1. What determines the choice of stylistically marked words in each particular situation?
2. In what situations are informal words used?
3. What are the main kinds of informal words? Give a brief description of each group.
4. What is the difference between colloquialisms and slang? What are their common features? Illustrate your answer with examples.
5. What are the main features of dialect words?
II. The italicized words and word-groups in the following extracts are informal. Write them out in two columns and explain in each case why you consider the word slang/colloquial. Look up any words yon do not know in your dictionary.
1. Ò h e Flower Girl.... Now you are talking! I thought you'd come off it when you saw a chance of getting back a bit of what you chucked at me last night.1 (Confidentially.) You'd had a drop in, hadn't you?
2. Liza. What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.
Mrs. Eynsfordhill. What does doing her in mean?
Higgins (hastily). Oh, thats the new small talk. To do a person in means to kill them.
3.Higgins. I've picked up a girl. Mrs. Higgins. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up?
Higgins. Not at all. I don't mean a love affair. Mrs. Higgins. What a pity!
(From Pygmalion by B. Shaw)
4. Jàñk (urgently): Mrs. Palmer, if I ask you a straight question, will you please give me a straight answer?
Muriel: All right. Fire away. Jack: Is your mother divorced? Muriel: Divorced? Mum? Of course not. Jack (quietly): Thank you. That was what I had already gathered.
Muriel: Mind you, she's often thought of divorcing Dad, but somehow never got round to doing it. Not that she's got a good word to say for him, mind you. She says he was the laziest, pettiest, most selfish chap she's ever come across in all her life. "He'll come to a sticky end," she used to say to me, when I was a little girl. "You mark my words, Mu," she used to say, "if your Dad doesn't end his days in jail my name's not Flossie Gosport."
(From Harlequinade by T. Rattigan)
5. My wife has been kiddin' me about my friends ever since we was married. She says that ... they ain't nobody in the world got a rummier bunch of friends than me. I'll admit that the most of them ain't, well, what you might call hot; they're different somehow than when I first hung around with them. They seem to be lost without a brass rail to rest their dogs on. But of course they are old friends and I can't give them the air.
(From Short Stories by R. Lardner)