Listening week seven
The secret life of words
Discussion
- Which of these words are real words?
- Who should decide which words should enter the dictionary?
- If nobody uses a word any more, should if still get a place in the dictionary?
- What words are there in your language that young people use, but that older people complain about or don't understand?
Task one - Note-taking and comprehension
Listen to the talk, and note down as much information as you can about:
- The word-of-the-year vote
- The speaker, Anne Curzan
- The field of linguistics
- What we'll look at in her course
- The American Dialect Society
Notepad
Task two - Defining words
Listen again to the second part of the talk. How does the speaker define the following words?
Task three - gap fill
Listen to a short excerpt from the talk.
Task four - Transcription
Now listen to one of the sections again, and try to transcribe everything you hear. Take your time, and replay each part as many times as you like. Aim for accuracy rather than speed here.
Check answers
We'll talk about all these examples in the coming lectures, as we explore where words come from, and how they change over time. I like calling this kind of investigation: exploring the secret lives of words, because what we're doing is digging below the surface of English words. We use words every day and we take them for granted; I mean we have to, because if we're going to talk with each other, we can't think about every word we're saying and where it came from. But it's fascinating when we do pause, and consider where these words came from and how they work. It tells us a lot about language, and about ourselves as speakers. Now some of you may have cringed when I said the word 'heighth', or I quoted the song lyric 'I wanna lay in my bed'; these are examples of language change, exactly what we'll be talking about. And I'm struck every day by the vibrancy of our language and the creativity with it as we exploit the riches of English vocabulary and create new words, or we change the meanings of words we already have, or sometimes we just abandon words, stop using them.
Written response
Your teacher will open up a post on Google Classroom. Write approximately 200 words on the following:
- What is your opinion on the words-of-the-year discussed by the speaker? Do you think that words such as these deserve to be entered into dictionaries?
- Since you’ve been in the UK, what words have you discovered that you believe should be nominated for Word of the Year? Give reasons for your choices.