[lg policy] Top 10 language stories of 2010

[Dennis Baron]

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The top 10 language stories of 2010

2010 was a year rich in stories about language, not the uplifting kind that celebrate  effective, poetic communication, but stories about attempts to regulate language, stifle it, even kill it off outright. Here are the top 10 language stories of the year, in no particular order.\

1. Book banning is one way to regulate language, but 2010 saw one school district take censorship even further, banning a dictionary because it contained words of a sexual nature. The district later relented, allowing students to look up words, but only if they had a signed permission slip from their parents. Such actions underline the common belief that language is too dangerous a phenomenon to go unchecked.

2. 2010 was the year in which e-books finally began to eat away at the market share of traditional print thanks to the iPad and the Kindle. As readers—better known as end-users in the world of digital text—switched from page to screen, some found out the hard way that in the brave new world of e-books, content is not sold outright. Instead, it’s licensed under a “terms of use” agreement which allows licensors to reach directly into a computer, phone, or e-reader and wipe books from the hard drive any time they want, for any reason, or for no reason at all. Plus advertisers and government agents don’t need a warrant if they want to see what end-users have been reading: all they have to do is click. . . .\

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____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English                    
University of Illinois 
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                               

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

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