Spelling-gate: Politics, propriety and power

Richardson, KP ORCID: 0000-0002-3805-5803 (2018) Spelling-gate: Politics, propriety and power. Journal of Language and Politics, 17 (6). pp. 812-830.

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Abstract

Back in 2009, the Labour British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was attacked for “bad spelling” in a condolence letter written personally by him to the mother of a soldier who died in combat, and publicised by The Sun newspaper. “Spelling” here acts as a leveller of hierarchical differences in the national political culture, with ruler and subject both publicly disciplined by the same standard language ideology. Previous research on orthography as social practice has tended to focus on deliberate manipulation of fixed spellings; this article extends the approach to unconventional spellings that have come about ‘by mistake’, and also widens it, to consider aspects of orthography other than spelling, focusing on the look of the Prime Minister’s handwriting. At issue, semiotically, are meanings such as ‘the personal touch’ and ‘respect’.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	British political culture, handwriting, haptics, media discourse, semiotics of writing, orthography as social practice, political culture, sociolinguistics of writing, spelling and visual aspects of writing
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	23 Feb 2018 13:27
Last Modified:	19 Jan 2023 06:39
DOI:	10.1075/jlp.17072.ric
Related URLs:	Author Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3018346