In the age of the text, just where is English headed?

Date Published: {J}

To many, it will hardly come as a shock that surprise visits by schools’ inspectors around the country found that, in a significant number of cases, there is a distinct lack of quality in both Maths and English in our classrooms at primary level.

The days seem to have long departed where there is a concentration on ‘reading, writing and arithmetic’. They should surely be the basics of education even today, but newspaper reports in the past week seemed to indicate that standards were low in a key number of cases, and that the standard of teaching was also low in a minority of cases.

It follows in line with a recent report from the UK where it was found that significant numbers of children were close to illiterate when they completed their first level education.

The finding reminded me of an extraordinary piece of research which Dr Sean O Muircheartaigh, of the Galway Mayo Institute of Technology, brought to my attention. We met at the Galway Science and Technology Exhibition and he plonked before me a typewritten sheet and invited me to read it.

In amongst all the high-tech of the exhibition, here was a piece of English which defied even the sorts of nonsense which you occasionally see in text messages on mobiles. Yet it was capable of being read.

And as a result of being intelligible . . . you have to ask, how would it fare out in years to come in a world which will surely be less and less a user of the written word.

I reproduce the piece below: The pweor of the hmuan mnid: Aoccdring to a rscheearch at Cmabridge Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouhitt prbelm. Tihs is bcusae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lterer by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

Incredibly, yes it can be read. Incredibly, I can also read some of the text messages which I get from those who have become experts in the ‘new lingo’ which is guaranteed to cut the phone bill for the mobile, but must surely play havoc with the written English language in the years to come.

In a world where literally billions of messages are sent by text each day, and in an Ireland where tens of millions of text messages are exchanged, what will eventually become of a language which commonly uses 4U instead of ‘for you’ and in which everyone understands ‘tnx’ for ‘thanks’.

The text message is an extraordinary and versatile means of communication, but remember also that in many, many cases, this is the only ‘writing’ that many people do in any one day. Then throw in the confusion which can be caused by the ‘Americanisation’ of our spellings such as ‘harbor’ for ‘harbour’ and ‘defense’ for ‘defence’ and you have to wonder where it will all end.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.