Homeless People Setting

STONE COLD

Setting

Understanding the setting is a vital part of understanding the text

Helping the homeless
BRIEF

1.

Shelter

2.

Salvation Army

recently decided to

3.

The Children’s Society

donate £150,000 to a

4.

Centrepoint

homeless charity.

5.

The Trussell Trust

They have invited

6.

The Big Issue

7.

Whitechapel Mission

8.

St Mungo’s
Crisis

The National Lottery
Commission has

Complete the activity below
•••

Robert Swindells’ Stone Cold largely takes place on the streets of London and focuses

presentations from all the main charities

in particular on the places

who work with the

that homeless people

homeless in order to

9.

help them decide

10.

congregate. Indeed the
Make an alternat ive list of terms that present homeless people in a sympathetic way.

Street lingo
An accent is the way a certain group of people pronounce words, phrases and sentences, including dropping sounds and joining up sounds from words. Accents often show which country people are from or which area within a country people are from. Traditionally, accent would denote social background. A dialect is the type of language typical to a particular groups of the language’s speakers, often dependant on where someone is from. Different dialects have their own vocabulary and grammar.
An idiolect is a form of language unique to an individual. It is shown by the words or phrases individuals select and the grammar that they use regularly and is unique to them.

With a partner list as many accents as you can. Try to include where the accent is from.
e.g. A Cockney accent may show that someone is from London.

Try to think of some examples of words that are used in different dialects. See if you can think of five more examples.
e.g. In Yorkshire nowt can be used to mean nothing.

Try to answer the following questions alone.
Do you have an accent? If so, can you define it?
What words/ phrases that you use are part of your
e.g. ‘recruiting’, ‘mission’,
‘19.00 hours’, ‘victory’.
• Shelter uses offensive or taboo language. e.g. ‘cheeky little bugger’, ‘cracker up his arse’,
‘arse-licking’, ‘it was pissing it down’.
• Shelter uses a lot of similes in his descriptions. e.g. ‘as easy as falling off a log’, ‘like a ruddy poodle’, ‘like a pair of new boots’, ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’.
• Shelter uses a lot of informal and dialect words. e.g. ‘scruffy blighters’, ‘dossers’, ‘winos and crims’, ‘woofta’.
• Shelter also uses some words that suggest he is well-educated. e.g. ‘anticipation’,
‘meticulous’, ‘commence’, ‘perished’.
• He also uses rhetorical questions. e.g. ‘Who loses?’, ‘What thanks do I get?’, ‘ They’re all par of the plot, see?’, ‘I can clean up the garbage, can’t I?’.

Here are some sentence starters to help:
• The time was 06.00 hours when I left the house that morning...
• I knew that today was going to prove successful to my overall plan
• The decontamination of the streets is starting to make an impact on me: I feel exhausted!
• Am I doing this for thanks? No. I am clearing the streets to satisfy my own mission as well as to improve the quality of life for