All our classrooms have their own unique language

Whether it’s a ‘donk’, a ‘nunky’ or an oddly named building, schools have their own ​language, says Tabitha McIntosh
5th June 2021, 12:00pm

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All our classrooms have their own unique language

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/all-our-classrooms-have-their-own-unique-language
Let's Celebrate The Unique Language Of Our School Classrooms

In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable lesson, my English-teacher mother once laughingly told a Year 7 student that he was a cheatercock. 

Silence fell across the classroom, until one brave child put up her hand hesitantly and asked, “Miss? What did you just say?”

My mother had accidentally switched into familect. Dialects are language variants tied to geographic areas, sociolects are ways of speaking linked to social groups, but familects are the most intimate form of language. They’re what we speak at home when we’ve come in from work, kicked off our shoes and taken our linguistic bras off. 

Inside the privacy of our own homes, we evolve our own slangs, shorthand, nicknames, insults and dialects exclusively reserved for ventriloquising the complex inner monologues of our pets. “Cheatercock” had taken root in our familect after I returned from an extended visit to a friend in Bangladesh with pictures, salwar kameez clothing and a hefty chunk of Anglo-Bengali slang. Unlike me, it did not travel well.

Schools have their own peculiar language

Like families, professional bodies and criminal fraternities, schools have their own ways of speaking. The oldest and most elite public schools are infamous for it. 

The language used at Winchester College, for example, has its own name, Notions, and some of it is more than 600 years old. Traditionally, new pupils had to learn it by Christmas of their first year - a term in which both the familects and families of boys were erased and replaced with new social and linguistic loyalty to the school.

As the 1891 Winchester Word Book explains, a boy no longer had anything as common as a family. Instead, he had a “pitch-up”, comprised of “his pater, mater, frater and soror”. “Nunky and nevy,” the guide pauses to caution, “are now obsolete,” thus sparing us the embarrassment of dropping a gauche “nunky” in the wrong circles.

But it’s not just expensive schools that have their own ways of speaking. When I started teaching at my London comprehensive, I was handed a site map full of confident, carefully labelled, entirely baffling references to the “Volumetric Building”. 

In the eight years since then, I have asked for explanations several times - “But surely all buildings have volume?” - and have been met with polite confusion. It is the Volumetric Building because it has always been the Volumetric Building and will always be the Volumetric building, world without end.

A perfectly puliminal teacher

When you ask people about the specific vocabularies of their schools, it’s places like this they remember: oddly named buildings, corridors of confusing provenance and underwhelming play areas with overwhelming titles. One school’s barren concrete zone is the Garden, and another’s is the Meadow. One establishment has a shameless Lady Garden.

Some children travel between buildings through a Breeze Way, some via the MUGAS, some though an Inside-Outside Area, and still others through the Covered Way - as if, their teacher remarked, “the rest of the school was roofless and open to the stars”. 

Learning to speak the language and navigate the built environment is a crucial part of learning to belong to a school - a part just as important as ill-fitting polyester blazers. These language variations identify us as members of our unique little institutional families just as thoroughly as a Winchester boy identifies himself when he opens his mouth and Notions pour out.

Perhaps the closest thing to a familect, however, is what we speak in our classrooms - in the shared language of teachers and the young people who they are dragging through the curriculum whether they like it or not. 

These vocabularies are temporary lexical worlds built from jokes, accidents, quirks of the teacher’s individual style, and that one time in Year 10 when Sarah thought “puliminal” was a word and wasn’t allowed to forget it until the end of Year 11. 

The students in one of my classes would shout out “That’s ligneous!” when presented with ridiculous vocabulary: a word that joined our classroom familect after an unfortunate writing incident involving a thesaurus and a description of wooden chairs. 

Every time I open a presentation for my current Year 11s, they refer to it as my “esteemed colleague”. One Year 10 class studied Spectacles instead of the more usual An Inspector Calls, and a Year 9 group several years ago read Tickle a Mockingbird. I myself have fond memories of studying Shakespeare’s As You Dislike It Intensely at A level. 

In recent years, students have variously encouraged one another to reach giddy literary analytic heights by “deeping” the text, “putting a donk on it”, or making “unicorn points”.  

We have to learn the language of our schools. They existed before us and will continue to exist long after we are gone: we adapt to them, not the other way around. 

But our classes have more in common with our families. Both are comprised of people who did not choose one another. Both require that we develop a shared set of habits within a shared set of walls. And both are intense sites for the production of new words - whether you’re a cheatercock, a nuncle or a perfectly puliminal teacher.

Tabitha McIntosh is an English teacher and key stage 5 manager at a comprehensive school in outer London. She tweets as @TabitaSurge

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