too cool for school

Recently, I attended Dr. Anne Curzan’s, from the University of Michigan, lecture on slang entitled, ‘Sticking up for slang: Why language authorities cannot stop language change.’ Although it was only an hour long, I gained a different perspective on slang and its use, while also trying to figure out my future stance on slang in the classroom and in writing.

Curzan began by posing a question to us similar to this, “The neighbors upstairs had just moved in and their boxes lay on the floor unpacked” and then asked us to tell her what was incorrect about it. Many said lay should be lie, maybe something was wrong about ‘neighbors upstairs,’ and then someone mentioned the ambiguity in ‘unpacked.’ We use it to mean that they boxes are still full or that the boxes are empty, and from this stance ‘unpacked’ can be considered slang.

This led her into the discussion of dictionaries. We are taught from a young age to question things like science and books that we read, but why do we never think to question the dictionary? It is because we see it as a fact, the know-all book, and as English teachers- a Bible like substance. But lexicographers, dictionary makers, are stuck in the middle of slang makers, which are mostly the younger generation, and prescriptivists, people who try to enforce the rules and standards of language.

Curzan writes in “Opening Dictionaries to Investigation,” “In the face of language change the dictionary seems a stable authority for determining what a word “really means,” even if we as speakers are all using it to mean something else… recent work in sociolinguistics has addressed speakers’ desire for authority in language and their natural tendency towards… “verbal hygiene,” or the regulation of other people’s language.”

Here Curzan is saying that we like to have a guide like a dictionary to tell us what words are considered “real” in English but sometimes how we use them isn’t included in there. In Curzans speech she brought up that as far back as you can go in the English language, there has always been someone saying that the words are improper or incorrect. In Beowulf and Chaucer’s Wife of Bath aks is used instead of the now used ask. However, now we associate ‘aks’ with African American English and say that it is ungrammatical, but how can we say that when it was used before ‘ask’ was?

“Speakers trust dictionaries to tell them if semantic change has “really happened,” of a word is standard or slang- in other words, if a word or a meaning is legitimate, rather than a “misuse” by “lazy,” “uneducated,” or otherwise “unworthy” speakers,” writes Curzan.

Prescriptivists and older generations tend to stereotype slang as lazy and incorrect in all senses but legitimate words are created everyday by clipping, compounding, affixation, and other methods, its here where we question what makes it into the dictionary. Typically, it is done by tracking- looking in popular magazines, newspapers, and TV to see how often a word arises and what the chances are of it sticking around. For example, in a popular Seinfeld episode Elaine uses the term “yada, yada, yada” which people started using like crazy. This leaves lexicographers wondering whether it should be included or not.

Everyday we use words that we probably don’t even know are considered to be slang. What we should keep in mind as future English teachers is that English isn’t decaying by using slang, it is just changing. We should trust the speakers of English because they will not lose something that is needed, however, they may just change it.

References:

Curzan, Anne. Language in the Schools. “Opening Dictionaries to Investigation.” London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher, 2005.

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