I am, I hope, a pedant. Impact is not a verb; invite is not a noun. I
keep my colleagues spellbound by explaining the Latin roots of words (if
necessary making them up).
So you can imagine my self-loathing when I asked Ask Jeeves a question,
and didn’t put a question mark on the end. Why? Laziness, inexcusable
dropping of standards. What’s more, that helpful site answered my
question.
Jeeves, in his internet form, is not a pedant: the Wodehousian original
would turn in his fictional grave.
I suppose my slide to the gutter of inexactitude began when I first
started an email without a capital letter. Having done it once, I dunno,
it just seemed so easy that I kept on doing it.
But it isn’t just me. There is something about the internet that makes
people sloppy. I was looking at Warner Brothers’ Harry Potter site just
now. It has very few words on it, but one of them, the name of a major
character (Hermione) was spelt wrong (Hermoine). This is an example of the
”quality gap” - had Warner Bros made that sort of cock-up in a printed
brochure, someone would probably be looking for another job. But, heh,
this is the web, who cares? That, at least, seems to be the general view,
even in companies which examine every word that goes into print, or on TV,
with an electron microscope.
It’s all a bit worrying for us pedants. First, the internet doesn’t care
about language. I would very much like it if Ask Jeeves refused to answer
questions that did not have a question mark at the end. Every email
program should refuse to send messages that include sentences starting
with lower case letters. But I might, sadly, be micturating in the
wind.
So it’s down to us. We all know that Americans are illiterate. We also
know that Americans dominate the internet. But that, I’m afraid, doesn’t
explain my moral turpitude in failing to use question marks or capital
letters. It’s my fault (and yours, if you are as bad as me). Don’t let the
internet bring us back to the days of cavemen, where we communicate
through electronic grunts. Use long words, correctly. You might believe
this deserves floccinaucinihilipilification - but it matters, I assure
you.
David Bowen is editor-in-chief of Net Profit, an e-business publishing and
research company. Tel: 020 7403 1140; www.netprofit.co.uk.
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