ANOTHER VOICE
Is Emma being tiresome or is it something much worse?
AUBERON WAUGH
he editor of the Gloucestershire Echo has all my sympathy. In a recent issue he railed against this magazine for its specula- tions about the Prime Minister's personal life: The Spectator article about John Major and his non-existent catering mis- tress is appalling journalism,' the leader thundered. I do not know whether the lady concerned would have been more insulted to be described as John Major's mistress or to be described as non-existent, but the Slip-up over magazines is very easy to make. How many people, for instance, remember in which of this week's Sunday newspapers they read that tales of Africa being in the grip of an Aids epidemic are untrue: they have been invented by the medical establishments concerned in order to attract some of the vast American funds available for Aids research? This discovery, if true, has grave implications for the het- erosexual-Aids lobby, which is very power- ful and very rich. It is a brave editor who denies that Africa is swarming with hetero- sexual Aids, that in fact Africans are dying of malnutrition, malaria and various intesti- nal infections, as they have always done. Who remembers which Sunday newspaper carried a long interview with a sculptress who creates her works of art by pissing in the snow, taking a plaster mould from it and casting the result in bronze? Which Introduced us once again to the ineffable Dr Carey?
As I say, confusion about newspapers is common and easily understood. On at least one occasion, a book review intended for The Spectator has arrived by fax at the Liter- ary Review, and we have printed it in good faith. It was both gratifying and humbling for me to meet an old gentleman last week Who assured me that my regular weekly col- umn in the Sunday Telegraph was the only reason he continued to take that newspa- per. I was not so cruel as to point out that I gave up writing it nearly three years ago. Even so, and making every allowance for honest mistakes, I was slightly alarmed to read an article in the Sunday Times this Week about illiteracy among the young, Which I was almost sure I had already read somewhere else. I searched the Telegraph, the Observer, the Independent and Mail on Sunday, but could find no trace. The article Was headed 'Reading books is not worth the effort', and purported to be written by a 16-year-old who had made this important discovery:
Reading is hard work. For a long time chil- dren believed their parents when they were told that something which took effort was more worthwhile than instant gratification, that hard work is eventually pleasurable .. .
It seems that mine is the first generation to reject this theoty. My mother was genuine- ly surprised when she asked if I didn't feel better for having cleaned my room and I said no. Why should I feel better? I stubbed my toe on the Hoover and it ate into time I could have used to watch pop videos or MTV.
Recognise it now? Although not a word of the text has been changed since this same article appeared in last week's Specta- tor under the heading: 'Eating pop tarts, watching pop videos: Emma Forrest, six- teen, explains why so few of her contempo- raries read books' — the effect of the arti- cle, as it appeared in the Sunday Times with a photograph purporting to show Emma Forrest, 16, was completely different.
When I read it first, in the Spectator, I assumed either that Emma Forrest was a mischievous, highly intelligent young per- son intent on tweaking the noses of all the middle-aged fogeys who read and write for this magazine, or that the article was writ- ten as a spoof by some resident, middle- aged male neophobe Digby Anderson, perhaps, or Theodore Dalrymple, or even, in an absent-minded or forgetful moment, myself — as a means of reviling the young. Certainly, I do not suppose there are any parents of children between 15 and 18 who have not had to listen to some version of this drivelling rhetoric. If it is any help to those parents suffering from it now, I can assure them that in my experience, at least, the children grow out of it before long. Far from its being the case that not reading 'is our way of alerting the intellectual estab- lishment that we have moved on', it is a familiar way of alerting us that they are entering a tiresome and embarrassing (but mercifully brief) period of adolescence. That, at any rate, is its significance among intelligent families of the educated bourgeoisie such as might read the Specta- tor (or New Statesman, for that matter). Among the Essex marketing consultants, garagistes and other louts of small intelli- gence and virtually no education who treat the Sunday Times as their Bible, its signifi- cance is quite different. It proclaims for those who wish to listen that this awkward period of adolescence is the new norm, the future opening up before us. Taken in con- junction with that newspaper's on-going campaign to promote sloppy English as a 'classless' novelty it might be seen as part of a sinister conspiracy to prepare the ground for Mr Murdoch's moronic — often mean- ingless — Fox Films to replace the printed word.
On this occasion, I feel the campaign may backfire. If 32 years in journalism has taught me anything, it is not to write about English language or grammar. Every half- educated pedant in the country feels strongly about standards of English. No one will understand what the Sunday Times is trying to do with its four-part magazine of scrappy drivel: The New Golden Age of Writing by Robert McCrum; The Ultimate Arbitrator (rather than 'final arbiter'?) by Professor Walter Nash of Nottingham. 'Dictionaries are supposed to look after our language. How do they come to decisions about what is wrong and what is right?'
The whole purpose of the exercise, if I understand it, is to argue that there is no such thing as correct or incorrect English. Here is a first response from one of their readers, John Tanner of Bristol:
I am no academic, but I am pleased to see your Wordpower venture. My own hobby- horse is the use of 'different to' when the user means 'different from'. I have never been able to understand how this has been given
credibility . If your venture does some- thing to highlight these failings, it will be worthwhile.
Would it be too cruel to draw Mr Tan- ner's attention to Fowler: 'That different can only be followed by from and not by to IS a SUPERSTITION.' Fowler also quotes the OED as saying that 'different to' is 'found in writers of all ages'.
By the time it has received about 10,000 such letters, the intellectual establishment of the Sunday Times may realise it has made a miscalculation. Perhaps it should appoint Emma Forrest, 16, as editor.
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