I read something today. Something that caused me to take the momentous decision to start a blog.
That something was a relatively simple idea, but something that I think is easily forgotten in our modern world:
“People are capable of revealing rich patterns of thought and feeling through language.”
Now of course, you probably all knew that, unless you are emotionally stunted in some way. But it really got me thinking about how little I use language to its full capabilities. And as an English Teacher, that worried me.
I have, for some time, possessed a hatred of Twitter, and those of you who know me relatively well have probably realised I’m pretty useless at replying to text messages. I have previously blamed this on the useless heap of crap the Orange Shop (or is it now EE?) insist on calling a phone. Other excuses have been a lack of time, my general derision for people that spend their lives refreshing a screen for the latest sneak-peak into Giles Coren or Grace Dent’s life, along with those of you who refer to things that happened “on Twitter” as if it was the real world. But today, I hit on the real reason. It’s the limited length; that horrendous pressure to say something witty / life-affirming / sufficiently impressive in only 140 characters.
Now I know this isn’t ground-breaking, but it turns out that our world is full of limitations on language, and I didn’t even notice it happening. Everything has got shorter – we don’t write letters, we email; we don’t email, we text; we don’t text, we tweet. I realise that this isn’t exactly how it works, but that list does capture a general chain of (d?)evolution over the last fifteen or so years. On top of this, newspapers are physically smaller (The Independent even shortened its bloody name to ‘i’), my school reports are limited to 160 characters (in which you must comment on a pupil’s entire term of work), and even the blessed BBC offers news snippets between programmes for those of us that won’t engage in a full news item (I sound snide, but I’m one of them).
Whereas some folks claim this is to do with the short attention spans of the younger generation, I think this is doing all of us a disservice. The teenagers I know (admittedly, they are all terribly middle class and pay for their education) are perfectly capable of sitting and concentrating in a 90 minute lesson. Furthermore, they will all sit and read a book for 45 minutes in a library class. And I regularly see less privileged children out and about, fully engaged in an activity for more than a minute at a time (even if that is the persistent tormenting of a Chinese man on the bus, like I witnessed last week).
The problem is that we have lowered our expectations of ourselves when it comes to language. We’re too willing to accept the shortened version, whether that’s for genuine time constraints or just pure laziness. But what I’m saying is that we need to make more time for words – not just to read something longer than a 'Daily Mail Online' article every so often (I know you do it, we all do), but to use more words to express ourselves. And by this I don’t just mean verbally, but on the page / screen. This is the important part. By limiting yourself to 140 characters, you’re essentially limiting your emotions to about thirty words.
You see, if I’d written this post as a tweet, I probably would have come across as either angry, bitter or saddened. Hopefully, after reading this, you’ll realise I’m all three. And possibly slightly optimistic that, by setting an example through this blog, I can encourage other people to spend a little more time each day using language to its full potential.
