Words on Wednesday: the Meaning of Epic

What a great word! Applied to a story, it describes the sweep of a complex tale, usually incorporating a quest. It seems now, like many other words before it, to have broadened and weakened its meaning in some contexts, to mean something like "really really good". 

It's been our teenager's adjective of choice for things she's really pleased about for a while. For example, most of her Christmas presents were declared epic (to our great delight). I don't know exactly how widespread this weakened teenage use is, but my students don't tend to use it in this way. That could be due to age (my daughter's 13, my students 16-19) or geography (we're in Leicester, I teach in Nuneaton). Students in the college I work in are aware of it, though. GCSE students working on writing film reviews criticised a sample student review of Pirates of the Caribbean because it used the word epic, which they saw as slang usage and therefore inappropriate.

Is this a sign that some of these words which are used differently by teens could gradually lose their original meaning, as people no longer are aware of them? It hasn't happened to some of the reversed meaning teen slang words like 'sick'; the earlier meanings still stand alongside the new ones, but I'm pretty sure many teens don't know any other meaning for 'blatantly' than 'clearly'.

Is epic a teen word for good/great where you are?

Words on Wednesday: Teaching Political Correctness

One of the topics we have to cover in the A2 year of English Language is Political Correctness, as part of the broader topic of how and why language changes. It amazes me, the extent to which seventeen year olds seem to have been raised on the Daily Mail diet. It's always a far harder task than you'd think to get a class to accept that maybe - just maybe - there have been some good things that have come out of the PC movement.

But then there's the perennially popular topic of swearing, which can be beautifully aligned with PC to open up the idea a little bit. Swearing reveals something about taboos and a simple survey, asking people to rate words according to their acceptability, can be most effective in reminding students of the need for PC language. Once they've made the connection, students are never really surprised that their grandparents/elderly neighbours etc find a different category of words to be taboo compared to their own sensibilities. Racial epithets are usually rated worst by teens, while older people are likely to find sexual swearwords more offensive. And there it is, right there. We need alternatives to 'those' words because they have become unacceptable - and most seventeen year olds can agree with that and have horror stories about grandparents embarrassing them with inappropriate racial descriptors.

The big task is getting students to separate the clear and apparent need for new terms represented by topics such as race and disability (many teens are shocked that 'The Spastics Society' ever existed, for example) from the myths perpetuated by the tabloids on a slow news day. Of course, the problem is that so many well-meaning institutions have embraced some of these myths in their desperation not to offend. If one more student tells me I can't say 'brainstorm' (I can, actually) I might just spit.

exciting news for tomorrow's blog

Sally Gardner will be here tomorrow, celebrating the publication of her new book The Double Shadow. She will be continuing the PC theme, from her perspective as a historical novelist. 

Words on Wednesday: a Bit of a Grumble

I hate corporatespeak. I know I'm not alone in this, and it's at least part of the reason I'm not a businesswoman but a public sector worker. However, it's been creeping into the world of education for a while now. Rather than share the Big Rant (especially since I'm pretty sure many of you feel the same...), here are my top three current annoyances (all heard this academic year):

1. Calendarise. "We'll get that calendarised for next term." It's not even easy to say. Ideally that would mean that it won't last long but given its regular use in emails rather than speech, it's hard to be hopeful...
2. Agenda (as a verb). "Let's agenda that for next time." Whilst easier to say than calendarise, it's still clumsy and ugly and oh yes, I wasn't going to rant, was I...
3. Evidence (again, converted to verb). "How do you evidence learning in a snapshot of a lesson?"* Ugh. What, may I ask, is wrong with "provide evidence of". Sorry, yeah, imminent rant engaged again. 

Am I just a grumpy old so-and-so or do you agree?

* If anyone knows, leave me a comment with the answer. Or alternatively, email me and we'll get a book out of it.

PS to any Language students who've wandered over here: I apologise for the prescriptivist nature of this grumble, especially when I tell you all to avoid sounding judgemental about new or non-standard uses of language. But, as we've discussed, we all have our little prescriptivist bugbears. This is (one of) mine.