Wednesday 12 January 2011

My Word Of The Year 2010: 'Simples'

‘But I can’t teach that!’
In a recent Tweet, I nominated as my Word Of The Year 2010 the marvellously creative and pseudo-erroneously inflected ‘simples’ as immortalised in ‘A Simples Life’ by (the creators of) Aleksandr Orlov. A fellow English teacher picked up on this, claiming, ‘but it’s wrong.’ Needless to say, I pointed out that this particular usage may have been deemed unacceptable before it was popularised through advertising, but had now entered common parlance. Still, the teacher persisted, ‘but I can’t teach my students to use forms like that. It’s not grammatically correct.’ Old habits die hard.

‘Yes, you can!’
My point here is that whilst you may decide not to teach such usage, you can’t ignore it either. Almost all instances of creative use of language start out by defying some norm or other; that is what makes them creative in the first place. From an EFL/ESL point of view, this does not mean that aberrations should be ignored any more than they should be blithely and indiscriminately taught. It merely means that teachers should be very conscious of what they are doing and why they are doing it. Shying away from originality and protecting students from the same is as inadvisable as accepting all forms of street English as unequivocally acceptable simply because they are authentic.

The key is to distinguish – and to ensure that students also learn to distinguish – between language taught and learnt in the furtherance of passive skills (I call these ‘knowledge and appreciation items’) and the language which students are expected to learn for the purposes of active production (‘imitation items’). Indeed, it is one of the most fascinating – and ultimately rewarding - challenges of the language teacher’s remit to decide how far down the rabbit hole the students need to go.

In the case of ‘simples’, other factors are at work, too. Teaching for appreciation would involve a large degree of contextualisation – almost certainly involving lots of fun with videos and text extracts – which in the case of students of Marketing or Business English could be of immense value but which might be unnecessarily time-consuming with other groups of learners. Neither the teacher’s own sense of displeasure nor enthusiasm for innovation alone should determine a lesson or its content; the decision whether or not to teach a particular item should ideally be based on the needs of the students rather than the predilections of the teacher.


Context and humour
Teaching the context of ‘simples’ also involves dealing with issues such as humour, irony, peer-group recognition and intercultural awareness, and these are also factors influencing my decision to highlight this word and this particular usage. And without in any way condoning or endorsing the products and services involved in the attendant advertising campaign, I find that this is one instance where the world of advertising engenders sheer delight in innovation and combines linguistic originality with a true sense of fun.

But why ‘simples’?
However, apart from the elements of linguistic creativity and ostensible self-mockery, there were other reasons for my choice of ‘simples’ as word of the year. Firstly, most candidates from the political arena (austerity, double-dip and so on) only seemed to indicate that history was repeating itself (although I could have made a case for ‘cuts’ in a British context), whilst it also seemed a little trite to resort to any of the endless stream of neo-neologisms and semantic shifts prevalent in the digital world, so I likewise discarded anything to do with apps, hashtags and twittermania and any contraction beginning with ‘i-‘; apart from which, none of the terms from the digital or mobile worlds really stood out or came to the fore in 2010. ‘Simples’ of course, has been in use since the first ‘Compare the Meerkat’ TV ad was broadcast in July 2009 and arguably I might have chosen it in that year, but to me, 2010 was the year when the image of Aleksandr Orlov came to be fleshed out to such an extent that the character and his impeccably peccable embellishments to the English language really entered popular consciousness in Britain – and came to deserve wider appreciation elsewhere. More importantly, however, I chose ‘simples’ because the usage is unusual in that its origin can be traced back quite clearly to a single source whence it has constantly gained momentum, and not least of all because the year ended (more or less) with the publication of ‘A Simples Life’, a truly hilarious account of how a simple meerkat rose from humble beginnings to trek across the Kalahari, brave the ocean waves, build a business empire in Moscow and unabashedly enter the vernacular.

Links
A Simples Life (book): http://amzn.to/eW0iUt
A Simples Life (video): http://bit.ly/aM4YdB
Controversies in ELT (book): http://amzn.to/ekmvEh
Controversies in ELT (info): http://www.controversies-in-elt.com/


1 comment:

  1. You should have replied, "It's only a word - simples." :)

    ReplyDelete