Mind your slang-uage
a ban on playground patois! not bloody likely.
PUPILS must use standard English and no slang inside the gates of Sheffield Springs Academy, the school has decided. It would be more sensible if they used standard English outside the gates, and enjoyed the vivacity and iron laws of slang in the playground.
Given a chance, children make up their own language in their own domain, as they do morality. Anyone who doesn’t use the right slang or breaks the moral code is mocked, assaulted and turned into a social leper by other children. “Tell-tale tit!” they chant, or used to chant, at informers. “His tongue shall be slit, / And all the little puppydogs shall have a little bit.”
That rhyme was not taught by the teachers. No doubt any child now caught chanting it would be met by “remedial intervention for issues around socialisation”. I’m not even saying the childish morality is right, for it protects gang control. But it is at least a clear and inviolable rule of behaviour, which we half adhere to as adults. Not for true-born Britons the denunciation of neighbours by an unsigned note dropped into the brass lion’s mouth, Venetian style.
The job of the schoolteacher is to turn the firm moral codes of children to good ends: to steal from no one, not just from strangers and enemies; to use violence in defence of the weak, not for their subjugation. And so it is with slang.
By slang, I take it, the authorities here mean non-standard vocabulary and grammar. It starts simply with words you wouldn’t use in the drawing-room. Most children, it must be remembered, have never been in a drawing-room. “Bloody” was once a shocking example. In a travel book about New South Wales, Australia, published in 1847, Alexander Marjoribanks noted that he had heard a bullock-driver use bloody 25 times in 15 minutes. At that rate, he calculated, in 50 years he’d use it 18 million times.
It was the word that Shaw chose in 1912 for Eliza Doolittle to scandalise Mrs Higgins’ “athome day” in Pygmalion: “Walk! Not bloody likely [Sensation]. I am going to take a taxi.” By 1964, when the film My Fair Lady came out, bloody wouldn’t do the trick, and Eliza was made to urge her chosen horse at Ascot: “Come on, Dover, move yer bloomin’ arse!”
The schoolmasterly objection to bloody used to be that it was an unimaginative adjective. That was to misunderstand the word’s grammatical function, which was as an intensive, like the prefix a- (afeared, amaze, aquake) or the suffix -ard (drunkard, bastard, coward). Bloody, like the stronger F-word, could even be inserted into other adjectives to strengthen them, like a whisky chaser. Hence abso-bloody-lutely. Note that the interfix (bloody) is located before the stressed syllable. All this is done as regularly as in Latin grammar by children in the playground. That is as true for the ghastly Estuary-gangsta patois of today as it was of Eliza’s quaint Cockney.
Through all the laws of grammar, slang makes different stipulations from standard English. “Isn’t” is standard; “ain’t” is held to be slang; “innit” is definitely so. But slang remains beautifully regular, or its users couldn’t understand one another. They do enjoy excluding aliens, such as teachers and other prodnose authority figures. Yet the glory of the slang lexicon is to generate words that bind groups together.
Slang words are produced by polished mechanisms. Thus plain “esra” in back-slang is, in rhyming-slang, “aris”, which is short for Aristotle, which rhymes with bottle, short for bottle and glass, which has its own rhyme. It is a misapprehension to see slang as a secret language. The cant called Polari may have plundered Italian to come up with, “Charpering omi. Scarper!” (“Run! It’s the police”), but it would be a poor policeman who didn’t know what was meant. Polari is no language – you’d be lucky to find anyone who could come up with 100 words of it. It is a verbal game, and close-knit groups play such games.
So the duty of a schoolteacher is to encourage language games in their rightful places. The game in the playground is slang; the game in the classroom is standard English. If standard English is not taught in the classroom, the child is betrayed. The pupil will never find work if he cannot spell, or speak in a polite register. In that, the staff of Sheffield Springs Academy are right. The child might even shake hands and say “How do you do?” on occasion. It’s like a suit: not worn every day, but needed for funerals, court appearances and perhaps to get a job.
As for Sheffield Springs Academy, its website says: “Every student is expected to aim high and outperform their best.” Heaven knows what that means. Giving 110%, no doubt. The thought counts, but the logic is awry and the English could do with a brushup. Grammatically, “every” does not go with “their”. It’s a failure of concord. But now I’m sounding like a pedant. That is a task for the classroom, and the English language is a playground. – © The Daily Telegraph UK 2012