Bare Vexed

I recently read an article on the use of slang by Isabelle Kerr. In this, she talks about how slang is ruining the “great language” of English and how young people don’t use it anyway. Srsly though, what is she chatting?

Shakespeare made his own language so why can’t young people? Take the sentence ‘The blushing girl sat huddled in the bedroom, the lustrous moonbeams highlighting the radiance of her face’; though all of these words seem commonplace, in fact every one in bold was coined by Shakespeare. For example, moonbeam, a compound of moon and beam, was first recorded in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Shakespeare introduced 1700 new words into the English language. He drastically changed the way English evolved. People of my generation wouldn’t recognise pre-Shakespearean language, as his words are now commonplace. The younger generation wouldn’t know anything about this contribution or even what it means, but the older generation probably does know it better than us, mostly because language changes with every decade that passes. However, I guarantee not everyone in the older generation knows Shakespearean language, so the point I’m getting at is that there are words that can come in handy in the “young generation” of slang. Words like “can’t” and “don’t” all started as contractions. Before, they were “do not” and “can not” without the apostrophe replacing part of the word so it is shortened. Miss Kerr’s argument that “twerk” is destroying the English language even further by sitting “embarrassingly next to ’twere, an archaic word reminiscent of an era of great language and literary triumph” is ultimately flawed. “‘Twere” is a contraction of “it were” that was recorded in 1578.

Miss Kerr says that slang infects the way young people to speak or talk. In my opinion they make a decision to talk or speak it; they don’t use it all the time, they only use it with their friends etc – no one would really use it to their parents or a teacher. The reason being that the teacher or parents will not understand what we are saying.  By definition , slang is currency amongst the younger generation. They use slang to shorten words eg wuu2 (what you up too); another example is nm (nothing much). Isabelle Kerr goes on to say ‘Slang is mostly related to image, reputation and sex’. I disagree with this. Slang is not mostly related to image, reputation and sex – Miss Kerr has only given one example and that is ‘twerking’, a type of dancing in which an individual, usually a female, dances to music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance. To me that is only one example and it has almost become a cliche, and I have not heard of anything else using image,sex and reputation. Also, if you went up to someone and you were talking, you wouldn’t say “Did you see that girl doing that type of dance to music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hips movements and a low squatting stance?” You would just say, “Did you see that girl ‘twerk’?” All you are doing shortening the word and saving time. Likewise, you wouldn’t go up to your friends and say, “Did you see your friend take a self-portrait photograph?”

Slang words are included in online dictionaries to help people learn them – not even I know a lot about slang, I just know the basics. So when someone mentions a “colloquial” word on social media and I don’t know the word, I just go the internet, type it in and it will give me an instant up to date answer. Kerr is correct in that not all young people use slang, but it is important that these words are added to the dictionary anyway to record how language  is changing and  evolving.