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