Politics and Language

Text massaging - lubrication please, not persecution

How is it that everyone who's not a teacher expresses absolute disgust at the language of text-messaging and at the fact that youngsters are using it to - wait for it - communicate?

I think I know why. The 'Disgusted' of The Ignorant Party are showing their true colours. That is, they've never had the job of encouraging youngsters to write anything. What's more, these people all went to grammar schools thirty or forty years ago, where writing was not only de rigeur as an ethos but actually carried out from morning til night by literate youngsters. What do The Ignorant Party know about the other ninety per cent who went to Secondary Modern schools, where the subjunctive was about as well known as the Chinese alphabet and a subordinate clause was a distant relative of Father Christmas?

Where do they think the equivalent of the ninety per cent are today? Answer: they're in our comprehensive schools: and they don't want to be made to read or write because it's not part of their essential culture. They're different, not disgusting, right? Understandable or what?

And I think technology's doing a great job in democratising the written word and that text messaging is at the 4front don't U C?

When John Milton wrote Paradise Lost his constraint was the verse form. When The Dream of the Rood was sculptured into the stone of The Ruthwell Cross, the writer was constrained by the form and the medium. It's not easy to carve a poem on to a lump of rock - not that I've ever tried it. It's not easy to write an epic in iambic pentameters, and I have tried that!

Now, I'm not saying that Tracy's text message to Kevin is on the same scale but there are indisputable similarities in the basic endeavour. Tracy's challenged by the English language: but more importantly, by the form. In this case it's the text message. And most important of all, she's taking on that challenge for the same reason as did Milton and the Anglo-Saxon stonemason: because she wants to communicate, and she's succeeding.

The main reason for being conversant and fluent with the English Standard in all its manifestations is to have the versatility to deviate from it for creative effect. That's where The Ignorant Party and I do coincide in our desire for all youngsters, indeed all per se, to understand the standard code. But as Tony Harrison says in Them and Uz, ‘RIP RP’, as he points out that The Times made 'Tony' 'Antony'.

I rest my case.