8 Given the role played in the preservation or transformation of language by spontaneous sociolinguists, and by the interventions expressly made by the family and the school which are elicited and oriented by it. a sociolinguistic analysis of linguistic change cannot ignore this kind of
9 While accepting the division which is the basis of the very notion of ‘popular speech*. Henri Bauche observes chat ‘in familiar usage bourgeois talk shares numerous features in common with vulgar language’
10 Although, for complex reasons which would have to be examined, the dominant vision does not give it a central place, the opposition between
masculine and feminine is one of the principles which give rise to the most typical contrasts, showing the 'people* as a ’female’ populace, changeable and hungry for pleasure (according to the antithesis of head and gut).
11 This is what creates the ambiguity in the exaltation of the speech form of those regarded as ’dead straight’: the vision of the world which it expresses and the virile virtues of the "dead tough" find their natural extension in what has been called the ’popular Right' (see Z. Stemhell,
12 Everything seems to suggest that, due to the extension of schooling, the ‘tough guy' character nowadays develops from his earliest schooldays, and against all the forms of submissiveness required by the school.
13 One of the effects of class racism, which, like the failure to distinguish among different yellow or black people, makes no distinction between the different types of ‘poor’* is the unwitting exclusion of even the possibility of difference (in fact, inventiveness, competence, etc.) and the pursuit of difference. The undiscriminating exaltation of the 'popular', which characterizes populism or radical chic, can thus lead to a kind of rapturous (rust in what the natives'judge to be inept* stupid or coarse; or. what amounts to the same thing* it can lead one to retain only what appears out of the ordinary in the ‘common’ and to present it as representative of common speech.
14 By totally rejecting a ‘French' society symbolized by school and also everyday racism* the young ‘tough guys’ who come from immigrant families undoubtedly represent the limit reached by the revolt of adolescents from the most economically and culturally deprived families, a revolt which often arises from educational failures* difficulties and disappointments.
15 P. E. Wilbs,
16 As an exemplary manifestation of this principle of classification and of the breadth of its field of application* one only has to quote the case of the mason (a former miner) who, invited Io classify the names of professions (in a test modelled on the techniques employed for the componential analysis of related terms) and to name the classes thus produced, wrote off the higher professions - of which he took the job of television presenter to be paradigmatic - with a wave of I he hand and with the words: "all a bunch of queers' (Enquete Yvette Delsaut, Dcnain, 1978).
17 In a more general way, since the more or less brutal evocation of sexual matters and the flattening projection of sentimental things on the physiological level often act as
changes meaning completely when it changes market, through romantic transcription or lexicological recollection*
18 Previously, the only equivalent situation was found in national military service, which was undoubtedly one of the principal sites for the production and inculcation of slang speech forms.