Alan’s blog

Fiona @ lovefibre and I have often discussed the worrying decline of language used in many comments and postings on the web. Sometimes people are using compressed txtng language or even leetspeak, both of these are reasonable alternative codes to ‘proper’ English, and potentially part of the natural growth of the language.  However, it is often clear that the cause is ignorance not choice.  One of the reasons may be that many more people are getting a voice on the Internet; it is not just the journalists, academics and professional classes.  If so, this could be a positive social sign indicating that a public voice is no longer restricted to university graduates, who, of course, know their grammar perfectly …

Earlier today I was using Google to look up the author of a book I was reading and one of the top links was a listing on ratemyprofessors.com.  For interest I clicked through and saw:

“He sucks.. hes mean and way to demanding if u wanan work your ass off for a C+ take his class¹”

Hmm I wonder what this student’s course assignment looked like?

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1. In case you think I’m a complete pedant, personally, I am happy with both the slang ’sucks’ and ‘ass’ (instead of ‘arse’!), and the compressed speech ‘u’. These could be well-considered choices in language. The mistyped ‘wanna’ is also just a slip. It is the slightly more proper “hes mean and way to demanding” that seems to show  general lack of understanding.  Happily, the other comments, were not as bad as this one, but I did find the student who wanted a “descent grade” amusing [back]

In explaining how to make sentences more readable (I know I am one to talk!), I frequently explain to students that language understanding is a combination of a schema-based syntactic structure with more sequential associative reading.  Only recently I realised this was also the way we had been addressing the issue of task sequence inference in the TIM project. and is related also to the way we interpret action in the real world.

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Was with Kiel, one of my PhD students the other day, reading a draft chapter of his PhD thesis. He used the word ‘thusly’ and at first I thought this was a Kiel-ism (sorry Kiel, you do have a few). However, he assured me it was common usage … and not just for him. I suspected it was a regional idiom and indeed a bit of web searching finds many archaic uses of thusly, but several more recent Lancashire uses.

I suspect the word arose because ‘thus’ often precedes a verb and so has acquired an adverb ‘-ly’ ending … a form of lexical over-generalisation. … and if you have not already stopped reading because you can’t understand why anyone would be even interested in this level of language … as I did the web search found a lovely discussion site called INTERACTION (and no, this one is not the synonymous BCS HCI Group) where one person mildly mocked another for using ‘thusly’ in the 21st Century … obviously not a Lancashire lad.

This has also made me reflect on my own frequent use of ‘thus’ to mean ‘therefore’ as opposed to ‘in this way’ … argh am I really a grammar nerd :-/