For many decades, women's speech has been seen as being very different from that used by men. Stereotyped as swearing less, using less slang, and as aiming for more standard speech style, women were judged according to their sex rather than other aspects of their lives, such as class and economic situation. With many critics now challenging these ideas, this article sets out to look at the reality of the swearing used by a group of women from a deprived inner-city area. Their constant use of strong expletives flies in the face of the theories proffered of the “correctness” of the language of women. (Expletives, taboo words, working-class women, female speech, female group, social networks, sociolinguistics, inner-city England)

The language of academic journals tends to become so technical that only specialists are able to understand the unnecessarily complex features of vocabulary, syntax, discourse, and format. This seems particularly unfortunate at a time when the results of present-day scholarship in linguistic and cultural anthropology need to be as widely accessible as possible. An examination of problems in two articles in Language and one in the American Anthropologist points out the nature of the difficulties and some of the solutions. (Sociolinguistics, academic dialects, writing, jargons, English)