Language Report
Encyclopedia
The Language Report was an account of the state and use of the English language
published by the Oxford University Press
(OUP) in 2003. It was compiled by lexicographer Susie Dent
, best known for her regular appearances on the television word game Countdown
, and was an annual publication until 2007.
and of text messaging
(noting, for example, that on St Valentine’s Day 2003, more text messages than cards were sent), language relating to particular areas of activity (such as fashion, warfare, politics, music, business and sport), urban
slang, American
and “World” English (for example, that of Australasia
and South Africa
), as well as nicknames, quotations and personal names “which have transcended their owners” (for example, Ally McBeal
, Elvis Presley
and Delia Smith
). There was also a list containing a word that typified each year between 1903 (gamma ray
) and 2003 (SARS), a practice which continued with "a word a year" in future editions. (HarperCollins
had produced a similar list in 1997 - from "radioactivity" in 1896 to "Blairite
" in 1997 .)
The second to fourth editions had slightly whimsical sub-titles:
The fifth edition in 2007, English on the move 2000-2007, was a retrospective of the early years of the 21st century.
The first and last words identified in each edition as representing the preceding century were:
A different approach was adopted in 2007 with ten words identified for each decade from 1900-99. Several words, such as "bling", "chav" and "sex up
" were also chosen to represent 2000-07. "Footprint" (as, for example, in "carbon footprint
") was referred to - almost in passing - as the choice for 2007.
There was no Language Report in 2008, but Dent produced a volume entitled Words of the Year that was published as a paperback by the OUP.
" (2005), "WAGs
", "dark tourism
" and "blook
" (2006), and "burkini" and "gingerism" (2007).
's Mother Tongue: The English Language (1990) and Made in America (1994) provided, from the viewpoint of an anglophile Mid-Westerner, entertaining accounts of the development of English on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean
. In 2006 the BBC television series Balderdash and Piffle
, presented by Victoria Coren
, highlighted how words found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary
and the type of evidence that supported such entries . Referring to this process and to its illustration by Balderdash and Piffle, Dent noted that, since 2000, quarterly updates of Oxford's "revision work" had appeared on-line .
and text messaging. Others, such as the broadcaster John Humphrys
and the lawyer and ethicist Sir Ian Kennedy, were concerned about what Humphrys called “sloppy, overblown, cliché-ridden language” and Kennedy saw as the undermining of the "symbolic importance of language" (for example, in the field of health, talking about "the patient experience" rather than "the experience of patients") . The novelist Kingsley Amis
(1922-1995), an admirer of Fowler's Modern English Usage
(1926), was apt, as he himself put it, to "spot some fresh linguistic barbarism and [I] am off again" .
However, Dent, who noted that "there has never been a finite golden age in our language's history, nor a monolithic, unified English" , did not tend to take sides; rather, the Language Reports illustrated how English evolves and, for better or worse, is adapted for differing purposes and media. Dent anticipated in 2006 that "discussions of good versus bad English, and predictions as to which will conquer, will continue as they always have done"
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
published by the Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
(OUP) in 2003. It was compiled by lexicographer Susie Dent
Susie Dent
Susie Dent is an English lexicographer, well known as the resident dictionary expert and adjudicator on Channel 4’s long-running game show Countdown. As of January 2009, she is the longest-serving member of the current on-screen team, having first appeared on the show in 1992.Dent was educated at...
, best known for her regular appearances on the television word game Countdown
Countdown (game show)
Countdown is a British game show involving word and number puzzles. It is produced by ITV Studios and broadcast on Channel 4. It is presented by Jeff Stelling, assisted by Rachel Riley, with regular lexicographer Susie Dent. It was the first programme to be aired on Channel 4, and over sixty-five...
, and was an annual publication until 2007.
The 2003 report
The first Language Report, described by the OUP as "a frontline account of what we’re saying and how we’re saying it" , reviewed, among other things, changes in the use of English since 1903, how new words come about, the language of the InternetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
and of text messaging
Text messaging
Text messaging, or texting, refers to the exchange of brief written text messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network...
