Every morning on the bus to work I, like many of my fellow miserable commuters, read the free Metro newspaper happy in the knowledge that its cheery banality will do nothing more than wake me as I trundle towards Manchester.
This changed this morning when I read what I believed to be amongst the top ten of ridiculous stories of the year so far (yes I know it is only mid-February pedants). The story was simply thus: A school in Sheffield has banned its pupils from speaking in slang in order to better prepare them for interviews later in life.
All sounds so innocent and quite okay, doesn’t it? Well, no. There is so much wrong with this policy that one struggles to know where to start. First of all let us start with the basics. How on earth do they expect to police this nonsensical idea? Will they have specially trained snoopers listening on every conversation ready to pounce? I can just see it now, Mr Rogers and Mrs Smithson by day are dull geography teachers but, by night, they are specially trained ninjas able to sneak up on any unsuspecting teenager. Does this school actually genuinely believe that the use of slang will stop these children from getting jobs? Let me tell you a story, when I was at school the word we used to describe something as good was “crucial”. It was also used in a rather forgettable sitcom starring Lenny Henry as midway through the programme his (allegedly) cool character would turn to the camera and give a “guide to cruciality”. The thought of this sends shivers down my spine but my point is this, I used slang when I was at school and guess what? I have a job! Who would have thought it?
Another thing is who decides which words are, and are not, acceptable? Will each teacher be armed with books of permitted and banned words?
“Jones, come here boy,” a teacher will say, “I have it on good authority that just after history you did say the wood ‘dude’. One half hour detention for you.”
Quite scary and also ignoring one immovable fact about this wonderful language of ours. That it constantly evolves. That’s right it changes. We do not use the same words that we used four hundred or five hundred years ago. Indeed the greatest of all wordsmiths, William Shakespeare, actually invented words that today are in common usage. Slang words are just that, they are invented words that, who knows, may well come into use by everybody one day and no over zealous teachers will be able to stop that.
There is one final and actually very important thing that this school is overlooking when they try to enforce this ludricous ban. That is teenage slang gives teenagers an identity, it enables then to be able to converse with their own peer group without fear of the prying adults being able to understand a single word that is being said. This will build confidence and, sound the fanfare, help them later in life including in interviews.
So, the next time a school, or anywhere else for that matter, tries to ban slang we should tell them to chill out dudes, take a chill pill and stop. Otherwise me and my homies will take them down to China Town and go old school all over them.
