Talk Proper

Lynne Truss, of Eats, Shoots & Leaves fame, makes a great case for ‘proper’ English in The Telegraph:

A lot of nonsense is talked about ‘proper’ English being a means of endorsing the existing social status quo. My feeling is that the opposite is true. If you encourage people to write the way they talk, class divisions are ultimately reinforced, even exacerbated. I’m a working-class girl who read a lot of books and grew up to - well, to write this piece in The Telegraph anyway, so maybe I have an old-fashioned view of education as the instrument of social mobility. But it’s pretty clear to anyone that, if children are taught that ‘getting the gist’ is sufficient, everyone stays where they are.

Truss then goes on to quote Bill Cosby, who pulls fewer punches:

Civil rights campaigners marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we’ve got these knuckleheads who can’t speak English.

You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

This argument is, I think, particularly pertinent to writing on the web.

I’m fairly familiar with l33tsP34k, or the txt msg vwl mnglng style, but if I happen upon a website written in either of these variations on English, I’m liable to close my browser tab quicker than you can type, ‘C u l8r m8!!!’ And, as a result, I could be missing out on profound observations, useful information, deep spiritual truths, etc. Okay, so it’s not that likely that I am missing out on anything more than teenage drivel and exciting new cheats for computer games I’ve never heard of, but still, there is much out on the web that I might want to read, but cannot, because it only purports to be in my mother tongue. As for future readers, I fear new university departments will be created to develop translation algorithms capable of untangling past language distortions, just as boffins are now having to spend time translating obsolete languages and file formats from the earlier years of computing and the internet.

Similarly, on a certain online forum which must remain nameless, I sometimes pretend to be appalled by the fact that many of the Scottish members insist on writing in dialect - cannae for cannot, and so forth - when they ought really to be speaking bloody English. In this case, being an Englishman in Glasgow, I’m obviously on shaky ground, and engaging in a little low-level trolling. But my point is valid: the web is a medium for communication, its great strength is the ability to connect people and their ideas; and by writing in psuedo-Scots any point made is buried under a deafening shout of, ‘I am Scottish and working class, you effete English arsehole!’ Or, to put it more politely, the strength of the web is weakened the moment people choose to ghettoise themselves by adopting an exclusionary argot. (The phrase exclusionary argot runs dangerously close to being self-descriptive, I know, but we’ll just gloss over that for now!)

So, looking at the web, the point made by the unlikely alliance of Truss and Cosby holds true. By writing ‘proper’ English (or, given the language war du nos jours, ‘proper’ Portugese) on the web, you build a place that is open to all, from stuffy old word-lickers like me to unfettered pre-teen l33tsP34kers. Call me a hippy if you like, but I thought the whole sodding point of the World Wide Web was to create a shiny new democratic space, one where class, nationality, colour, creed and whatever else people use to cut themselves off from other sections of society are stripped away to an extent impossible in the good old real world, leaving only the free and happy exchange of information and ideas. Like, y’know, and shit, man.

Posted at 3pm on 21/07/04 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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Tags: language, web