Il fait beau, innit?

There's a great programme on Radio 4 at the moment, hosted by Stephen Fry, called Fry's English Delight. Last week it was all about contradictions, and there was lots of really interesting stuff about the logic of double negatives, and so on.

But the bit that stuck in my mind was a piece by (the brilliant) David Crystal towards the end. He pointed out something which should be obvious, but which never occurred to me before. And that was that the much derided 'word', 'innit', derived from 'isn't it', has come to be used in just the same way as 'n'est-ce pas' in French (which also means 'isn't it').

I'm not sure this holds true in every case – I hear people say things like, 'He told me to get lost, innit', and I'm not sure you could use 'n'est-ce pas' in quite that way (I may, of course, be wrong – my French is rusty!).

Nevertheless, love it or hate it, 'innit' has genuinely added something to the language. What brought this home to me was the fact that when I first started learning French at school, I seem to remember that the teacher had some difficulty explaining the meaning of 'n'est-ce pas'. It was one of those things that didn't quite have an English equivalent. Now it does. So do teachers now say, 'It means 'innit''?