yeah but no but yeah but...

although i am not terribly interested in discussions about what a certain social group's (say, for instance, british teenagers) vocabulary size is, i couldn't help but crack up about this post on languagelog. the post talks about vicky pollard, one of the character's from the tv show "little britain". my interpretation of the vicky pollard character was that matt lucas (the guy behind vicky) really was making fun of british youth for similar reasons that the BBC News made their claims and gripes about the small vocabulary size of british kids. liberman's post on languagelog puts this in perspective and his use of type/token plots of vicky's "vocabulary" and data from the 2003 Fisher corpus illustrate that vicky's problem is not her vocabulary.