pupoture

If you're thinking ahead to Paper 2 at the end of the week and wondering about potential case studies to use for the language change question or even for debates about language for Section B, gammon might be a good place to look. It's one of those words that's been around for a while with one main meaning (a kind of smoked ham) but it's recently developed a newer and more controversial meaning that's been used online and debated in various newspapers by some of the most high profile columnists and sharpest minds of our generation (and Brendan O'Neill from the appalling Spiked Online). It's a neat example of semantic change, polysemy and debates about the potential of language to cause offence. It also ties in quite nicely with the sample paper on 'literally' and attitudes to language change. 'Gammon' has meant other things too and you can find definitions that relate to the police (presumably a link to the pejorative slang terms 'pigs...

Paper 1 of the A level isn't that far away so here are a few suggestions about approaching the first 3 questions. I've posted in more detail about these in previous blogs which you can find here , here  and here but here are some quick pointers: It's all about meaning. Texts mean things and are made to mean by the people who produce them and the people who receive them. Think about what each text is actually about before you put pen to pen to paper. What are you being presented with? What's happened? Who is involved? What perspectives are being offered? Meanings depend on contexts. You need to think about how meanings are being created in the texts in front of you. Look closely at how language is being used in particular places in the texts and how that relies on context. Is it the context of text being spoken, online or written? Is it the context of what has gone before in the text? Is it the context of who is saying or writing something? Texts can be from all sort...