I am endlessly fascinated by the people who are, by their own account, in a constant state of simmering rage at having to overhear other people’s uncouth language. This comment was in response to an article in the Sunday Times:*
Dave Russell wrote:
Couldn’t agree more abouyt the dumbing down of the nation. Just listen to a conversation between a group of people under the age of 25. It seems to be cool to speak like a complete thicko these days, no longer something to be ashamed of. The one thing that really grates on my nerves is to hear people using the child-like term ‘train station’ instead of ‘railway station’- the mark of the true dumbed-down chav. The other thing is how some apparently intelligent people think its cool to continually use swear words in public-in bars, buses and trains etc-even at the ‘Train Station!’ Most of the this dumbed down class wouldn’t understabnd a single Monty Python sketch-they simple don’t have the educational background.
OK, this is the usual stuff: the suffering of psychic violence when exposed to casual speech, the fear of the demotic. But the idea that the mark of a ‘true dumbed-down chav’ is that they say ‘train station’? That’s genius.
*admittedly, it’s a Jeremy Clarkson article, but even so.
4 replies on “Speaking as a dumbed-down chav…”
heh. He’s trying to tell people they don’t know their proper station.
I imagine that’s just one part of his broad-spectrum anger and resentment.
EDIT: Oh my god, I’m an idiot and I only just noticed your excellent wordplay. *feeling stupid*
Grrr…it’s a RAILWAY STATION!
Unfortunately it seems that chav or otherwise now prefer to call it a train station. There can’t be much time left before civilisation finally collapses.
The joy about linguistic peevery is that you could be being sincere or you could be taking this piss: and there is no way of knowing. No statement about the decline of language is so mad or so hyperbolic that I can’t imagine someone saying it.