This post, from Marco Rossi continues the discussion about elites in the Anglo-sphere, with particular reference to language. He asks whether syntactical standards matter any more, and whether media, or indeed computer spell checkers, may be exercising a pernicious and inevitable influence on how we speak, what we say and even what we think we should be saying. At least, that's what I think he's saying. Discuss. What do you you think, particularly with reference to defining what we do and how Prospect projects and expresses itself? . . .
When an email is sent out some choose to spell check it for better understanding. The machine goes through the eventual syntactic errors and corrects them accordingly; thus if I write "I went home, than had dinner" rather than "I went home, then had dinner", the machine does not recognizes that "than" as a semantically intended (in the phrase in question) error and keeps it, in other words does not accept the semantics into the system.
So, given that now we accept as a given the fact that the neural interaction being implemented multilaterally by our own cerebral system is what we mirror into the message being carried forth, nevertheless the interlocutor perceives that the message is written incorrectly and so the template being put in place is not mirrored according to our own intentions.
Same as we would speak with a different accent and being identified as foreign regardless of how hard we try to achieve a semblance of "standard accent" and "elitist" eliciting sundry requests for clarifications or stonewalling the flow of communication: thus Christopher Tayler on LBR in reviewing "The Mission Song by John le Carré" states that "...In Tinker Tailor, we’re told that a minor character, a strong-arm specialist called Ricki Tarr, was recruited to help suppress ‘the Malayan emergency’ before being ‘called back to Brixton and refitted for special operations in Kenya – or, in less sophisticated language, hunting Mau Mau for bounty’. The main implication is that Tarr is an unsavoury, potentially dangerous person, not that the Circus plays a nasty role in putting down insurgencies. Confronted with the practicalities of Tarr’s work, Smiley would probably have taken some leave and been spotted ‘sitting rigidly before an old volume of German poetry’, as happens in one of the books, ‘while he silently wept’. But the need to fight Communism always overrides his fretting about British moral credentials, however dubious those might be and however much of a hash the Cousins might be making of things in Vietnam.
‘I do find I become a great deal more radical in my old age,’ Smiley announces during his final appearance in The Secret Pilgrim (1991), an inquest into the Cold War that also offers some pointers for the future. The right people have lost but the wrong people have won. Capitalism must stage its own glasnost, which perhaps it can now that anti-Communism won’t provide ideological cover for low deeds. Unhappily, this isn’t the view taken by the likes of Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw, an arms dealer who once did the Circus some favours and can’t see why he should stop shipping his ‘toys’ to African warlords just because the government’s gone soft. Bradshaw comes out with a long rant on this theme (‘my advice is step aside, let them slug it out, and bloody good luck to ’em’), which the narrator dutifully transcribes, though not before giving a disconcertingly extended disquisition on Sir Anthony’s barbarous dialect and ‘sawing nasal tones’:
He spoke English as if it were his second language, but it was the only one he had. He spoke in what my son Adrian tells me is called ‘slur’, which is a slack-mouthed Belgravia cockney that contrives to make mice out of mouse and dispenses almost entirely with the formality of pronouns. It has a vocabulary, naturally: nothing rises but it escalates, no opportunity is without a window, no minor event occurs that is not sensational. It also has a pedantic inaccuracy which is supposed to distinguish it from the unwashed, and explains gems like ‘as for you and I’.
And since the early 1990s, le Carré’s novels have registered his growing dismay at, on the one hand, the bungling or ignoring of opportunities for the great powers to act less thoughtlessly, particularly in the developing world, and, on the other, the strange accents and linguistic abuses of the rapacious new elite. Perhaps the idea, as Cyril Connolly writes of Eminent Victorians, is to make his points in ‘the language through which the bourgeois ear’ might be ‘lulled and beguiled’. But the results are jarring..."
To what extent then interpreting what is being written and read affects for better or for worse "the least intentionally meant message" yet expected but "filtered" as it were by our own voice?
Certainly not by any computer that does not scan for accent or even less so for semantics, only cold and impersonal syntax good for general knowledge.
Marco Rossi
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