Authors Electric

The A level results are in and it appears there has been an overall 13% decline in the number of students choosing to study English Language and Literature. The reason? According to several prominent writers and teachers, it’s all down to Michael Gove. His recently reformed English GCSEs have taken all the joy out of the subject, thereby deterring young people from continuing it in the Sixth Form. That is quite a claim. It ignores other factors at play, most importantly the government’s push for more students to study STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) subjects; any promotion of one subject has to be at the expense of another. That is the price we pay in the UK for not following the Baccalaureate model. Still, the message is that English GCSEs aren’t as fun as they used to be. As an assistant headteacher put it, in the  Guardian  article referred to above: ‘GCSE English language is sucking the joy out of the study of how we communicate: ...

  In last month’s blog, I said I was spring cleaning my office and, specifically, tidying my book shelves, which meant I had to throw some books away to make room for new ones.  As other bookworms will know, what this really means is to make enough room to stand all my books upright with spines to attention, instead of slotting them in higgledy-piggledly, to lounge languidly about, horizontally, on top of the others. Ha! I’ve tried this before and I know exactly what happens. I pick up a lounging book and it infects and entrances me, so that a while later I come to and find myself lounging about too, in my armchair, half way through its pages..  You know it’s true. To be fair, you have to give a book on death row a chance. In order to find those I can safely discard, I’ve decided that a book worth keeping has to have taught me something, ie it’s one of the ‘great’, or it has entertained me, in which case it’s one of the ‘good’. All keepers have to be some...

(1-A. 2-A. 3-B. 4-B. 5-B. 6-A. 7-A. 8-A. 9-A. 10- A. I'll explain later).  Did you catch Stephen Fry on Radio 2 recently, talking about words? He’s something of an expert having worked on a series of programmes about plain English. His main point this time was that, unlike more regimented languages, English is constantly evolving, to embrace how people actually use words. I hadn’t really thought about it, that dictionaries record usage rather than dictating the rules. What a great example of honouring creativity! How sensible! Fry pointed out this aspect of our beautiful language, when he was asked if he really was the creator of the term ‘luvvie’ for an actor sort of person. The OED lists him as the first person to use the word.  Fry quoted another example of his creating a word that has entered common usage, with his friend Hugh Laurie. The word was ‘spoffle’, to described the muffler spongy bit which is placed on the end of a microphone during recording. He...