News and events

Leave our kids alone

Published 5 October 2010

Oscar-winning actress Emma Thompson declared war on 'yoof' language but Raf Salkie, professor of language studies at the university, argues we should leave our kids alone.

"I admire Emma Thompson immensely. She's a terrific actor and director, and a brave campaigner for refugees. But when it comes to 'speaking properly', she is talking tosh.

Not that she's alone. In fact, she's the latest in a long line of geniuses who should have known better.

Emma Thompson has told pupils at her old school not to use slang words such as 'like' and 'innit'. She told the Radio Times that people who did not speak properly made her feel 'insane'.

She's in good company. In 1638, the poet John Milton complained that the language in common use in England was becoming 'corrupt and depraved'.

The author of Gulliver's Travels agreed. In 1712, Jonathan Swift grumbled that English was being 'maimed', in particular by poets and 'young men at universities'.

Another of my heroes, George Orwell, wrote in 1946: "Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way."

I could quote many more in the same vein. When people make the same complaint over hundreds of years, you have to stop taking them seriously. Instead, you should ask what they all have in common that makes them write the same nonsense.

The answer is obvious. Milton was 30 when he held forth about English, Swift was 45, Orwell 43, and Emma Thompson 51. All middle-aged grumps. All of them wallowing in nostalgia for the golden days of their youth.

It's understandable that people who have begun to feel 'past it' should complain about young people. Teenagers seem to be having all the fun, all the sex, all the excitement. Sometimes we oldies can't understand what they are talking about.

I don't have a problem with teenagers. Many of them are having very little fun: they are bullied, prone to sexually transmitted diseases, and have a shortage of adults who are worth listening to for advice. Most teenagers are far more intelligent than their parents, in my experience. If teenagers want to use slang that we don't understand, we should leave them to it.

But no, say the grumps. Let's criticise them. In particular, let's criticise them for the way they talk.

I say that we should stop reproaching young people, and instead let them show us how to stop destroying the planet.

The English language has changed massively over hundreds of years. Some people have used the language beautifully (step forward Milton, Swift and Orwell). Some people haven't. It has always been like that.

The English spelling system is insane. The vowel sound in 'cheese' can be spelt in nineteen different ways. When teenagers send a text saying 'Can I cum 2 C U?' they are using 10 characters instead of 15 (sensible), and they are reforming English spelling from below – long overdue, and something that their grandchildren will bless them for.

By the way, some of the middle-aged grumps who complain about the decline of English are the same ones who hark back to a golden age when crime was rare, decent women could walk the streets, and food tasted better.

Orwell used to pine for the time before the Great War: in his novel Coming up for Air, the main character remembers a time when there was 'a feeling of security' that people don't have now.

Just like complaints about the standard of English, these gripes have gone on for hundreds of years. In 1898, a Brighton Magistrate named Charles Heathcote said that "the manners of children are deteriorating, [...] the child of today is coarser, more vulgar, less refined than his parents were."

Do you get the picture? It's the same middle-aged fantasy in a different form. There's a terrific book about this: Geoffrey Pearson's Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears. Pearson shows the same moans appearing regularly over the centuries like a stuck record.

There never was a golden age of Merrie England without crime, and there never was a golden age when everyone used English properly.

Of course, there is (and always has been) such a thing as sloppy writing. My students sometimes produce it. What should I do: call them ignorant morons, or recognise that they are writing about complex and difficult topics, and that sometimes they will struggle to express themselves?

Should I grump, or should I try to understand and help?

What do you think?"

Raphael Salkie is Professor of Language Studies at the University of Brighton. He writes here in a personal capacity.