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It ain’t what you say...

By Community Member on 17 Feb 2012 No comments

A secondary school has told its pupils to leave slang at the school gate in order to make them more employable. Out goes ‘hiya’ and ‘cheers’ and in comes ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’. Sheffield Springs Academy says its ethos is now ‘the street stops at the gate’.

Now, I know we all use our ‘telephone voice’ when talking to someone important, and that we adapt our language depending on who we are speaking to. If the school is saying that pupils today are unable to make that distinction then it’s right that they should be given the verbal tools with which to fit in to any situation.

It seems that we Brits have an innate fear of losing anything that we feel defines us. We worry about losing our religion, our currency, our traditions and most of all, our language. It still matters to us that people speak ‘The Queen’s English’, i.e. that they speak ‘properly’. I love the spoken word and the written word, through my careers as a copywriter, proof reader and in public relations, I’ve enjoyed agonising over which word to choose for some advertising copy to get the best results. Do my client’s customers concern themselves with financial security, or are they more worried about watching the pennies? Do they want their cats to eat food which is nutritious, or delicious? As language has been my ‘keeper’ for so long, it would be understandable if I felt rather precious about standards of English.

But I don’t see slang as a threat. Language has always been - and should be - a living, developing entity. Ever since we stopped grunting at each other in the Stone Age we have added words, developed dialect and sayings, and let other words fall into disuse. We have been invaded many times and each occupation has added its own words to the English language. Anger, freckle, knife and mistake all come from the Vikings, whilst immediate, manicure and salary are from the Latin-speaking Roman Empire.

The Norman invasion of 1066 left its impact on our language too, catch, fashion and poor are just a few of the words left to us by William the Conqueror and his ilk. However, we don’t need to be invaded to change and develop English (thankfully!), we have made many changes to it ourselves over the course of the centuries. Once upon a time, to be gay was to be happy, chips were what your mum cooked for tea, and memory was something you tried to hold on to as you aged instead of keeping yours on a stick in your desk drawer.

Not only have we incorporated words and adapted them but we’ve even come up with our own over the years. If we weren’t so flexible we would have no word for a low paid, low grade position (a McJob), no-one would ever have been called a wally or a boffin, and we’d all be wandering around the area in which we live instead of hanging in da hood. Ah, well, not every slang term reaches all the generations successfully eh! But the Oxford English dictionary does now include the words D’oh, LOL and OMG and those are in wide usage daily.

So whilst I applaud the staff of the Sheffield Springs Academy for teaching their pupils that you are more likely to secure employment if you can speak ‘proper’ English I don’t agree that the street should be left at the gate because the street is where our language grows, develops and enriches us. In fact, depending on your generation, having a living, growing language is rather groovy, cool, excellent, wicked or sick.

teanna