Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
The rights and wrongs of modern writing
This sentence appeared on the Canterbury Residents Group Facebook page: “people if u want a gd chippy ozzies northgate im having sausage and chips i tried sturry rd chippy no tar donna meat cooked in batter i told them to keep it ozzies northgate number 1”
Never mind some of the bad spelling and lack of capital letters, this sentence is remarkable for the fact that it contains no punctuation whatsoever – not even a full point.
It is not unusual to read prose like this on social media. To someone like me who enjoys the vagaries and uses of language, it is as fascinating as it is irritating.
And I have to ask myself why some people have so readily dispensed with it. Part of it is probably laziness, but part is no doubt because people think it’s unimportant.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Punctuation ensures clarity and helps avoid misunderstandings. It also contains the power to emphasize important points or ideas, and anyone who writes anything should always pause to consider what punctuation marks might be needed in their text.
Many a novice reporter read Keith Waterhouse’s book On Newspaper Style, which talked of the kinds of words to use and the kind to avoid, how to construct sentences and the use of punctuation.
Waterhouse devotes a section to what he calls the “asthmatic comma” which writers wrongly insert into sentences where they feel a natural point to take a breath, but is often completely unnecessary.
The humble comma is the piece of punctuation that some writers struggle with most – and yet it’s one of the most important. But people who can’t use apostrophes really get my gander up.
Quote of the week comes from the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1883): “Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.”
Adefining characteristic of any authoritarian regime of the past 100 years is their pathological obsession with the minds of their subjects.
Such regimes strive to manipulate them with propaganda and fear, to twist and contort them, to bend them to their will. If they fail or encounter opposition, they resort to the tried and tested methods of the police state.
Whether we are talking about Nazi Germany, socialist Eastern Europe and Asia, Cuba, North Korea, even Hugo Chávez’s clownish cult of personality in Venezuela, they all had their methods of dealing with dissent – be it the concentration camp, the Gulag, the firing squad, a pit of ravenous dogs or a 6ft by 6ft cell.
And yet we in 21st century Britain must urgently recognise that we too are goose-stepping towards stricter and stricter controls over what people can say or think, towards criminalising them as offences of thought, attitude and emotion under a catch-all called “hate”.
This week, for example, the thought crime bandwagon rolled menacingly into Kent.
Victoria Linnell, from Strood, found herself before JPS in Medway for asking a taxi driver how long he had been in the UK and saying she wanted “my country back”. Speaking afterwards, the 72-year-old said she didn’t care what people thought, adding: “It’s not our country any more.
“We are the hosts of this country yet we bend over backwards to help these people. How much further do we have to bend over?”
Linnell, who admitted racially aggravated harassment, was effectively prosecuted for holding an opinion deemed incorrect by the state.
Why is there such a focus on “hate” now?
First and most obviously, the referendum result of June 23 sent the establishment into a rage. Thus there has been a concerted effort to portray Brexit-voting Britain as a country convulsed by “hate” as punishment for the result.
This is both malicious and preposterous.
Writing in the August edition of Prospect magazine, David Goodhart, of the Policy Exchange think tank, points out that 75% of the UK population thinks that immigration is too high.
But: “Britain has not become a country of angry nativists. Indeed, the growing opposition to immigration in recent years has been accompanied by increasing liberalism on almost all cultural matters.”
There are three other things we must factor into our understanding of why thought crime is so actively pursued these days:
1) Its loose definition means it is very easy to prosecute and far easier to tackle than, say, heroin dealing on the streets of Canterbury. For example, the Met Police now has a £1.7 million unit dedicated to reading social media for evidence of “hate”.
University of Kent sociologist Frank Furedi objected: “What happens is that increasingly outbursts of dislike or hate, pure rants which are very childish, are becoming criminalised.”
2) The establishment can exploit “hate” legislation to insulate itself from criticism. It knows there is significant opposition to immigration so anyone who dares question it can find themselves being visited by the police.
3) The idea of free speech can be denounced as a sanctuary for intellectually or culturally inferior morons and bigots to peddle “hate”.
In the past, when people talked about class war they meant the working class rising up against the middle and upper classes.
Today it should be conceived of in reverse. What we are witnessing is the middle and upper classes pushing down on the lower classes, instructing them in how to behave, how to think and what kind of people they should be.
Those who support the remorseless assault on free speech will, of course, rarely admit to their true purpose.
In most cases their incantations against free speech will come in the form
The prosecution of Victoria Linnell at Medway ended with the words of district judge Paul Goldspring.
He told Linnell that her opinion was “abhorrent”, that she was “fuelling intolerance” and most importantly: “Whatever your personal views are you should keep them to yourself.”
The obvious paradox is here is that while Mr Goldspring condemns the woman for her intolerance, he also puts the state’s own intolerance on display.
There is a brutal arrogance about Mr Goldspring’s words. He embodies privilege, power, class, status and authority delivering a well aimed uppercut into the cultural inferior.
The restriction of free speech through laws and censorship invests enormous power in those who decide what others can think and say.
This is incredibly dangerous to both liberty and democracy – as US president Harry Truman warned in 1950: “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures.”