IPhone: The device that killed grammar
Of all the many indignities I have suffered at the hands of my iPhone, the humiliation that sickens me the most is that it has rendered me ungrammatical. This monstrous device. This vile, evil, vindictive, obstructive, disingenuous, fiendish machine. I hate it. I loathe it more than I had thought it possible to loathe an inanimate object. For example, I just sent a message to the builder boyfriend saying: “Casserole on the oven, can you hear it?”
The BB will come in later, look on the hob for a casserole and, finding none, open himself a tin of soup. He will not look in the oven. And he will not be able to hear the casserole. I’m guessing he won’t even attempt to hear it. Why should he? Even white van man knows you can’t hear a casserole, hard though that may be for the Remain camp to believe.
And so I will come home tonight and find the oven cold and the casserole cold inside it. And the BB, defiant in his work clothes to spite me, slumped in a mood on the sofa with an empty bowl of “Ena Baxter’s” soup on the arm. (He will insist on eating soup “made by Ena Baxter”. I keep telling him that Ena Baxter died two years ago, aged 90, but he won’t have it. He feels warm inside when he thinks of a little old lady designing broths for him.) I have had a lot of suggestions from friends. Or, as my iPhone would say, “I gave a Lotto suggestions form fiends.”
My friends tell me I must try harder. Turn off spellcheck. Turn the phone round so the screen is bigger. Learn to poke with greater accuracy. “Is this what made Britain great?” they chide. If at first you don’t succeed, poke, poke, poke again!
But why should I make the mother of all efforts to tap some tiny letters? Why should I fight a Herculean battle to make spellcheck go away? It’s an infernal cheek that this unnatural, egregious, diabolical device fights its human masters so audaciously. It would take too long to make it do what I want and I have a feeling it never would do anyway. It holds out the promise that if I prod it enough times — type, go back, type, go back — it will at some point come out with the sentence I want. You know what? No, it won’t. That’s never going to happen. You’re a fool if you think it is.
By arrangement with the Spectator