As mentioned before, I’m a Brit who has experienced many different dialects and local slang of British English. These idioms and colloquialisms often sound alien or are “bad” English but, to me, they are interesting, charming, quirky, and about identity. Unfortunately, I can’t get my head around modern versions of slang or phrases. They make me cringe and my shoulders tense as if one of my old strict English teachers has possessed my body and heard the phrase, “can’t get my head ‘round.”
Recently, there was an article in The Guardian newspaper about British schools banning slang in English classes, at the end of the article is a convenient list of slang and fillers. Oddly, I am comfortable with some although, others were painful to my core, possessed by my old English teacher again! If you would like to see the whole article click the link below.
Masami and I teach how to communicate in English. Unless our students request to learn slang or idioms or if slang and idioms are relevant to the students’ needs, we avoid these words or phrases.
But the professionals do it!
In response to this article, someone commented about the novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, whose works I studied at school. His comment is as follows,
Your article reminds me of the story Robert Graves tells of his meeting in Dorchester with Thomas Hardy, who said he was being plagued by critics, one of whom complained of a poem where Hardy had written “his shape smalled in the distance”. Hardy said he’d recently looked up the word in a dictionary, in case he had made it up, only to “find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel”. So much for banning new language.
Peter Branston
Brentford, London
I read the quote, “his shape smalled in the distance”, to Masami, she asked, “What does that mean?”. “Smalled”, being highlighted by Masami’s grammatical expertise and my word processor’s spellchecker right now.
I like this use of English, context and grammar rules make it mean what the writer wants it to but the important thing is that I understand it, not everyone. Whether people didn’t like the use of grammar or didn’t understand the meaning of “smalled“, it didn’t become popular to use. Now, if only selfie, bants, adulting, and addicting could disappear, my old strict English teacher could have a bit of a rest.
【あなたの心が伝わるあなただけの英語】
英語でのコミュニケーションをあなたらしい英語で。一人一人のレベル、能力、興味に合った教材や方法での英語レッスンプログラムをオンラインで学べます。
”あなたの英語”でコミュニケートしたい方は、まずは無料カウンセリングをご予約ください。
