Teen follies

[George Thompson]

> "Archbishop Trent", Richard Chenevix Trench, who's in the new Oxford DNB.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>
Date: Thursday, December 14, 2006 3:51 pm
Subject: Re: Teen follies

> >
> > the crack staff at Language Log Plaza is at work on tracking down
> the> source of the story.
>
> "Archbishop Trent", I'm forgetting his first name, a prominent mid-
> 19thC English amateur philologist, wrote that the English rustic
> had a
> vocabulary of X00 words -- I forget the count, but absurdly low,
> ca. 400
> or so.  I saw this published as a fact when I was a boy -- not in the
> Victorian era, neither.
>
> English rustics must know X00/2 nouns for the animals they care for,
> their body parts, the terms designating the males, females and young,
> their colors, Ec.; plus the names of the tools they use and their
> parts. Cats have paws, horses hooves & pigs trotters, for instance.
> Throw in
> nouns for household furnishings, articles of clothing, &c., and a few
> verbs, and they've already exceeded their quota.  Teenagers have fewer
> things to talk about than rustics do, of course.  But no doubt many of
> us, English rustics, teenagers, and others. often talk for hours using
> 100 words or so.
>
> Pointing no fingers, of course.
>
> So someone at the BBC reads books by mid-19th C amateur
> philologists and
> makes them relevant to the modern world -- nothing wrong with that,
> surely?
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Date: Thursday, December 14, 2006 12:35 pm
> Subject: Re: Teen follies
>
> > On Dec 14, 2006, at 6:54 AM, Jon Lighter wrote:
> >
> > > BBC sez: "Teenagers use just 20 words for a third of their speech,
> > > according to a new study by Lancaster University."
> > >
> > >   They're British teens. No telling about ours.
> > >
> > >   Two of the words may be "porn" and "dekeck."
> > >
> > >   Don't take my word for it; take the quiz instead:
> > >
> > >   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6179573.stm
> >
> > the crack staff at Language Log Plaza is at work on tracking down
> the> source of the story.  BBC News will apparently believe
> anything (and
> > will cheerfully re-work stories so as to make them more exciting and
> > entertaining -- think cow dialects, for example).  we're thinking of
> > giving them some kind of award for their reporting on language
> issues.>
> > so stay tuned.
> >
> > arnold
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
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>

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