Posted on 05/29/2012 5:14:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The future of written English will owe more to Hollywood films than Dickens or Shakespeare, if the findings of a study into children’s writing are anything to go by.
The analysis of 74,000 short stories found that their written work was littered with Americanisms, exclamation marks and references to celebrities.
Researchers who looked at the entries to a national competition found they were increasingly using American words such as garbage, trash can, sidewalk, candy, sneakers, soda, cranky and flashlight.
The stories, written by pupils aged seven to 13, show how fairy cakes are referred to as cupcakes and a dinner jacket has become a tuxedo.
‘Smart’ is now often used for ‘clever’ and ‘cranky’ for ‘irritable’.
Celebrity culture also has a powerful influence on children’s work, with Simon Cowell and Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi among the famous names cropping up repeatedly.
But pupils are let down by basic spelling, punctuation and grammar, according to the study by Oxford University Press, which looked at the entries to BBC Radio 2’s ‘500 Words’ competition.
Children stumbled over simple spellings such as ‘does’ and ‘clothes’ and struggled to use the past tense correctly, often saying ‘rised’ instead of ‘rose’ or ‘thinked’ instead of ‘thought’.
Researchers also found that punctuation was underused, especially semi-colons and speech marks. Some did not know how to use capital letters.
However, exclamation marks were overused. Researchers found 35,171 examples in total, with some young writers using five at a time.
The study of more than 31million words will be compared with future research to see how written language evolves. Popular US fiction such as the Twilight vampire novels and films is thought to be fuelling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Shot glass, photo shot, "I'm shot" (I'm exhausted), the air conditioner is shot (it's broken)--"shot" has plenty of non-violent connotations. But jab--there is nothing non-violent about the word--I don't want a measles jab under any circumstances! But I'll be glad to get a measles shot. ;-)
Definite articles eh?
Do you go to church, or the church? :)
Using or not using the article causes a change in meaning. Without the article, you aren't going to a specific place; you're going to a facility that has a stereotypical activity or function associated with it, and the stress is on the activity rather than the physical structure. With the article, you're stressing the physical structure rather than a stereotypical activity.
For example, my uncle went to prison when I was a teen. I have never been to prison myself, but I have been to the prison on numerous times to visit.
A hospital does not, to my knowledge, have a single stereotypical activity associated with it. It's a place where many activities happen, so it's more appropriate to use the article.
I get a sense that the definite article is omitted when the place being gone to, or stayed in, is viewed as a broad social institution, rather than a place of personal choosing.
Can you find anything that contradicts this principle?
Not even “church” / “the church” really belies it. It depends on how particular one is about the congregation being visited. If I was willing only to go to, say, a Baptist church, then in a strange city I would report going to “the church” if I found a suitable congregation and went to its religious service. But if at home and everyone ought to know what church I attend, I go to “church.”
I guess you're really serious about how much it irritates you, since you took the time to tell me about it twice! (You double posted.)
I think we both write people, and write to people. Those phrases are not grammatical equivalents.
That's as good a way as putting it as any. The word "hospital" just doesn't have the same kind of connotation as "school", "jail", or "church".
All US origin usage. Shows how much part of American thought patterns it is.
Languages are not static. They grow and develop (or regress, depending on your point of view). If anything, English is developing faster in Britain than it is in the US (a rather odd phenomena - I would certainly have thought it would have been the other way round). For example, many of these “americanisms” that the report mentions are perfectly respectable English words that have fallen out of use in the mother country, but have now been reintroduced from the US.
The real problem is the steady decline in the standard of basic literacy, spelling, grammar and vocabulary that exists amongst the youth of both Britain and the US.
zzzzzzz
WOW!! I wasn't aware that the Brits got the exclamation mark from the Americans!!
Nice car, but to be safe, always carry a torch in your boot.
As a Brit, if I said I was going to the hospital, I would be referring to the local one. If I just said hospital, I would mean some medical facility generally.
WOW! The statement doesn’t say they did! It says Americanisms, exclamations marks and references to celebrities! The comma after Americanisms stands for ‘and’ in a list! Read the damn sentence properly!!!!
Me, too!
I often describe things I don’t like as “rubbish.”
Top Gear UK is my favorite TV show.
In perfect English, your comment should be "Read the bloody sentence properly!!!!"
The problem with this crossing over of idioms is that the context in which they are used is not also transposed accurately. “Bloody” is quite high on the British curse word totem. Higher than “damn” anyway.
Typically, if I were in such dire need of medical care, I'd want to be going to the closest hospital.
I remember learning about that when I took a linguistics course many eons ago. It seems to be a characteristic of languages that usage evolves more quickly in the "core" language group than in groups that split off from the core. It seems to have something to do with psychology; groups that split off from the core linguistic group aren't as confident of their language, and that lack of confidence leads them to resist language change, for fear they'll corrupt the language. The core group has no fear that they'll mess up the grammar or whatever, and so they don't resist change.
No, sorry, I dont buy this explanation of the use of definite articles. Not in this context anyway.
Perhaps it's related to the US having such heavy immigration from non-English speaking populations. On the one hand, it introduces some extra words (Gesundheit, guy) but on the other, it encourages the local English speakers to resist change like you say.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.