Yeah, I know; it’s been ages since I wrote Part 1.
In this post, I want to give a brief account of observations I made about the use of the word “outstanding”. This was one of most mentioned words in my survey of words that annoy on EduTwitter.
I admit that the methodology here wasn’t particularly academic! But it may serve as the beginning of an interesting analysis of the developing use of this word in educational discourse, amid discourse more generally.
I used the Google nGram viewer to compare the lexemes satisfactory and outstanding, identifying these two terms as being highly associated with Ofsted. The fist term has, of course, disappeared from the lexical set used by Ofsted. Perhaps this was in recognition of the feeling that satisfactory no longer meant satisfactory in its description of schools, having shifted to mean something akin to “not good enough”. I shan’t…
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The Echo Chamber 