scholarly journals A cheeky investigation: Tracking the semantic change of cheeky from monkeys to wines

English Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Laura R. Bailey ◽  
Mercedes Durham

The present study focuses on the word cheeky which, in the past few decades, has taken on a new meaning of ‘mildly illicit’ in addition to, and partly overtaking, its original meaning of ‘impudent’. We examine how this semantic change is spreading in different age groups and in different parts of the English-speaking world. As we demonstrate, the newer meaning of cheeky is associated with younger speakers, so we examine whether this correlates with different age groups’ understanding of the new form. Furthermore, cheeky ‘impudent’ was used more frequently in the United Kingdom than in North America. If that earlier meaning was already marked for North America, how is the newer meaning cheeky ‘mildly illicit’ understood by speakers there?

English Today ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Hickey

In different parts of the English-speaking world various vowel changes have been taking place in recent years, perhaps the most noticeable of which is the vowel lowering in words like DRESS and TRAP. This lowering would seem to have its origins some few decades ago in North America, probably in California and perhaps simultaneously in Canada. The shift, labelled here short front vowel lowering (SFVL), has spread quickly across the anglophone world and is found in locations as far apart as Ireland, South Africa and Australia. In each case where the change has been adopted there has been an adaptation of the change to local circumstances within the borrowing variety. The transmission of the change is also significant as the spread would seem not to be by direct speaker contact.


1988 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric A. Johnson

What has happened to quantitative history? Is it dead? Any working historian alive today in the English-speaking world surely knows that it has come under heavy attack at least since Lawrence Stone, one of its former proponents, began sounding its death knell in a provocative and widely cited essay written at the turn of this decade by declaring scientific history a “myth” and calling for a “revival of narrative.” Georg Iggers, perhaps the leading historiographer of European and especially German history, wrote recently that “the past few years have seen a profound disillusionment with the quantitative approaches which were at the core of would-be scientific history…. The heady optimism of Marxists, Annalists, and American cliometricians that history would become a rigorous science has been shattered. What has taken its place in recent historical writing is a return from analysis to narrative, with a central focus, as Stone says, on ‘man not circumstances. Indeed many pioneering American cliometricians have turned conciliatory like Robert Fogel, irritable and combative like Charles Tilly, or downright depressed like J. Morgan Kousser.


1996 ◽  
Vol 76 ◽  
pp. 31-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksander Bursche

The concept of Central Europe is understood here to cover the geographical centre of the European continent (i.e. the territory between the Elbe, Bug and Neman rivers, that is, eastern Germany, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia and Lithuania), formerly treated in much of the English-speaking world as ‘Eastern Europe’. In the past six years, however, this area has been moving closer to the West. This paper shall concentrate on the region north of the Carpathian mountains, particularly the Vistula river-basin and Scandinavia (without Norway), in other words the territory round the Baltic Sea.


Author(s):  
Chris Holmes

In the particular and peculiar case of the Booker Prize, regarded as the most prestigious literary award in the United Kingdom (as measured by economic value to the author and publisher, and total audience for the awards announcement), the cultural and economic valences of literary prizes collide with the imperial history of Britain, and its after-empire relationships to its former colonies. From its beginnings, the Booker prize has never been simply a British prize for writers in the United Kingdom. The Booker’s reach into the Commonwealth of Nations, a loose cultural and economic alliance of the United Kingdom and former British colonies, challenges the very constitution of the category of post-imperial British literature. With a history of winners from India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Nigeria, among many other former British colonies, the Booker presents itself as a value arbitrating mechanism for a majority of the English-speaking world. Indeed, the Booker has maintained a reputation for bringing writers from postcolonial nations to the attention of a British audience increasingly hungry for a global, cosmopolitan literature, especially one easily available via the lingua franca of English. Whether and how the prize winners avoid the twin colonial pitfalls of ownership by and debt to an English patron is the subject of a great deal of criticism on the Booker, and to understand the prize as a gatekeeper and tastemaker for the loose, baggy canon of British or even global Anglophone literature, there must be a reckoning with the history of the prize, its multiplication into several prizes under one umbrella category, and the form and substance of the novels that have taken the prize since 1969.


Italus Hortus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Roberto Della Casa ◽  
Francesco Mattioli

For the benefit of a younger audience, the cherry can be further enhanced by freeing it from the fruit group and allowing it to become part of the world of desserts and special treats. On the contrary, the localisms, traditions, and seasonality which characterize much of the national production can be further emphasized for the middle age and the “differently young” age groups, especially for the domestic market. Common to these diverse strategies is the need for high performance varieties linked to a structured sales season and non-destructive sorting with the use of the latest technologies to guarantee what the English-speaking world calls “consistent quality” and what we could rename “quality that lives up to our promises.”


