The basic question of teaching students how to speak and write in appropriate registers has been an essential project of schooling for a very long time. Everyth

The basic question of teaching students how to speak and write in appropriate registers has been an essential project of schooling for a very long time. Everything else in here is fluff or misinformation. The author of this article clearly had a paucity of material at his disposal, because he almost immediately flies wildly off the rails and just starts paragraphs about any form of non-standard language he can find. Slang, argot, jargon, foreign loanwords, accents, dialects: all of these disparate topics she lumps under the umbrella of 'slang', and solicits 'experts' to just provide some sound bite, any sound bite, about any of the above, so she can fill out space. The BBC, sadly, is consistently wretched when it comes to reporting about language. I have to say, though, I do appreciate the subcurrent of racist fearmongering that she could slip in there. Even though the article is allegedly about the dangers of slang and its overuse, she manages to wend around to let us know that our beloved English Cockney (a non-standard variety, of course) is itself under threat by some barbarous cocktail of foreign influences. Oh, and hoodies!