The Grammar Police

There’s a debate raging on the website I edit . You know the old debate: should we be slaves to grammar? People are moaning about ‘kids nowadays’ and their ‘ridiculous text speak’.

I personally believe in informal situations, such as forums, chat rooms and text etc, people shouldn’t feel like they need to adhere to strict grammatical rules. As long as the msg is understood, ryt? Ha ha. But you see what I mean. That’s the whole point of it being informal! Just because someone uses ‘gr8′ instead of ‘great’ in a message doesn’t make them illiterate. Kids are very bilingual – get them to write an essay or article and those who are naturally gifted writers will do a fab job, despite the fact that they may have just messaged their friend a moment earlier with ‘C u l8r’. Those who don’t do a fab job usually have skills elsewhere (art, design etc). They are incredibly astute – they know how to adapt their language for certain situations and to me, that’s a gift.

Many of our greatest writers (Joyce, Beckett etc) talked about the fact that language is a tower that needs to be knocked down to expose its true beauty. If writers stuck to grammatical conventions, some of the most beautiful work out there wouldn’t have been created. As my fave poet Tony Harrison said:

How you became a poet’s a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?
I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

However, saying all this, when it comes to the novel I’ve just finished working on, I have kept to pretty conventional language cos the main objective is to tell a story. It’s all about plot and characters; about driving the story one. But don’t worry, one day, I will write that literary masterpiece and get all Beckett on your ass!

It’s November …

 … And I want to share a beautiful poem with you (courtesy of my Tweet mate, Stephen Fry, who’s currently in Africa, filming for the BBC … see his blog). I think I’d like to use it at the beginning of the follow up to my shapeshifter novel (still re-drafting it, think I need to change the end). Enjoy!

November

Thomas Hood, 1844

as heard in The Art Of Noise’s “Opus 4″

 No sun – no moon!

No morn – no noon –

No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day.

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,

No comfortable feel in any member –

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! –

November!

Unreliability staring right back atch ya!

We talk about those annoyingly unreliable people in our lives – those ex-boyfriends who always forget those all-important anniversaries (‘O s*it, sorry honey, the dog ate your flowers’); the friend who always cancels at the last minute (‘my cat has a phantom pregnancy’); the work colleague who never ever does those important tasks within deadline (‘sorry, I’ve just been toooooooo busy – looking at Facebook’).  But something dawned on me last night as I was eating a huge chilli con carni meal – isn’t it often the case that it is our very own sweet selves that are the most unreliable people in our lives? If you’re like me, you’re favourite phrase in the world is ‘O well, I’ll start again on Monday’. Every few weeks, I’ll come up with some crazy grand plan to live a pure and slimline life. 5 portions of fruit and veg a day; only one ‘naughty’ meal a week; exercise 3 times a week; drink 2 litres of water a day … the list goes on and on and on.   It lasts for, like, 3 days then vroom, the dedications go flying out the window like a rugby ball kicked by Johnny Wilkinson (give me a moment here as I drooooooool and reflect and worship at his altar!). I never ever stick to the promises I make to myself. Never.  At least my unreliable friend only lets me down 90% of the time. I let myself down 100% of the time. What gives?

Treat the choccie muffins mean, keep ‘em keen

I was chewing on a low-fat choccie muffin today and dropped a bit on the floor. Usually, I’d grab it up and stuff it in my cakehole (waste not, diet not). But someone walked past and I just couldn’t bring myself to pick it up off the floor. Why didn’t I pick it up off the floor? Was I ashamed I’d look like a dirty little fugly scum ho? No, it was more than that – I didn’t want to look needy. I didn’t want to look like I really needed that last morsel of low-fat choccie heavan. I wanted to play hard to get with that choccie muffin.

That got me thinking. Does that old adage “treat ‘em mean, keep ‘em keen” also apply to the chocolatey morsals of our life? Is there an innate aversion within most of us to appear needy? To even knowing the needy (when I say needy, I don’t mean needy as in homeless / foodless / ill etc. Read on to see what I mean)?

Frankly, my dear, there damn well is. Certainly for me anyway, and many of my nearest and dearest. It’s not just the chocolate muffins and men in our lives as well – it’s also those random people ’ships’ you float by in life. They seem like fun at first. You hop into their ship every now and again, they hop into your’s. The Pinot Grigio flows as fast as the laughter. But then your ship starts to get a bit over crowded so you try to move away; float toward your usual familiar waters. But before you know it, you hear a disturbance, you turn around and they’re clinging for dear life onto your ship. The worse thing about this all isn’t their neediness. No, it’s your response to their neediness – it’s the way you stamp on their fingers and they’re spiralling off into dark, murky waters. 

Email, the grandaddy of cyberspace

I love to email, we all love to email – it’s the thing we do in the noughties, right? To me, email is like a soft fuzzy comfort blanket. Take it away and I start stamping my feet and whining like a baby. So I was kinda freaked out to read an email (coo!) from some web guy here that opened the door to a new approach to email. That is, a kinda collaborative web page (like, hey, a blog or a wiki kinda thang) with links to various projects and the opportunity to add comments on those particular projects (see http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue45/web-focus/) . Simply: no-more-email.  Just web. And wikis. And blogs. And I’m thinking, for chrissakes, no!

There’s something about email that brings out the Virginia Woolf in all of us, allows us to deliver a stream-of-consiousness that is unrestricted by blogs and stuff. I can’t tangibly explain why really. Email? It’s the proverbial chat over the garden fence. Collaborative web pages? It’s like a meeting at work.

Sure, email can get you in trouble. Like that time I forwarded on a joke from a friend to a few people. Thing is, what I failed to delete off the bottom of that joke was a whole conversation about how I snogged a boyf of one of the girls I’d forwarded that email too. Or the time I emailed a colleague while working at a company during my uni days, saying the boss was a perv and was no doubt shagging his PA then pressed ‘print’ instead of ’send’. Yep, you’ve guessed it, it printed out to my boss’s printer. Or the time when I referred to the person who we were buying our house from as ‘not having the nonce’ to do anything right then forwarding it on to him by mistake …

 But still, I use email freely and without fear. It’s like that friend you can’t help gossiping with even when you know what you say could be passed on to the wrong people. You do it anyway cos it’s like purging the soul; like scratching that itch that just won’t go away; like grabbing that last handful of peanuts when you’ve already eaten several handfuls …

 So halleluiah to email, the grandaddy of cyberspace. Long live email.