Balderdash and Piffle, or Keep It Real

What a stuffy bunch of old farts are in charge of content of the Oxford English Dictionary. Surely we the English-speaking people should be in charge of it instead. I’m sitting here watching BBC2’s Balderdash And Piffle while Dave is out at a school governors’ meeting, and I’m almost speechless at their inflexible rejections of the obvious. Which is ironic, really, since they aren’t that interested in “talk” and are instead obsessed with getting evidence of a word’s usage from written sources alone. The case currently being investigated is “nit nurse”, which they have sourced from a 1985 Guardian cutting stating, “Whatever happened to the nit nurse?” So this means that they are claiming that the first recorded instance of the term “nit nurse” is from a question wondering why they have become obsolete.

My studies in Linguistics taught me that language is in a permanent state of flux, and it’s speech that adapts long before the graphical representation of that speech. In our formative years, we are discouraged from writing in a colloquial style and encouraged to be formal and strictly adherent to grammatical rules and formulae, so it’s no wonder that there’s a significant delay to changes in our vernacular being noted by the pen. But the OED needs to spend more time in sound archives and watching film and video material too – if speech has been put onto tape, it’s a factual, accurate record that surely has to be considered as valid source material. But if the squirmingly pernickety Chief Editor still won’t accept this, they should consider an alternative: television subtitle archives. It’s a shame that teletext subtitles for the hard-of-hearing really only exist from the early '90s onwards, as they could be a marvellous mine of information for language investigators. Of course anything that pre-dates this will have to be subtitled when it is re-broadcast now, at least on network television. When I started subtitling, it quickly became clear just how many words I was typing into the screen that I had never actually had to spell before. Is hard-on hyphenated, for example? How do you transcribe Ali G (punani, aiiight?) or Bo Selecta?

On that note, it’s time for ER. And, lacking a degree in medicine, that’s a whole other subtitling nightmare. ("CBC, BP, KUB, lytes, sux, trauma panel, tox screen, C-spine and a head CT...SATS are down, vitals are good, we need to tube him, V-tach, V-fib, asystole, 10 of lidocaine, 48 of adrenalin, bag him, I'm in..." Cue continue spouting bollocks until "Time of death" 45 minutes later.)

REBECCA