Bare Vexed

As a male of this generation’s youth, I vigorously disagree with Isabelle Kerr’s article on how young people talk. Slang is a sub-language to the standard English language, that is more prolific and divergent. It expands the way in which we communicate with each other in many forms rather than using sanitized English.

In order to criticize a language you must understand the language itself. There is evidence that she has little understanding when she says “I’m so gonna unlike that selfie of her twerking.” The first thing that’s wrong with that sentence is that a ‘selfie’ is defined as a self portrait photograph, typically taken from a hand-held digital camera or mobile phone. Twerking, as she says, means dancing to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance. Isabelle Kerr acknowledges what twerking is, but tries to merge a dance with a single image picture, which does not make sense. A selfie of you twerking would simply be an image of you squatting, therefore not twerking but rather posing for a picture.

Isabelle Kerr states “instead of creating words to improve our ability to communicate and express ourselves…”. There are many ‘slang words’ that people have created and have become the lingo for a generation were communication has changed. Not every slang word is sexual or provocative in any way, some such as ‘brb’ which is an acronym for ‘be right back’ has no negative effect on the speaker or person being spoken to, its simply a shortened version of ‘be right back’.

The reason why people are so differentiated in our modern day society is because of the idea that when someone does or says something new, its not taken in a positive way but as an abnormal thing, as if the person that said it was an unknown entity of some kind. Isabelle Kerr, for example, is not agreeing to the way the younger generations are communicating simply because she does not understand it herself, however if you were to ask another person of the youth a question containing slang or speak to them in a certain way, they would understand because they know the slang and its a normal thing.

How she contradicted herself:

Throughout Isabelle Kerr’s “rant” she is going against the use of modern slang, however there is evidence that she does not understand slang itself, as she herself uses idioms. “If they are even to remotely reflect that this is how the young generation speaks, then the dictionary needs a reality check.” The part “…the dictionary needs a reality check” is using the idiom “reality check” to talk about the way she thinks that things are out of order.

Isabelle Kerr also ends the “rant with the line “Shakespeare will be turning in his grave.” This is another piece of evidence that she does not even know the history about her topic, however she still criticizes. Shakespeare is known for having created 1700 words that he used in his own writing, many of which people did not understand at the time. He created words that are commonly used in everyday life such as ‘Addiction’ (Othello, Act 2, Scene 2) and ‘swagger’ (Henry V, Act 2, Scene 4/A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 1) . Therefore, for Isabelle Kerr to be stating “Shakespeare will be turning in his grave” would be contradicting her argument as Shakespeare himself created words that other’s didn’t understand.