Feature
The L Word
by Denis Welch
We read and write more than ever.
It’s just the meaning of literacy that’s changing.
When a semi-colon was spotted in a New York subway sign earlier this year, it made the news. The New York Times ran a report about it, as excited as if a creature long thought extinct, like the takahe, had been rediscovered. The sign, which urged disembarking passengers not to leave their newspapers behind, said: PLEASE PUT IT IN A TRASH CAN; THAT’S GOOD NEWS FOR EVERYONE.
One small step for the subway, one giant step forward for good grammar? Maybe. If it’s true, as the Russian writer Isaac Babel once said, that “No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place”, then the semi-colon has similar power to disturb. At the very least, it supplies a delicate shade of meaning and a rhythmic function in a sentence that no comma can ever match.
But should we grieve unduly for its passing? Or – to take another example – for the rapidly dissolving distinction between “may” and “might”? Language, written or spoken, is a living thing, always evolving and mutating. Just because Charles Dickens, say, wrote a certain kind of English doesn’t make it the benchmark forever: he was writing at a time when print was king and the electronic media had not yet claimed the throne of mass communication.
Which reminds me irresistibly of Lloyd Jones telling the Queen, when he met her, that had Dickens been alive today he almost certainly would have used a computer. To which Her Majesty glumly replied, “Then we would have had even more of his books.”
Questions of literacy can never be judged out of their cultural-historical context; as Australian educationist Ilana Snyder says in her book The Literacy Wars, the term is always value-laden (what you mean by it might not be what I mean by it); and there are many kinds of literacy – oral, visual, technological, occupational as well as verbal.
Concern is valid if students are reaching tertiary level unable to consistently write coherent sentences, but we should also acknowledge that those uncomfortable with the printed word might be right at home at a computer console, or highly skilful at texting. These competencies should be honoured at the same time as perceived inadequacies are addressed.
In a Guardian article earlier this year Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, argued fiercely that reports of the decline of literacy were wildly exaggerated, and that studies suggesting as much were heavily biased towards words on a printed page.
“Yes, we are reading in smaller bites on the screen,” Johnson acknow-ledged, “often switching back and forth between applications as we do it,” but we are also writing more – every year, millions more people are blogging – and that not to include screen-based reading in literacy surveys “is like doing a literacy survey circa 1500 and only counting the amount of time people spent reading scrolls”.
More work needs to be done, too, if texting is to be proved deleterious to literacy. Meaning is still paramount in this medium as well. British linguist David Crystal, who lectured in New Zealand two years ago, puts it well when he says that “Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. There is no point in paying to send a message if it breaks so many rules that it ceases to be intelligible.”
Addressing concern about the trend towards abbreviations, Crystal points out that they are only a small part of texting, and in any case, people have been abbreviating English for centuries. IOU, for instance, can be traced back as early as 1618, and abbreviations like vet, fridge and bus “are so familiar that they have effectively become new words”.
The true test of literacy is not so much form as meaning. Whatever the grammar or punctuation, if the meaning remains clear, then we probably shouldn’t fuss too much. If TRASH CAN were followed by a full stop, dash or comma, the subway sign would still mean the same.
Ironically, the Times had to publish a correction to the original article about the subway sign: it had left out the comma in the title of Lynne Truss’ book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. And that grammatical error really did get the meaning wrong.
