Yesterday we had a little laugh at the expense of an Indian interpreter who, with more ambition than ability, had written an English method for his Bengali-speaking neighbors. But Dr. Boli hinted that he saw this book as a very hopeful sign for the English language. Now he will explain why he thinks that is true.

There was a time when the English language was full of natural poetry. Back in the time of Good Queen Bess, the first of that name, it was almost impossible for an English-speaker not to be a poet. Our language produced Shakespeare and Spenser and Marlowe and dozens of other first-rate poets in her time, but even the most prosaic writing of the Elizabethan age is full of poetry. The Elizabethans couldn’t help it: they opened their mouths, and beautiful music came out.

We Americans had our own age of poetry. In the nineteenth century, and into the early twentieth, the ordinary American spoke a language that was full of the elements of poetry: rhythm and metaphor and alliteration and—above all—variety. But we outgrew that poetry. Americans of today speak a dull and prosaic sort of English; we naturally think in terms we have learned from marketers and politicians, the two groups least likely to produce a poetic statement.

But there is a country, soon to be the largest in the world in terms of population, where millions upon millions speak a variety of English that is full of natural poetry. “Make English your lap-dog”: no American would say that, but how much better American English would be if it were the sort of thing we naturally said! We laughed at the grammatical errors in the sample letter about “poor sanitary arrangements,” but look at that letter again, and you will see that there is not a single sentence in it that is not perfectly clear on the first reading. Now pick up any random piece of American writing—say, a letter from a politician to the editor of the Washington Post—and see whether you could say the same for it.

Go back and read the sample letter again, and this time listen to the rhythm. It is varied in just the right way to hold our attention. The vocabulary is rich and descriptive. The argument flows persuasively.

It would be easy to point out the errors to our author, and if he is not too proud to take advice, he could remove all our grammatical objections to his writing. But no one could teach him the poetry: he had to grow up thinking poetically. As India grows in prosperity and influence, more and more of this poetic and definite Indian English will penetrate our fuzzy and prosaic literature, and a fresh breeze will blow through the English-speaking world. Let a thousand Sudhamay Balas bloom. They will make us proud of our language again.

Here is a sample letter to a newspaper, printed in a book, and your job, dear readers, is to guess what kind of book it was printed in:

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Sub: Poor sanitary arrangements spread of Malaria.

Sir.

I want to ventilate through your esteemed daily about poor sanitary arrangement in our locality 17 No. ward, Barasat. Now it is a grave problem in our locality. Because of the drains and ditches are not cleaned. So the heaps of the garbage and rubbish are accumulating at random there. These ditches, sweage of garbages are the brooding ground of mosquitoes, spreading malaria in this locality. Day before yesterday a young man 36 year Sadhan Roy died of the Malignant Malaria and many others have been suffering from fever. Formarly the workmen of Municipality were seen to take away the garbages, but now they are hardly seen. We pay a good amount of tax but the Municipality returns a deaf ear to our grievance. It is indeed sad. So I want to draw the attention of the concerned authority.

Therefore, I would request you to publish the above note to inform the public and the authority sharply.

Thanking you

Yours faithfully
S. Roy

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Now that you have read the letter, can you guess what kind of book it comes from?

The answer:

(more…)

The Internet is determined to squash literacy at any price. The reason is simple and obvious. Writing is a very efficient way to communicate information; videos are not. Efficiency is fatal to content providers’ profits. If you can read the information you need instantly, then you will not linger on the page. But if you are forced to watch a video that takes a definite amount of time, then you will be on that page for that time, and perhaps you will fall into a coma and your mouse-clicking muscles will contract and you will click on an ad or a Patreon link or another video. This is what the content providers refer to as “engagement.”

For example, Dr. Boli wanted to know how to get the € symbol on a Macintosh keyboard, because he uses a Macintosh keyboard layout, though not on a Macintosh. (Anyone can use a Macintosh keyboard on a Macintosh—that’s no accomplishment at all.) So we call up Startpage, a search engine that gives us Google results anonymously, so that we see what Google would give us if it had no idea who we were, and we type “euro symbol macintosh keyboard.”

The first result, enclosed in a box to let us know that it is the recommended answer to our query, is a video.

Screenshot provided for the fair-usey purposes of criticism, etc.

This is a short video, only one minute and five seconds long. Eleven seconds into the video, the video producer says “Let’s get started” and then begins his explanation at the 12-second mark. So one-fifth of the video is introduction.

By a curious coincidence, “Let’s get started” is exactly the same number of syllables as “Shift-option-2,” which is the answer we were looking for. It took one second to say “Let’s get started,” so we can assume it would take the same amount of time to give the answer without the useless fluff. But a one-second video would be silly, wouldn’t it?

Yet the information could be absorbed in less than a second if it were presented in written form:

Shift-option-2

Now, what is the rest of the video about? We still have 48 seconds to go, after all.

Well, our videographer gives us two methods of producing the euro character. The first is the painfully roundabout way of pressing control-command-spacebar, which brings up a symbol list, then clicking on a “small icon” to expand the window, then clicking on “Currency symbols,” and then finding the euro sign, and then choosing the font you want from the “Font Variation” panel. Yes, this is all much easier than shift-option-2. Are we a little sarcastic today? No, not at all. Dr. Boli? Sarcastic?

All that takes us to the 48-second mark, at which point we are finally told that the keyboard shortcut is shift-option-2. From second 55 on is just the standard boilerplate begging us to subscribe to the creator’s channel, where presumably we’ll find similarly informative videos (“How to type Letter H on MAC,” “How to make Space Between Words on MAC”).

In what way is a video better than displaying the answer “Shift-option-2” as the top search result? In only one way: since Google supplies the results, Google leads us to YouTube, a Google property, where it can now try to persuade us to watch “Otter Carries His Little Friend Up the Stairs with One Paw” or “A baby hears Pavarotti sing ‘Nessun Dorma’ for the first time ever.” Bing! We’re engaged!—Oops—sorry—we accidentally slipped and used the B-word, but you get the idea.

Content providers prefer to have us sit still and shut up and watch a video. This establishes a certain expectation among the younger generations. In ten years or so, it will be mandated that all essential information be presented that way. Road signs, instead of instantly recognizable symbols, will carry little animations showing the proper way of yielding to oncoming traffic or the dreadful consequences of taking this curve too fast. Fire extinguishers will have color displays to play the ten-minute video that demonstrates how to aim the extinguisher at the base of the flames.

This is how literacy will die: not because we the people will lose interest in reading, but because the capitalists who control access to the information we want will refuse to let us read. Gradually we will accustom ourselves to the idea that we do not control how we take in information. Our masters will unscrew the tops of our heads and pour in the information they think we ought to have in measured doses. It will not be necessary to prohibit reading. It will simply be made more and more inconvenient to find information in written form, and our native laziness will do the rest of the work.