The spoken word
Sir : Brigid Brophy, in her review of Gillian Freeman's Angela Brazil biography, must surely be oblivious of today's periodical literature for teenagers if she truly doubts the influence of fictional dialogue on everyday spoken language.
When I began to write stories for teenagers some ten years ago 1 in my innocence made my characters speak as did the real-life youngsters with whom 1 was then in communication. Youngsters who, I must add, were themselves avid readers of the magazines in question.
To my surprise those stories, when published, often contained almost unrecognisable mutations of my realistic dialogue. I found it hard to retain my belief in the importance of 'reader identification' with fictional characters when there were my carefully-observed heroes and heroines speaking a language other than that which I had given them at their births on my typewriter.
I was obliged to absorb the lesson that in popular literature there exists a fantasy language deemed by editors appropriate to that fantasy world where love springs fullyrealised from a single paragraph descriptive of our hero's physical appearance.
Perhaps the experience of my niece in writing to one such magazine to relate an anecdote concerning some crisis of dress will best make my point. This young lady, a thoroughly trendy teenager and employed on the modelling scene, had had to seek the privacy of a toilet for running repairs to her clothing. When published, her letter told how she had 'bombed into a loo'!
She was astonished to think that anyone could believe she, or any of her friends of similar age, really employed such 'pop' phraseology.
Yet still the magazines have persisted in this substitution of a fantasy language for the one actually in use among their readers. It seems unlikely that this stubbornly reiterated fantasy language can fail to influence everyday speech-form.
Nick Allen 116 Slack Lane. Derby
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