ABSTRACT
Building up their everyday vocabulary is not without its difficulties and dangers for some children. Precisely because a word seems so ordinary, so rooted in everyday experience for an adult, he or she may be proportionately more outraged by a child who uses a different word. I have never forgotten a discussion I had with a teacher from a South Yorkshire school who was adamant that no child in her class was going to write under her picture ‘This is me playing with my mates’, though this is an everyday word for ‘friends’ in that area. Children are often criticised for using vocabulary that seems to a teacher limited or regional or impolite – as in the requests for going to the toilet mentioned on p.29. I remember another angry teacher declaring: ‘I will not have them coming in in the morning and saying “Wotcher, miss!”’
