www.bobsmithart.com

 

 

I would love to learn

the language of

a 10-year-old texter

Ian Hamilton QC

 

I met a 10-year-old girl at a party. She was too busy texting to be bothered with me. I also met a 21-year-old girl. She was studying Eng Lit at a Scottish university. I told her she was likely to learn nothing but the status quo. She looked at me vacantly. 'What do you think of Linklater?', I asked, choosing a 20th-century writer at random. She'd never heard of him. 'We're doing Victorian writers,' she explained.
     Seeking knowledge I asked her views on spelling. Why do nouns indicating action sometimes end with 'er' and sometimes with 'or'? Like actor and computer. 'That's just the way it is,' said the young savant. I told her if she didn't apply her mind to such questions she was wasting her time. 'No one's ever spoken to me like this before,' she said. 'I don't know what to say.'
     Meanwhile, the 10-year-old wee girl in the corner sent her swift thumb across the keys, using a language she has never learned by rote (or wrote, or roat, or by any other of the absurd spellings of our language). She doesn't have her mind burdened by the 'correct' spelling used by the big girl who's doing Eng Lit.
     A university can only deal with the material it gets. Yet its failure to inspire the big girl to think outside the curriculum is a failure of the university itself. Professors and lecturers are as ignorant as she is. So are teachers. They ignore a new way of writing that goes on even as they teach. It can be done by one hand in a pocket. It doesn't need pen or pencil. No pedagogue knows the new language of the wee girl.
     What a waste! The written English language is non-phonetic. A great deal of education is taken up with teaching children how to spell. Two generations have been labelled illiterate because they can neither read nor spell in the absurd way the Victorians fixed it for ever. Our language has become frozen in a non-phonetic mode. Meanwhile, the wee girl texts on.

 

     George Bernard Shaw left his fortune to found a 32-letter alphabet which would spell the sounds we make. The spoilers stepped in. The English judges held that our language was so perfect it needed no reform. They diverted his money elsewhere. We have 'Pygmalion' and My Fair Lady' as Shaw's comment but still his message is ignored. We spell in the same illogical way. But all is not lost. I suspect the new language our children have devised runs phonetically. In any event their communication isn't burdened by artificial modes of spelling.
     If Milton had known of this 10-year-old he would have made her immortal. So would Shakespeare. He cared as little for spelling as I do. Think how many plays he might have left us if he could have written as swiftly as she does. There's nothing new in bringing a language up to date. Our spell checks only sanctify an absurdity. Look what Kemal Attaturk did for Turkey. He changed their written language with an alphabet reform. He did this in one generation. Here are the first words he caused to be written in the new style and read out to a gathering of Turkish scholars one evening in August 1928:
     Our rich and harmonious language will now be able to display itself with new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from these incomprehensible signs that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice.
     I would love to learn the language of the wee girl in the corner. At which of our great universities can I take Eng Lit in it?
     I leave you with lots and lots of love.
     Lots and lots of love took 21 strokes of the keyboard.
     Lotzzznlotzzzol took half that and is very nearly phonetic. It could never be misssspelt or even mis-spelled.
     It's enough 2 make u lol.
     xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

 

Ian Hamilton QC is, well, Ian Hamilton QC