Register of language & speech

• Appropriateness to both person and context is what you should remember when discussing register.

2) Think of something that happens in your life that you are likely to tell someone else about.  It can be real or fictional.  Write out how you would describe this event to:

• a friend
• your parents
• your personal tutor or other authority figure

3) How would you react to an unfamiliar doctor who received you in her office wearing old jeans, a sweat-shirt and gold chains and who greeted you with the phrase, “You all-right”?

Basing your remarks on the reactions to you the situation outlined above write a paragraph on the purpose and function of:

• formal dress
• formal registers

The Common Register

'No man's English is all English', remarks the Preface to the Oxford English Dictionary.  To put it another way, no one uses all the registers that are available.  The common register, as its name implies, is used by all; the colloquial and slang by most, and dialect forms by many.  After that, it's a question of where our occupations and interests take us.  The wider an individual's interests, the wider their command of register and the scope of their knowledge.

Colloquial, Slang & Dialect

6) Below is a passage written in Cockney rhyming slang.

'Nice little battle this, ain't it?'

'Yer.  Have a butcher's at the ice-cream at the 'aystack.’

'Filth?'

'Dunno.  'E's been eyeballing us ever since 'e came through the Rory.'

'Nah, 'e's sweet. I know 'is boat.  'E's an iron I was in the shovel with.'

‘Ere, you're wanted on the odie.  It's that bloke 'oo 'ad 'is collar felt

        for a bit of Bob Hope.'

  'The gevalt that bloke gets into.'

• Translate the dialogue above, which contains Cockney rhyming and other slang, into a formal register, using Latinisms where you can (beverage rather than drink, for example).
• Discuss the difference in the tone of the two pieces.
• Analyse the character that has emerged through your translation.  What kind of person is he?  What makes you think this?
• What insight has this given you into how playwrights create their characters?

The literary, scientific and technical registers

These two registers - scientific and technical - can be grouped together because they have a number of things in common:

• Both have many sub-registers, the technical register embraces the terminology of thousands of occupations from the making of false teeth through the programming of computers to the building of ships. The scientific register includes the terminology of professions as diverse as nuclear physicist and professor of environmental science, astronomer, and forensic surgeon.
• Both draw heavily on the Latin side of English for their terminology.
• Both contain large amounts of something called 'jargon'.

 

• Jargon

Philip Howard offers the following definition of jargon:

The definitions that concern us here are the second and third.

The specialised vocabulary used when expert talks to expert is known as technical jargon.  It is used for two main reasons:

• It is a kind of shorthand.  Much quicker to refer to a lien than to 'a right to retain another person's property pending discharge of a debt'; to talk of quarks than of 'hypothetical elementary particles postulated together with their antiparticles to be fundamental units of baryons and mesons', and of irony rather than 'the sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean'.

• It is more exact than everyday language; being drawn largely from 'dead' Latin and Greek, it does not change as living English does, altering its connotations or acquiring new meanings.

However unintelligible to the layman, therefore, jargon is never obscure as long as it is used in its proper context.  Used by experts to laymen who do not understand it, however, it is both a form of bad manners and a barrier to communication.

Generally speaking, in writing containing jargon the technical words themselves are the only source of obscurity to a layman.  In passages of pseudo-jargon almost every word may be obscure, so that whole sentences may be impossible to pin down to a concrete meaning and translate.

Specialist Registers – Journalese

Journalese - the language used by newspaper journalists - is a register full of clichés and stereotyped expressions.  As Fritz Spiegl has pointed out,

The journalist Liz Gill admits that the tabloids also sensationalise their stories with the help of strongly emotive language:

“They tell of agony, anguish, torture, ordeals, going through hell.  Events are horrifying, historic, tragic, heart-warming, shattering, staggering, amazing, scandalous, astonishing, devastating, cataclysmic, outrageous, stunning, moving, disastrous.”

• Over-use of such words is however counter-productive, and any power they once had to stir emotion is long gone.  The same is true of the clichéd nouns and adjectives used in the tabloids' treatment of sex - tease, showgirl, dish, love-nest, romps, canoodling, dishy, saucy, sizzling, hot, cheeky, exotic, titillating.

•   The people who appear in the stories are similarly stereotyped by a series of clichéd adjectives, often hyphenated to compress as much as possible into a small space: any woman not actually ugly is described as attractive, raven-dark-, or blond-haired, blue- or brown-eyed, similar clichés for men are handsome, dashing, muscular

• Utterly predictable puns are another kind of cliché dear to the tabloids, however serious the subject: 'Take-away thieves last night ransacked a Chinese restaurant. 'It was a black day for coal-man Ted . . .' Teachers are caned, butchers get a roasting, maritime projects are sunk, scupper, or torpedoed.  Musicians always strike notes - high, low, or sour.