(noting, for example, that on St Valentine’s Day 2003, more text messages than cards were sent), language relating to particular areas of activity (such as fashion, warfare, politics, music, business and sport), urban
Urban culture
Urban culture is the culture of towns and cities. In the United States, Urban culture may also sometimes be used as a euphemistic reference to contemporary African American culture.- African American culture :...
slang, American
American English
American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
and “World” English (for example, that of Australasia
Australasia
Australasia is a region of Oceania comprising Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. The term was coined by Charles de Brosses in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes...
and South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...
), as well as nicknames, quotations and personal names “which have transcended their owners” (for example, Ally McBeal
Ally McBeal (Character)
Allison Marie "Ally" McBeal is the central fictional character in the Fox series Ally McBeal played by Calista Flockhart.Ally is a Boston-based lawyer. She is shown as a woman who believes in love and is continually looking for her soul mate...
, Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Elvis Aaron Presley was one of the most popular American singers of the 20th century. A cultural icon, he is widely known by the single name Elvis. He is often referred to as the "King of Rock and Roll" or simply "the King"....
and Delia Smith
Delia Smith
Delia Smith CBE is an English cook and television presenter, known for teaching basic cookery skills. She is the UK's best-selling cookery author, with more than 21 million copies sold....
). There was also a list containing a word that typified each year between 1903 (gamma ray
Gamma ray
Gamma radiation, also known as gamma rays or hyphenated as gamma-rays and denoted as γ, is electromagnetic radiation of high frequency . Gamma rays are usually naturally produced on Earth by decay of high energy states in atomic nuclei...
) and 2003 (SARS), a practice which continued with "a word a year" in future editions. (HarperCollins
HarperCollins
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
had produced a similar list in 1997 - from "radioactivity" in 1896 to "Blairite
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is a former British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007...
" in 1997 .)
2004-7
Succeeding reports, which drew on the work of Oxford’s language monitoring programme, concentrated on developments over the previous period of twelve months. A discernible feature was the increasing prominence given to Dent herself. In 2003 she was identified as the author on the inside title page and, with a small photograph, on the inside of the dust-jacket, but not on the outside; in 2004 and 2005, her name was on the front cover, with a photograph on the back cover; in 2006, her name was shown on the spine and her photograph was on the front cover. The 2007 edition had the name in larger letters than the title or sub-title.The second to fourth editions had slightly whimsical sub-titles:
- larpers and shroomers (2004);
- fanboys and overdogs (2005) (dedicated to Richard WhiteleyRichard WhiteleyJohn Richard Whiteley, OBE DL , usually known as Richard Whiteley, was an English broadcaster and journalist. He was famous for his twenty-three years as host of Countdown, a letters and numbers arrangement game show broadcast most weekdays on Channel 4...
, presenter of Countdown, who died in June 2005);
- The like, Language Report for real (2006) (the title shown on the front cover, though with just The Language Report on the spine and inside ).
The fifth edition in 2007, English on the move 2000-2007, was a retrospective of the early years of the 21st century.
The first and last words identified in each edition as representing the preceding century were:
- "hipHip (slang)Hip is a slang term meaning fashionably current and in the know. Hip is the opposite of square or prude.Hip, like cool, does not refer to one specific quality. What is considered hip is continuously changing. The term hip is said to have originated in African American Vernacular English in the...
" (in the sense of fashionable) (1904) and "chavChavA chav is a term that is used in the United Kingdom to describe a stereotype of teenagers and young adults from an underclass background.-Etymology:...
" (2004); - "peace economy" (1905) and "su doku" (2005); and
- "muckraking" (1906) and "bovveredThe Catherine Tate ShowThe Catherine Tate Show is a British television sketch comedy written by Catherine Tate and Aschlin Ditta. Tate also stars in all but one of the show's sketches, which feature a wide range of characters. The Catherine Tate Show airs on BBC Two and is shown worldwide through the BBC...
" (2006).
A different approach was adopted in 2007 with ten words identified for each decade from 1900-99. Several words, such as "bling", "chav" and "sex up
Sexed up
Sexed up refers to making something more sexually appealing. Since 2003 it has been used in the sense of making something more attractive than it really is by selective presentation; a modern update to the phrase "hyped up". Variants include "sex it up"...
