Housemaster’s crusade against modern slang produces predictably ironic results
A Linguistic Crusade That Backfires Within The Hour
Dr Nigel Thorpe-Willoughby, long regarded around College as the last true defender of the Queen’s English despite the Queen in question having been gone some years now, this week issued a formal classroom ban on the word bantz, describing it in a memo circulated to colleagues as a linguistic abomination unworthy of a school that once produced prime ministers, poets, and at least one man who successfully argued that Latin remained relevant to a career in finance.
Pupils, upon learning of the ban, reacted with precisely the response any reasonable educator might have predicted, immediately generating an enthusiastic wave of bantz specifically about the ban itself, with several boys reportedly competing to work the forbidden word into as many sentences as possible before the end of first period, a linguistic act of rebellion that Dr Thorpe-Willoughby has since described, through gritted teeth, as regrettably clever.
The Cobbler Weighs In, As He Always Does
Rajiv Bannerman-Hoyt, known across College simply as the Cobbler on account of a now-legendary incident involving a woodworking class and considerable structural ambition, reportedly led the charge, producing a full sentence containing the banned word no fewer than four times, a grammatical feat that several younger pupils have already begun attempting to memorize word for word, ensuring the ban’s primary legacy may end up being its own spectacular failure.
Colleagues of Dr Thorpe-Willoughby note this is not his first attempted linguistic crusade, having previously campaigned unsuccessfully against the words vibe, mood, and, most controversially, the increasingly common pupil habit of ending sentences with the word basically, a battle he reportedly still refers to, basically, as his darkest professional hour.
An Observation From The Staff Common Room
One junior housemaster, speaking on condition of anonymity out of what he described as pure institutional self-preservation, noted that banning slang among teenage boys tends to function roughly the same way banning rain functions during an English summer: technically an option, practically futile, and almost certain to generate more of exactly the thing you were trying to prevent.
A Ban That Will, Inevitably, Quietly Fade
Whatever the eventual fate of this particular linguistic prohibition, longtime observers of College life predict the same outcome that has met every previous attempt to legislate teenage vocabulary: quiet, dignified surrender, followed by Dr Thorpe-Willoughby pretending, with admirable consistency, that the entire episode never happened at all.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The London Prat
Scriptor Rerum Novarum Cupidus: Morag Sinclair
