Corporal Punishment in Late Modern English Dialects (an analysis based on EDD Online): How beating has been reflected in ‘the language of the people’

Abstract

It is a sad fact that physical violence and, as a subtype, the corporal punishment of children and juveniles, practised by parents and other guardians, schools and clergy in both Europe and North America, have been part of our ‘Western’, i.e. Christian, cultural heritage, not to mention other world-cultures. I myself am old enough to remember the various common practices of physical violence used on children in the 1950s. At school in Germany, caning and face-slapping were officially tolerated and quite common, applied as a kind of educational instrument, sometimes even to 17-year-olds. In state-run schools of the United Kingdom, corporal punishment was politically banned only in 1986. Private schools followed suit from 1998 (England and Wales) to 2003 (Northern Ireland) (Country report for UK, 2015). In the United States, corporal punishment is still lawful in 19 states, in both public and private schools (Country report for USA, 2016).