ABSTRACT
Strong words, but of little historical relevance to the linguist, who records, but does not regret, language change. However, the strong feelings they evince have to be recorded too, for they have
ever-renewed synchronic relevance. It appears that languages, like civilizations, know that they are mortal - indeed, historical linguists metaphorically describe the demise of languages in terms of murder or suicide - and that the violent feelings this awareness provokes, reflecting as they do the violence of linguistic change, ruffle the equanimity of the synchronic état de langue. Or at least the equanimity of its most vocal supporters, grammarians, writers, or authors of dictionaries. The past and future of a language become the object of synchronic struggles, as arbiters of linguistic taste resist the moral corruption of linguistic change. But here we are drifting from the purely historical - the systemic evolution of language, in which no individual speaker is involved as such, not even as Unknown Coiner - to the social. A linguistic change in progress involves real people, and questions of prestige, conflict, and struggle are raised. Thus, a study of a teenage subculture in Reading in the 1970s describes the appearance of new verbs with non-standard tense markings, as in ‘we fucking chins them with bottles’, or ‘we bunks it over here a lot’ (where ‘bunk’ means ‘play truant’).1 What we have here is not only a new vocabulary, but a new syntax in the making. It emerges through violence - the violence done to language, the violence of linguistic corruption; and also the violence of the social conditions that the subculture reflects.
