Wednesday, April 12, 2006

"Playing like a spaz"

Tiger Woods, the golfer described his own performance the other day by saying, "I played like a spaz"... and I had typed a very long piece about this, full of references to negative semantic space, historical tributes to an icon of my teenage years (Joey Deacon) and Language & Representation, but some s*d just blew a fuse in our house, so it's all gone. Curses!

So have a look at this article about the words "spaz" and "spastic" from the BBC news website and its disability issues site, Ouch,and I reckon you can work out why it's interesting and how it might help you with your work on ENA1 Language & Representation.

And check out the top 10 most hated words as voted for by Ouch's readers. What's interesting to me is how different the two sets of charts are: the words hated by disabled people are quite different to those voted for by non-disabled people. Why might this be?


Black British English vs MLE

The latest episode of Lexis is out and it features an interview with Ife Thompson about lots of issues connected to Black British English, i...