Three great events in English Language and Linguistics this week that YOU should come to:
Jonathon Green: Slang Lexicographer
Monday 6 November, 16.00 in Fulton 107
You are welcome to join Approaches to Meaning students to hear a talk by the English language's preeminent slang lexicographer. (See his dictionary here.) To quote the beginning of Green's newest book:
----------------------Slang is an unsafe space. It has no time for political correctness, none for true belief. Neither is it that pious product of Victorian muscular Christianity, Mrs Do-As-You-Would-Be-Done-By, nor does it turn the other cheek, other, perhaps than shifting a buttock all the better to deliver a noisesome fart. Racist and nationalist, all-purpose-sexist, variously phobic, if it lacks micro-aggressions then it is because such piffling teases in turn lack sufficient antagonism. It is contemptuous of the special snowflakes and their identity politics and if it tosses snowballs, they are lined with stones. It is filled with stereotypes, how else to define the necessary ‘other’ against whom it aims its weaponry, but it lays down no laws, no diktats, no ukases. It is neither naive nor optimistic, it does not demand that things be otherwise, it knows too much. It is, in other words, real. Too real?
So some complain, but slang, with its emphasis on sex, drugs and at least in a figurative sense, all the self-indulgences that can be labelled rock ’n’ roll, represents its users not as they should be, but how they are. As the American comedian Lenny Bruce noted, everybody wants 'what should be', but 'what should be' does not exist. There is only 'what is.' Slang is. Call me a cynic, but to me slang paints a picture that shows ourselves at our most human. Which doesn’t, unfortunately, mean nice. Slang is an equal-opportunity vilifier. Look at those words: to steal from the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who was talking about human beings, nasty, brutish and short.
John Richardson: The imagined community: ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ in British fascist discourse
ROLLS Research on Languages and Linguistics Wednesday 8 November, 1pm; Jubilee G36
Richardson is visiting us from Loughborough University.The abstract for this talk will follow early next week.
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