Professor was Crystal clear on English language

You’ve just been set free from school and given the heady excitement of taking ‘responsibility’ for your own learning.

Loosely translated by teenagers, this means you don’t have to go to lectures unless you want to. Or if Supermarket Sweep is on the telly.

Unlike tutorials, where there are only four or five of you in the group so there’s a chance it’ll be noted and a black mark put against your name if you’re not there, or the dreaded one-to-one sessions with your tutor when they’re definitely going to be cross if you don’t show up to endure the picking apart of your latest effort at explaining the peculiarities of Tudor finances, it’s unlikely anyone will even notice if you’re not at a lecture.

The numbers were noticeably larger at the start of each term, when people arrived with a new determination to apply themselves, than they were at the end, when those not nursing a hangover in bed had already packed up and gone home to their parents to get some clean clothes and proper food.

It’s not that we were all useless layabouts, you understand – we got the work done and managed to emerge with decent degrees eventually, just more through bleary-eyed all nighters fuelled by copious amounts of caffeine before finals than in any sort of sensible, sustained effort over the whole three years.

There were occasions, though, when you’d go to a lecture and find the hall packed to the rafters.

Outside of the panicky run-up to exam time, this would generally mean simply that everyone’s ‘I must go to at least one of these’ resolutions had inexplicably coincided on the same day for the same lecture, with the same bemused but nonetheless gleeful professor at the helm.

This was what I assumed when I arrived at one English language lecture to find every seat was taken, some by people I don’t think had ever been near the place before.

The lecture was on the history of swearing.

Apparently we may have been old enough to take responsibility for our own education but we were also young enough to find a man in tweed saying the f-word in class hilarious.

The book that formed the basis for this, and many other lectures on that particular course, was Professor David Crystal’s A History of the English Language.

Prof Crystal is speaking at the Chalke Valley History Festival this year.

I may manage to miss Supermarket Sweep for that.

And, at my advanced age, I may even be able to resist giggling if any of the words he says are ‘naughty’ ones.

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