Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [51]
There are other large changes to punctuation practice in our own lifetimes that have not troubled us much. Nobody says, “You can find it at BBC full stop Co full stop UK,” do they? Even the most hidebound of us don’t mind this word “dot” getting into the language. Above all, though, a revolution in typographical spacing occurred so quietly that very few people noticed. Spaces were closed up; other spaces were opened; nobody campaigned. Dashes which were once of differing lengths for different occasions are now generally shorter, of uniform length, and sit between spaces. Until very recently, typists were taught to leave a two- or even three-space gap after a full stop, but now word-processing programs will automatically reduce the gap to a single word space. Semicolons and colons used to have a word space preceding them, and two spaces after, and to be honest, it looked very elegant : but nobody does that any more.
My point is that while massive change from the printed word to the bloody electronic signal is inevitably upon us, we diehard punctuation-lovers are perhaps not as rigid as we think we are. And we must guard against over-reacting. Those who identify “Netspeak” with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “Newspeak” (on the basis that non-case-sensitive compound words such as “thoughtcrime” and “doubleplusgood” bear a superficial resemblance to “chatroom” and “newsgroup”) should urgently reconsider this association, not least because the key virtues of the internet are that it is not controlled by anyone, cannot be used as an instrument of oppression and is endlessly inclusive: its embracing of multitudes even extends to chatrooms in which, believe it or not, are discussed matters of punctuation. A site called “halfbakery”, for example, encourages correspondents with attractive names such as “gizmo” and “cheeselikesubstance” to swap ideas about punctuation reform. This is where the intriguing idea of using a tilde to sort out tricky plurals such as “bananas” came from. In one rather thrilling exchange in 2001, moreover, a member of the halfbakery crowd proposed the use of the upside-down question mark (¿) as a marker for a rhetorical question. This suggestion hung there like a bat in a cave for eighteen months until, astonishingly, someone called “Drifting Snowflake” wrote in to explain that a rhetorical question mark (the reversed one) existed already, “invented in the 16th century, though only in use for about 30 years”. Gosh. I wonder if Drifting Snowflake is male and unmarried? As the internet is dedicated to proving, you really have no idea who anybody is out there.
What to call the language generated by this new form of communication? Netspeak? Weblish? Whatever you call it, linguists are generally excited by it. Naomi Baron has called Netspeak an “emerging language centaur – part speech, part writing” and David Crystal says computer-mediated language is a genuine “third medium”. But I don’t know. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s typing”? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and doesn’t even qualify as typing either: it’s just sending. What did you do today? Sent a lot of stuff. “Don’t forget to send, dear.” Receiving, sending and arithmetic – we can say goodbye to the three R’s, clearly. Where valuable office hours used to be lost to people schmoozing at the water cooler, they are now sacrificed to people publishing second-hand jokes to every person in their email address book. We send pictures, videos, web addresses, homilies, petitions and (of course) hoax virus alerts, which we later have to apologise for. The medium and the message have never