One More Thing

Posted on 10 Aug 2009 at 17:22

 

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The English language is in peril, what with Microsoft encouraging us to 'verb up' its products and others insisting on random case anomalies.

There might be a little bit of allowing you to peek behind the proverbial curtain here, but I've always been grateful to sub-editors. Their job is a damned-if-you-do and damned-if-you-don't affair. If they manage to successfully vacuum up the traditional littering of tiny little errors with which I permeate my raw copy - just to keep them on their toes, of course - then they get none of the credit. Quite right, too. If, however, they let a mistake through, it's rarely the writer who gets it in the neck. From where I sit, it's exactly how the world should be.

I'm particularly grateful for sub-editors right about now, too, as I'm entering the dangerous territory of writing a column about grammar and spelling. About the rogue invasion of capital letters that are infesting product names. About just what technology is doing to our language. It's clearly putting myself up for a kicking, as one tiny error would potentially knock me straight off my soapbox here. But, heck, Rob's a cracking bloke and I'm absolutely sure he won't let me down. It's what his living depends on, after all.

This all started, anyway, following some comments that Steve Ballmer made when launching Microsoft's strangely impressive Bing search engine. As he eulogised over the launch of the firm's Google rival he was actively encouraging people to 'verb up' the word Bing. He did actually say that, too. He really makes writing columns such as this far too easy.

Google, infamously, was once resistant to the idea of people using its brand name as a verb until it stopped taking its silly pills, but the idea that Microsoft can whip out a PowerPoint presentation and try to add a new word to the English lexicon just like that takes some swallowing. I might be going out on a limb now, but I don't think people will be saying that they've 'binged themselves', or that they 'binged it' without the aid of some potent liquid lunches first. Even if people did, everyone else would probably have to go to Google to find out just what it is they meant.

It's just as likely that Bing would take on a different meaning of its own over time, and I leave it to your guesswork what a description of Steve Ballmer 'binging again' a decade down the line is actually likely to mean.

But then technology companies have little respect for such things as spelling and grammar. Thanks to Apple, for instance, product names now seem to have to start with a little 'i', which on more than one occasion I'd wager Rob would have loved to have turned into a capital letter. You can almost see his finger hovering over the Shift key as you read this. The latest example in my inbox? The i-Pig. Even that I've had to type twice, as my word processor insists on correcting it for me. It's the only time I've found myself siding with a copy of Word on a grammatical battle, even though we were both, ultimately, in the wrong.

Then we've got those incessant capital letters. JavaScript, for instance, is supposed to be written with its fifth character a capital, as if it's the work of an inept seven-year old failing an English test. We spend years teaching our kids the appropriate uses of capitals, drilling into them that they must only use them at the start of words. Then Sony brings out the PlayStation. We're then back to square one. MySpace, of course, insists on then taking a perfectly natural space between two words away, with no appreciation for irony as it does so.