Student Expelled from School for Dirty Linguistic Observation

A high school student in Indiana has been expelled from school because he made a linguistic observation using profanity.

The tweet in question was “F*** is one of those f*** words you can f*** put anywhere in a f*** sentence and it still f*** makes sense.”

Austin Carroll’s tweet may use profanity, but it does offer linguistic insight into one of the most commonly used word in the English language. The tweet he made was invariably true in that the word is incredible versatile and can be used in virtually every part of speech.

The faculty of the school makes the claim that Austin tweeted from a school computer, while he claims that it was made at home. Regardless of where he tweeted, there is an issue of privacy of online accounts and whether the school has a right to punish a student for using profanity on the internet.

From a linguist’s perspective however, I cannot help but feel saddened that this student is being expelled for promoting linguistic knowledge, no matter how profane it may be, linguistics deals with language as a whole, and a teenager in high school that is able to understand the intricacies of this commonplace word shows some level of linguistic interest!

-Rickey Lu

Source: voxy.com