Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000
"Slumped in front of the telly"
Mike Rundell 11 January 2000
One of the British tabloids recently carried a story about a family who called the fire brigade when smoke was seen issuing from an upstairs room. While the firefighters dealt with the blaze, the family remained in the house because they didn't want to miss the last 10 minutes of Coronation Street. But the report did not simply describe them as "watching television". No, they were "glued to the goggle box" and "staring at the screen".
Corpus data is very revealing about our attitudes to television. While people are typically found "at" their computers or VDUs, the usual preoposition for showing our relationship to the televsion is "in front of". These small differences carry a lot of meaning. The implied message is that viewing a computer screen is an (inter)active experience, and a positive and productive way of spending your time. But viewing a television screen – "sitting in front of the telly" – is passive (therefore reprehensible) and a waste of time. The pattern is only broken when the reference is to a child spending hours "in front of " his or her computer, probably playing silly or violent games. This is a case of "bad" computer use, on a par with being glued to the goggle box.
What do people do "in front of" their televisions? A trawl through some British and American corpus data shows that people sit, eat, sleep (several references to each of these), do their homework (I did my homework on my lap in front of Neighbours), or even have sex in front of the television. "Spending time" is commonly mentioned:
Young Britons spend two and a half hours a day in front of the screen
By the age of 18, most children have spent more time in front of the TV set than at school
Sometimes they are just there:
fat kids are couch potatoes in front of innumerable TV sets
Ginny left him brooding on the past in front of a game show
More positively, people look forward to "a quiet night in front of the telly", but the appeal of this, by implication, is that it is mindless and undemanding.
In addition to all this, there is a striking and quite unmistakeable tendency for writers to select verbs from a particular semantic category: in sentences with a prepositional phrase about being "in front of the TV/the telly/Inspector Morse", or whatever, the preceding verbs include:
sprawled, plonked, curled up, lounge, cosily installed, and vegetate (with "in a stupor" also figuring once).
All of these expressions can be found in corpus data, some of them more than once. Overwhelmingly, however, the collocate of choice is slumped:
their peers back in Britain would be slumped in front of the telly as n in search of mass entertainment or slump in front of the television n leading a sedentary life, sitting slumped in front of the televisi er instruments, and our leisure time slumped in front of a television ore readily than a couch potato. But slumping in front of the televis for advice,while their husbands are slumped in front of the tenth re ide cheap entertainment for a public slumped in front of the telly.
This is how people choose to talk about the most popular leisure activity in the western world. Slump is not – in any of its uses – a word with positive associations. Stockmarkets, prices, even whole economies can slump (or experience a slump), while people slump from weariness, sickness, or dejection. The word's downbeat flavour inevitably seeps through into the "televisual" meaning. All of which looks like evidence for an institutionalized view of television-watching that perceives it as a mindless, passive activity engaged in by pople who are too weak-willed, too witless or (at best) too exhausted to do anything else. Hypocrisy, or what?
The clustering of this specific semantic class of verbs around words like TV and telly is a good example of a phenomenon called "semantic prosody", which is opening up exciting new ways of looking at corpus data. Watch this space (but don't slump in front of it) for more on this another time.
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Michael Rundell is a lexicographer, and has been using corpora since the early 1980s. As Managing Editor of Longman Dictionaries for ten years (1984-94) he edited the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987, 1995) and the Longman Language Activator (1993). He has been involved in the design and development of corpus materials of various types, including the BNC and the Longman Learner Corpus. He is now a freelance consultant, and (with the lexicographer Sue Atkins) runs the "Lexicography MasterClass", providing training courses in all aspects of dictionary development and dictionary use (see http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/ae345).
