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.
Comment - Pedant fights losing war on e-literacy.
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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