is, I understand, saved from extinction by the efforts of the actor Bruce Willis.

Though most of those who use the word Armageddon have something really severe in mind, one or two looser usages have begun to steal in. One columnist at the weekend, for instance, applied it to floods in Hungary in which three people died and 250 were injured. Perhaps he was being ironic (always a dangerous practice in journalism), but I rather fear that if present trends continue - as in such matters they usually do - we shall before the end of the football season read pieces in which Armageddon refers to the threat of relegation now facing, say, Luton Town.

· The new edition of Samuel Butler's The Authoress of the Odyssey which I mentioned two weeks ago is published by Bristol Phoenix Press, a partner imprint of University of Exeter Press, not Bristol Phoenix Books. I hope to return to the subject of resurrectionist publishers soon.

an extremely useful site

Some of you may have heard of the website Reddit, this site has a huge community of people sharing some really interesting articles, pictures and forums.
One brilliant feature of the site is found when you type /r/linguistics, this sub section brings up thousands of language articles and interesting forums created by users to discuss various languages.

Here are some of the articles that can be found on the site:

http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/a-matter-of-fashion/?ref=opinion

http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/what-chomsky-didnt-get-about-child.html

An interesting article about a man who invented his own language which has since gone viral online and has spread across the net and has been described as  "a monument to human ingenuity and design."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/24/121224fa_fact_foer?currentPage=all

This is a great little video about the English language from the youtube channel Vsauce. They're worth a subscribe as they make new videos every week explaining every day thoughts such as why is there a hatred of comic sans?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atI-JPGcF-k