" were also chosen to represent 2000-07. "Footprint" (as, for example, in "carbon footprint
Carbon footprint
A carbon footprint has historically been defined as "the total set of greenhouse gas emissions caused by an organization, event, product or person.". However, calculating a carbon footprint which conforms to this definition is often impracticable due to the large amount of data required, which is...
") was referred to - almost in passing - as the choice for 2007.
There was no Language Report in 2008, but Dent produced a volume entitled Words of the Year that was published as a paperback by the OUP.
"Bubbling under"
A regular feature from 2004 was a section entitled “Bubbling Under” which recorded "words of the moment” that had not yet found their way into dictionaries but which “have shown clear signs of semi-permanence and of fairly wide usage" . Examples were "crackberry", "fugly" and "gene editing" (in 2004), "chugger", "Google bombing" and "happy slappingHappy slapping
Happy slapping was a fad in the UK, in which someone assaulted an unwitting victim while others recorded the assault...
" (2005), "WAGs
WAGs
WAGs is an acronym, used particularly by the British tabloid press, to describe the wives and girlfriends of high-profile footballers, originally the England national football team. The term came into common use during the 2006 FIFA World Cup, although it had been used occasionally before that...
", "dark tourism
Dark tourism
Dark tourism is tourism involving travel to sites associated with death and suffering. Thanatourism, derived from the Ancient Greek word thanatos for the personification of death, is associated with dark tourism but refers more specifically to violent death; it is used in fewer contexts than the...
" and "blook
Blook
A blook is printed book that contains or is based on content from a blog.The first printed blook was User Interface Design for Programmers, by Joel Spolsky, published by Apress on June 26, 2001, based on his blog Joel on Software...
" (2006), and "burkini" and "gingerism" (2007).
The wider context
The Language Report was one of the more successful attempts to disseminate trends in English in a scholarly, but accessible and readable form. An earlier publication, though more traditional in format, had been the Oxford Dictionary of New Words, compiled in Sara Tulloch in 1992, while Bill BrysonBill Bryson
William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of Britain for most of his adult life before moving back to the US in 1995...
's Mother Tongue: The English Language (1990) and Made in America (1994) provided, from the viewpoint of an anglophile Mid-Westerner, entertaining accounts of the development of English on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
. In 2006 the BBC television series Balderdash and Piffle
Balderdash and Piffle
Balderdash and Piffle was a British television programme made by Takeaway Media for the BBC. Presented by Victoria Coren, it was a companion to the Oxford English Dictionary's Wordhunt, in which the writers of the dictionary asked the public for help in finding the origins and first known citations...
, presented by Victoria Coren
Victoria Coren
Victoria Elizabeth Coren is a British writer, presenter and champion poker player. Coren writes weekly columns for The Observer and The Guardian newspapers and hosts the BBC Four television quiz show Only Connect....
, highlighted how words found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
and the type of evidence that supported such entries . Referring to this process and to its illustration by Balderdash and Piffle, Dent noted that, since 2000, quarterly updates of Oxford's "revision work" had appeared on-line .
Good versus bad English
The Language Report first appeared at a time when there was concern in some quarters about a perceived decline in the use of written English due, in part, to the growth of e-mailE-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
and text messaging. Others, such as the broadcaster John Humphrys
John Humphrys
Desmond John Humphrys , is a Welsh-born British author, journalist and presenter of radio and television, who has won many national broadcasting awards...
and the lawyer and ethicist Sir Ian Kennedy, were concerned about what Humphrys called “sloppy, overblown, cliché-ridden language” and Kennedy saw as the undermining of the "symbolic importance of language" (for example, in the field of health, talking about "the patient experience" rather than "the experience of patients") . The novelist Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
(1922-1995), an admirer of Fowler's Modern English Usage
Fowler's Modern English Usage
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage , by Henry Watson Fowler , is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing...
(1926), was apt, as he himself put it, to "spot some fresh linguistic barbarism and [I] am off again" .
However, Dent, who noted that "there has never been a finite golden age in our language's history, nor a monolithic, unified English" , did not tend to take sides; rather, the Language Reports illustrated how English evolves and, for better or worse, is adapted for differing purposes and media. Dent anticipated in 2006 that "discussions of good versus bad English, and predictions as to which will conquer, will continue as they always have done"