So call me daddy-o
The other day I had to make a mobile phone call so I wandered into the front room to stand near the window because that’s where I usually make my mobile calls from. Now, if you were some kind of qualified language detective, you’d be able to find out all kinds of things from that previous sentence. For a start, you’d be able to work out that I’m of a certain age (I’m 66 but you probably guessed as much) because I called the phone a “mobile phone” and then I called it a “mobile” and of course everyone below the age of, say, 50, calls it a phone because it’s their phone. And because I’m in my mid-sixties, I did that thing of walking into another room to make the call, sitting near the landline because, well, that’s where the phone calls were always made and received. When I tell my grandchildren that and I point to the phone that’s connected to our landline, they look at me like I’m showing them around a museum.
I’ve never really grasped the mobile bit of the mobile phone so if it rings when I’m strolling down the street, I stop to answer it. And I’ve also never fully fathomed the multitude of ways you can interact with someone on the phone; I very rarely do Facetime or any of its variants because to me it’s almost still science fiction. I’m comfortable with the Zoom meeting or even the Zoom family quiz but I still find the sight of somebody talking to another person’s face live on the phone at the bus stop a bit jarring. I know, I know: get down with the kids, daddy-o!
This development of phone language and etiquette is important if you’re a writer because if you get that kind of detail wrong, then the reader stops believing in the story you’re trying to tell. If a twenty-something calls their phone a mobile phone, then the whole fictional edifice will come crashing down around the reader’s ears. In real life, as opposed to fiction, you never notice these kinds of things because they’re just floating around you like a tide of language that comes in and goes out but if you’re writing them down, then they have to be accurate.
And that’s why I’m always listening to the way people speak. So I’ve noticed that a lot of people start sentences with “so” these days. So I’ve noticed that people say “to be fair” a lot, to be fair, sometimes abbreviated to TBF. So I’ve noticed that people say “can I get” rather than “can I have” in cafes, to be fair.
I’m not some kind of purity of language evangelist who wants to stop grammar and vocabulary and syntax changing and developing though; no, I just find it really fascinating, TBF.
So, somebody’s just ringing me up on the mobile phone. I’d better go into the front room to answer it. Laters!
financed by advertising. It declined to do so. Sir Alan’s report “proved a bitter personal disappointment to Thatcher”.
Hendy has written an engaging and, to my mind, very fair book. He isn’t blind to the BBC’s failures or to the follies, misjudgements and sometimes misdemeanours of some BBC employees. If the earlier chapters, covering the early years when John Reith was director-general, are of particular interest and have a narrative sweep missing in the later parts of the book, this is surely because it was then a much smaller organisation with a more clearly defined character than the great sprawling animal the corporation was to become.
I suspect that many readers may baulk at reading the book from beginning to end as the story becomes more detailed and often confusing, but most will surely find pockets of interest throughout.
It is very much the case for the BBC, but it is a case which, with things as they are, needs to be made; and
Hendy makes it well.