2008 October 03

By Kate Smith

They make unlikely revolutionaries, teenagers, heads stooped over mobile phones, thumbs rapidly whizzing around keypads. While older generations may lament the passing of a passion for the formal written word, some academics believe SMS messaging, “texting” to you and me, is creating a renaissance in the English language.

It is a language of youth. One where the humble vowel is in jeopardy, where acronyms rule and the written word is phonetically reduced to the point where few over the age of 40 will understand. Omg means “oh my God”, lol is “laugh out loud”, l8r is later, gd means good, y is why and kl is cool. Words are phonetically spelled to create wot and wanna.

While parents and teachers fret at this apparent semantic barbarism, academics at the University of Toronto say instant messaging in fact represents “an expansive new linguistic renaissance”. They believe that students are caught between disapproval from elders for using slang, and scorn from friends for being too formal. Texting allows them to “deploy a robust mix” of colloquialisms and formal language that is good for their communication skills.

Teenagers and children use their mobile phones primarily as messaging devices rather than telephones. The Canadian survey of 72 teenagers revealed they sent a combined one million texts over 12 months.

The really radical aspect of this is that content is changing the form of the language. While the passing generations of youth have always had their own jive talk, this is different and much more drastic because it is radicalising the actual form of language.

Rather than subject-verb-object, we’re getting verb and object, all expressed with great sparsity of letters and symbols. Words are written as numbers and letters. It is the language of haste and, once you learn it, it seems so efficient. Some academics have argued that texting is a separate language. Perhaps it was, but now it is synthesising with conventional English.

The strictures of SMS language have evolved from the limits and opportunities of mobile phone technology. Like most things in life, it has proved that necessity is the mother of invention.

Indeed, journalists, secretaries and plain masochists who have taken shorthand recognise immediately the shortcuts that naturally flow from the imperative to simplify. Goodbye vowels, adios words that rhyme with numbers and cheerio to superfluous letters pointlessly doubled up. Why bother with the pleasant preambles in life that take too much time to write (“I am sorry to bother you “) when you could just get straight to the point?

The behaviour of teenagers is also changing. Dating now consists of asking someone out by text, or on MSN, or social networking sites such as Bebo or Facebook and the relationships continue to be virtual. They might never meet up, or go on a date. Cynics point out this cyber-cupidity might be good for Britain’s high rate of unplanned teenage pregnancy.

For all its modernity, this linguistic tussle is not a new fight. This is a battle royal between traditionalists who seek the purity of the written and spoken traditions and those who believe we should rejoice in the fluidity of language.

In Scotland, we are used to the language of teaching being more formal than our everyday language and accents. The bard Robert Burns was adept at Scots and formal English. Our children learn the language of the playground and the BBC. Grannies all over put on their best telephone voices. We often formalise our language when speaking in public, including a different set of nouns. In essence, many of us are diglossic already, with two accents or dialects. This parallels what young people experience with texting and formal use of language.

It is inevitable that language becomes abbreviated and casualised since this is the historical dynamic of language – to become more efficient. The evolution of language is its simplification. Purists were livid at Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Chaucer at the time for taking linguistic licenses, using dialects and slang vocabulary. The flip side is that youngsters do still need to learn the rules of formal language, and any educator will tell you of the creep of texting language into written work. Celebrity philologist Stephen Fry confirms that once you know the fundamental rules, then you can have fun.

As a first-year university student I remember interrupting a lecturer who assuredly told the lecture hall in his beautiful Queen’s English that you could not construct a sentence using only vowels. I raised my hand and shouted out with delight: “Professor, you can: a e i o’ ,” I told him, pronouncing them phonetically – “ah eh ih oh”. He looked perplexed and asked me to repeat it in English, which I duly did to gales of laughter from my fellow students; “I ate it all”. I knew that spoken Scottish doesn’t always need consonants but I didn’t know faces could go such a deep shade of purple. An ingénue can challenge convention just by being young, exuberant or in my case, idiotic.

Some revolutions are hapless by-products of inevitable change where those century-old conventions just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Formal language will continue to be the medium of education but let’s not look down at texting and instant messaging and see it as the end of our language.

The older generations shouldn’t feel concerned at the sedition of it all.

English is not made of glass. C u l8r, K8.

