idiolect

this is my english language homework....... i wouldn't usually do this (who am i kidding, i so would) but i can't think of a way to end it so if anyone has any ideas PLEASE email me it's annoying me so much xxxxxxxxxxx
(we had to write an article about how we use language)

I’m pretty straight-cut English, so when I was asked to write something on how I speak I was just a little bit mystified as to what was so genuinely intriguing about the babble that trips off my tongue every now and then (aka about every couple of seconds – I never shut up). I was born in London but grew up in Brighton, and so was inadvertently deprived of a painfully cool but impenetrable northern drawl, as I would have had and treasured if my parents had decided Liverpool was charming and culturally stimulating; or even being able to fake a tough upbringing and say things like ‘bare’ and ‘sick’ with a clear conscience, not that my birthplace of Clapham is famed for being exactly gangster. All that we have in the south is twittens and a habitual mixing up of sat and sitting when talking about buses. Not exactly what you’d call ‘difficult to understand but who needs to when it sounds so damn cool anyway’. Us southerners, we have to come up with our own complicated language backgrounds.

Me, I chose old English. Of course, I didn’t live through World War Two, I never got the cane from a stern schoolmaster for writing the wrong answer on my own little blackboard, and I never had to put up with a whalebone birdcage and several miles of fabric every time I fancied a trip to the smallest room in the house. But through a meager collection of beautiful china dolls, a stack of Jane Austen & Enid Blyton tapes and a vivid imagination I made up for what my boring-by-comparison upbringing couldn’t give me. I never swore, made minding my Ps and Qs practically a career choice and quoted Jane Austen, bobbing the china dolls along in time with the syllables, though then again what do you expect from a girl whose first word was flower other than an obsession with all things cute and feminine.

Naturally, this phase passed, as, though Brighton is hardly the gang-culture capital of Britain, no one goes through secondary school without picking up at least half of the swear word dictionary. I won’t quote my favourites, but be assured that there are few swear words I haven’t heard, just like most teenagers nowadays. You’ll be catching a bus to town and out of nowhere you’ll hear a bellow of “OI [insert a previously highly offensive word here]”, and it’ll turn out that they’re actually really good friends. That’s not really me, I’m far too wound up in calling all my friends ‘babe’ and anything that moves ‘pumpkin’ to branch out into swearword pet names, but I do seem to swear every other sentence, just because it makes me seem so desirably passionate, and the not-so-occasional slip of the tongue into words you shouldn’t say around your grandparents is just a force of habit.