Confusions and confabulations

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

27 February 2013

Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?

After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.

Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?

Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?

Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...


If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here