Posted on 05/29/2012 5:14:15 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The future of written English will owe more to Hollywood films than Dickens or Shakespeare, if the findings of a study into children’s writing are anything to go by.
The analysis of 74,000 short stories found that their written work was littered with Americanisms, exclamation marks and references to celebrities.
Researchers who looked at the entries to a national competition found they were increasingly using American words such as garbage, trash can, sidewalk, candy, sneakers, soda, cranky and flashlight.
The stories, written by pupils aged seven to 13, show how fairy cakes are referred to as cupcakes and a dinner jacket has become a tuxedo.
‘Smart’ is now often used for ‘clever’ and ‘cranky’ for ‘irritable’.
Celebrity culture also has a powerful influence on children’s work, with Simon Cowell and Argentinian footballer Lionel Messi among the famous names cropping up repeatedly.
But pupils are let down by basic spelling, punctuation and grammar, according to the study by Oxford University Press, which looked at the entries to BBC Radio 2’s ‘500 Words’ competition.
Children stumbled over simple spellings such as ‘does’ and ‘clothes’ and struggled to use the past tense correctly, often saying ‘rised’ instead of ‘rose’ or ‘thinked’ instead of ‘thought’.
Researchers also found that punctuation was underused, especially semi-colons and speech marks. Some did not know how to use capital letters.
However, exclamation marks were overused. Researchers found 35,171 examples in total, with some young writers using five at a time.
The study of more than 31million words will be compared with future research to see how written language evolves. Popular US fiction such as the Twilight vampire novels and films is thought to be fuelling the increasing use of American vocabulary and spelling.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Well, it's about time they learnt proper English. (Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?)
Indians seem to retain Edwardian English....
The troublemakers are mostly Pakis -- moslems...
In Texas, we call it a coke. Those Brits will lose their minds if they try to figure that out.
Typical conversation:
“You want a coke?”
“Sure. I’ll have a coke.”
“What kinda coke do ya want?”
“I’ll have a Dr. Pepper.”
Dot, not feather, right?
thinked? should be thunk
like stinked should be stunk
Brits go to hospital.
Americans go to jail.
yeh the dot kind
or more confusingly “the coke i want is a pepsi”!
It's a curse which desecrates the Precious Blood of Jesus Christ.
It might also refer to some blasphemous imitation of the bleeding Christ, or to a Protestant skepticism about the literal presence of the blood of Christ in communion. And when we talk about bleeding heart liberals nobody religious gets bent out of shape about it.
I notice in online English English, frequency of “your” for “you’re” and “to” for “too” seems to be approaching that for American English.
Pity the fools.
Top-tips Freepers, if your[sic] sending in a resumé, don’t make to[sic] many of these errors. Prospective employers will toss you’re[sic] submission into there[sic] bin.
It personally irritates me when Americans talk of ‘writing someone’ instead of writing TO someone. Having said that, Britons in the 18th century apparently spoke and wrote more like contemporary Americans than contemporary Brits, so all the Americans have really done is preserve a manner of speaking and writing that disappeared in Britain sometime during the 19th century. Words like ‘chore’ instead of ‘errand’ and ‘Fall’ instead of ‘Autumn’ are examples of archaic English words that were re-imported to Britain after falling out of use in their native land...
It personally irritates me when Americans talk of ‘writing someone’ instead of writing TO someone. Having said that, Britons in the 18th century apparently spoke and wrote more like contemporary Americans than contemporary Brits, so all the Americans have really done is preserve a manner of speaking and writing that disappeared in Britain sometime during the 19th century. Words like ‘chore’ instead of ‘errand’ and ‘Fall’ instead of ‘Autumn’ are examples of archaic English words that were re-imported to Britain after falling out of use in their native land...
2 great things. One British and one German. It works here. If it weren’t for TG, I would have probably never head of Sabine. I don’t pay attention to the racing world at all.
Sabine isn’t exceedingly good looking or anything but she makes up for it in personality. Apparently she’s from one of the wealthiest families in Europe.
I don’t know much about her racing career but I do know that she’s done more laps around the Nürburgring track than any other person. She’s done some 30,000 miles on that track alone.
Used in Harry Potter and bound to show up in American school kids writing: torch, dustbin, trainers, sweets.
Of course.
Sabine has from what I have seen on TG a great and fun personality. I have no complaints on the looks either.
Definite articles eh?
Do you go to church, or the church? :)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.