Political Children

By Kate Smith

IT IS not your average childhood experience. Dressed in your Sunday best, face scrubbed and told to be on your best behaviour by a finger-wagging parent and advisers, you are thrust on to a stage like a rock star in front of 84,000 fans.

Far from looking bewildered, nine-year-old Malia Ann Obama and her little sister Natasha, seven, bestrode the podium in Denver with all the confidence of two children oblivious to the nature, scale and significance of the situation.

As Barack Obama’s family walked into the history books at the US Democratic convention, the children were pristine, courteous and waved sweetly at the audience.

Unfazed as they were by the world’s TV cameras and thousands of flashbulbs, a question emerges – how did Michelle and “Barry” get them to behave like that? The thought of appearing on any political stage with my children makes my blood run cold.

The limitless capacity of a child to undo you means the risks are higher than giving your personal data and bank details to the government. Unfettered by the constraints of self-awareness and self-doubt, children have the ability to cut to the chase, tell it how it is and prick the bubble of delusion and hubris that adults require just to get through life, let alone a political career.

Political children are props, totems of reliability, dependability, normality and religious values. They symbolise family values and an unspoken virility. As politicos parade their children, they present an idealised version of the parent-child relationship.

The impact on the child is often an afterthought. Some wither in the shadow of a parent who is a world leader. Others may even be paying attention and, after an apprenticeship served at their parent’s knee, go into the family business, take public office and form a political dynasty like the Bushes, the Kennedys or even the likes of Hilary Benn, son of Tony and now a Cabinet minister.

The life of political offspring is not an easy one. While political spouses have the choice to opt in to the deal, the children find out the hard way that you cannot choose your family, and cannot even opt out.

As for getting uproariously drunk, stumbling out of a club at 3am and puking on the pavement, well we only have to look at Euan Blair’s rap sheet to know it’s a cruel world.

As a fresh-faced 16-year-old, Euan was arrested for being drunk and incapable in 2000. He gave his name at the police station as Euan John, his age as 18 and an old address. Typical behaviour for a teenager, but this came only days after Tony Blair had made a speech on drunkenness and advocated on-the-spot fines.

Then there’s Jenna Bush, who in 2001 was charged for possessing alcohol under the age of 21. All very well, but it gave the media an opportunity to wheel out her father President George W Bush’s battle with the bottle and ask if she was a chip off the old block.

A month later she was charged again, for attempting to use fake ID to buy alcohol. Images of her sticking her tongue out at photographers sealed her reputation as a bad girl.

But rebelling might be the only chance a political child may have of retaining an identity or their integrity in the face of the enlarged super-ego of their parent.

Carol Thatcher, now 55, still strives to carve out her own identity through reality shows, books and interviews. As a working journalist in her twenties and thirties, many editors refused to use her own name on the byline, so she was left nameless.

Like Jenna Bush, Carol has a golden twin – Sir Mark Thatcher, her mother’s favourite. While Mark was leading a glamorous jet-set existence, Carol created outrage when it was discovered she had failed to pay her poll tax in 1991.

While Sir Mark fled South Africa after an alleged involvement in a failed coup in Equatorial Guinea, Carol hit the headlines for refusing to admit urinating in the middle of the camp on the TV show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!

Even her journalism is framed by her relationship with her mother. In 2007, Carol travelled to Argentina to make a documentary on the legacy of the Falklands conflict called Mummy’s War. Her life and career suggest that political children are destined always to be a satellite to the parent’s mother ship.

The cynicism with which children can be used in politics would be bearable if only the parents paid the price. In some cases, political children have even been used to conceal the truth.

When, at the height of the mad cow disease scare in 1990, Tory agriculture minister John Gummer desperately tried to persuade his four-year-old daughter, Cordelia, to eat a beefburger to prove British beef was safe to eat. It was a photo opportunity to make the hardiest of souls wince. She wisely refused. When Carol Thatcher’s ex, Jonathan Aitken, was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice in 1999 and jailed for 18 months, it is alleged he had been prepared to have his teenage daughter, Victoria, lie under oath for him.

As for Malia Ann and Natasha Obama, they face the possibility of eight years at the White House if their father attains the maximum two terms, emerging as 17 and 15-year-olds respectively. It’s not as free as being a celebrity’s child, like Peaches Geldof, because a politician’s child has to learn very quickly at a young age that there is a potential political cost for everything they do. The burden of high office often rests on small shoulders.