pupoture

Dogs are better than cats - it has been scientifically proven, by scientists using science - so it's no surprise that LOLcats are so last year when it comes to language memes and dogs are where it's at just now. Well, not dogs exactly, but Doge , a weird variant of English (some use of wow , a deliberate mis-spelling or two, a strange unnatural combination of an adverb plus a noun, for example) that exists on the internet in pictures like this one below. If you're still not sure what Doge is or why you should care, you can have a look here for a more detailed update, read this link on Superlinguo , or listen to this clip from this morning's Radio 4 Today programme . (HT to @suewalder for Toast link and @StanCarey for LOLcats article)

If you are studying Language Change or Language Discourses for either AQA A or B A2 English Language, a recent run of articles should be really helpful to you. One of the big debates - probably the biggest, overarching debate of all - connected to this topic is over the ways in which people view language change. Is it a downward spiral of decline or a natural process of evolution and progression? As you might expect, it's rarely a simple answer and opinions are often divided. For members of the declinist to-hell-in-a-handcart brigade (aka the prescriptivists ), like Simon Heffer and Lynne Truss, our language (usually ours , not theirs ) is permanently at risk from the eroding winds of change and the tides of textual degradation. In a recent piece for The Daily Telegraph (which you'll be reading/working on now if you're in one of my A2 classes), Lynne Truss bemoaned what she saw as the increasingly blurred distinction between single and compound words such as any way / anyw...

"Menglish". I'll just leave this new word with you for a moment so you can process it . If you're a male reader of this blog, then you might need a few more seconds to process it than a female, because you're designed to be a bit slower with language. Females, after all, are experts in language and just better designed to deal with fancy stuff like words. At least, that's what a reheated brand of Mars and Venus cobblers from Julie-Anne Shapiro would have us believe. Menglish has been featured in the Telegraph and Mail this week, with the Mail accepting the banal generalities of Shapiro's "research" at face value and The Daily Telegraph's Rebecca Holman taking a much more sceptical view of it all. Menglish then is the language that men speak. "What the actual flip?! I thought we spoke English!" you might cry, but no, you'd be wrong. If you're male you speak a completely different language from women and that's why err.....