The daily observations of smoke and sulphur dioxide that have been taken over the past ten years at some 1200 sites throughout the United Kingdom for the National Survey of Air Pollution, have provided a great deal of information on pollution in towns. An examination of this material is made to assess changes that have been occurring in levels of pollution in relation to the changing pattern of fuel consumption, and is used in trying to forecast the position in the next 15 or 20 years. A comparison is also made between pollution in towns in different parts of the U.K. The question of what levels of pollution may be tolerated is also considered. The part that aerodynamicists, architects and town planners can play in reducing urban pollution is discussed and an attempt is made to see what guidance can be given to them so that as far as pollution is concerned, the new and renewed towns of the future may avoid the mistakes of the past and therefore not need the costly remedial measures that now have to be taken in towns built in the past.


2001 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-87
Author(s):  
D. Vasanta

This article provides a review of some of the major language and gender studies reported pri marily in the English-speaking world during the past three decades. After pointing to the inade quacies of formal linguistic and sociocultural approaches in examining the complex ways in which gender interacts with language use, an alternative theoretical paradigm that gives impor tance to the sociohistorical and political forces residing in the meanings of the resources as well as social identity of the speaker who aims to use those meanings is described. The implications of this shiff from sociocultural to sociohistorical approaches in researching language and gender in the Indian context are discussed in this article.


Author(s):  
Bernd Kortmann

Based on the data set in the electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English, the primary purpose of this chapter is to determine the areal and global reach as well as the degree of distinctiveness of morphosyntactic properties for fifty spontaneous spoken L1 and L2 Englishes as well as twenty-six English-based pidgins and creoles spoken in seven Anglophone world regions (Africa, North America, Australia, British Isles, the Caribbean, the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia). Central questions addressed include the following: Which are the most widespread non-standard morphosyntactic features in the Anglophone world? Are there distinctive, or even diagnostic, features for the different variety types? Is it possible to identify systematic correlations between variety type and different degrees of structural complexity? Which are the most widespread or even diagnostic features for the different parts of the English-speaking world?


1991 ◽  
Vol 47 (03) ◽  
pp. 337-348
Author(s):  
Michael P. Costeloe

In 1843, two friends, one Scottish and one American, published books about Mexico which were to become essential reading for students of Mexican history. Much the better known of the two is William Hickling Prescott whose History of the Conquest of Mexico became an instant best-seller and remains to this day one of the classics of Mexican historiography. Less well-known but equally valuable to historians of nineteenth-century Mexico is Frances Calderón de la Barca's vivid account of Life in Mexico based on her experiences during the two years from 1840-1841 when she lived in the country as the wife of the first Spanish ambassador. By coincidence, Prescott and Sra. Calderón were close personal friends and regular correspondents and they gave each other much assistance in preparing their respective books for publication. Both their works were greeted with critical and public acclaim in the English-speaking world of Europe and North America but reactions in Mexico were markedly different. While Prescott's book was received with qualified enthusiasm, Life in Mexico was the subject of hostile reviews and its author much vitriolic, personal abuse.


Author(s):  
Tony Hallam

Georges Cuvier has not been treated with much respect in the English-speaking world for his contributions to the study of Earth history. Charles Lyell is thought to have effectively demolished his claims of episodes of catastrophic change in the past, and it is only in the past few decades, with the rise of so-called ‘neocatastrophism’, that a renewed interest has emerged in his writings, which date from early in the nineteenth century. Cuvier was a man of considerable ability, who quickly rose to a dominant position in French science in the post-Napoleonic years. Though primarily a comparative anatomist, his pioneer research into fossil mammals led him into geology. He argued strongly for the extinction of fossil species, most notably mammoths, mastodons, and giant sloths, at a time when the very thought of extinctions was rather shocking to conventional Christian thought, and linked such extinctions with catastrophic changes in the environment. This view is expressed in what he called the ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to his great four-volume treatise entitled Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles (Researches on fossil bones), published in 1812. This extended essay was immensely influential in intellectual circles of the western world, was reissued as a short book, and was repeatedly reprinted and translated into the main languages of the day. It became well known in the English-speaking world through the translation by the Edinburgh geologist Robert Jameson (1813), who so bored the young Charles Darwin with his lectures that he temporarily turned him off the subject of geology. According to Martin Rudwick, who has undertaken a new translation which is used here, Jameson’s translation is often misleading and in places downright bad. It was Jameson’s comments rather than Cuvier’s text that led to the widespread belief that Cuvier favoured a literalistic interpretation of Genesis and wished to bolster the historicity of the biblical story of the Flood. The English surveyor William Smith is rightly credited with his pioneering recognition of the value of fossils for correlating strata, which proved of immense importance when he produced one of the earliest reliable geological maps, of England and Wales, but the more learned and intellectually ambitious Cuvier was the first to appreciate fully the significance of fossils for unravelling Earth history.


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