Sunday, 22 June 2014

            Oxford English Dictionary terms 

1.   New words have entered the English language through ‘borrowing’ whilst being in contact with people of different cultures with diverse languages, for instance ‘The word cushy was borrowed from Urdu by the British military in India’, words were also formed as a description to the conditions they were in.
2.       Whilst reading through the article I had to look up the following words to receive their definition: ‘spike bozzle’ (meaning to badly damage or destroy an enemy weapon), ‘napoo’ (meaning that there is no more of something, it’s gone, finished - oringally army slang, presently rarely used) and ‘maconochie’ (meaning vegetables stewed with meat in a tin).  

3.       The OED have chosen 100 terms to include in the list within the article to provide a ‘record of social history’ – I feel they have chosen a broad range that covers multiple years and numerous segments under the heading ‘War terms’ – it shows how the war effected everyone, e.g. ‘domestic and civilian life’ and ‘life in the trenches’.
4.   I could use this corpus of terminology to investigate how many terms are used today or how many of the words today’s generation know the definition to, perhaps to understand how effectively social history has been captured through learning about historical events. 
5.     This article could be linked to transcripts written with present modern day speech from various dialects, socialects and idiolects so that a comparison can be made to portray how language has altered over the years but to also identify what has stayed the same, maybe due to high significance or simplistic catchy terminology. 

1 comment:

  1. A thoughtful response, especially about the far-reaching effects of war and the language of war. You could look at how the lexical field of war is used now or in a literary context or what words people associate with war in different age groups or, or, or!

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