It's linguistics, stupid

“Rubbish!” says a senior DfE source. “Extremely patronising!” continues said source. “End of civilisation as I know it!” roars Sir Herbert Gussett. “Low brow!” sighs Sir Hubert Highbrow. “We’ll squash it!” drones Ofqual. In their day they did proper English, the canon – great Dead White Men. Well, Samuel Pepys is a proposed text. “Filth!” Whatever next? The Beano? Viz? Surely they’re not as “good” as Pope’s Dunciad or Swift’s Modest Proposal? 

That is entirely to miss the point. The proposed exam is not about the literary worth of a text, but how the English language behaves in it. It’s Linguistics, stupid. It deals in things like phonetics, syntax, etymology, morphology, register, semiotics, semantics, structuralism, genre, gender and power relations, class, subtext, context, codes, audience, dialect and much more. It can get a bit political and prompt dodgy left wing tendencies. And we don’t want that kind of thing.