Making words meaningful

One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a cold Primary School classroom.

Beyond the windows, a grey afternoon surrounded us; specks of snow were falling, so it may well have been at around this time of year. I was just six years old and felt very alone – even though I was surrounded by my contemporaries. I wasn’t to know it then, but this feeling would remain with me for the months and years that followed.

Something else that has stayed with me throughout my life is a love of words which began that same afternoon. We were doing ‘word building’ whereby the teacher (who usually communicated her thoughts to us through grim mutterings of disapproval or even plain shouting, on particularly grey days) held up white ‘flashcards’ on which were printed single black words.

Shy and lacking confidence, I was initially reticent in putting my hand up to tell her what the word said. Others were less afraid, just lazy. However, once I had correctly pronounced nouns such as ‘sheep’ and ‘goose’ (we lived in a rural community!) I experienced not only colour rushing into my world but also a belief that here was something that I could do – and it was easy.

“aeroplane”

I found that I could pronounce this word through understanding the sounds that the letters made when assembled in this order, I could also spell it after the artful teacher had turned the card around to reveal only white space. I firmly believe that the tyranny of the blank sheet of paper has never affected me because of what happened that day.

“I would never be beaten by words, once I realised that I could use them to my advantage"

Beyond the grudging respect of the teacher and astonishment of my classmates, I quickly graduated to reading and writing, which have not only been the key building blocks of my life but also my greatest joys.

 “without words, how could we possibly begin to describe and understand the world in which we live?”

Some years after this, I met Lynne Truss at a book launch event for her seminal book – 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves’ – and realised that I was not alone in my love of words and instinctive defence of grammar, punctuation and structure. I have always spotted spelling errors because they shout at me from page or screen; I cannot bear it when writers think that a misplaced apostrophe is OK, or thought that the mixing up of past and present tenses was acceptable.

“we are all just passive subjects, but give us verbs and we can start doing things”

I was thinking about this over Christmas, partly forward-thinking because 2018 marks a re-focussing of my business on words. I have worked in the media industry for over 30 years, specialising in content writing, indexing and proofreading, as well as searching for information and fact-checking.

I have experience of working with all kinds of documents - from internal communications to company reports; from paper-based books to web communications across a broad range of websites and know that I will enjoy the challenges of more proofreading every bit as much as understanding and interpreting flashcards.

I was also feeling reflective over the holiday period, thanks to the news that Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees had been knighted. Unsurprisingly, ‘Words’ is one of my favourite songs and has been since it was released - also more than 50 years ago.

“talk in everlasting words”

That line says it all for me. We remember words and phrases and conversations emotionally, as well as rationally. By the same token, as a reader and writer of words, I get irritated or annoyed when the material is not published to a high standard.

As a writer of both fiction and non-fiction myself, it causes me mental anguish when I read fiction containing spelling or grammatical errors, or non-fiction where consistency or factual accuracy is missing. In a world of digital reading devices, why would I buy beyond a sample if this was the case, or trust an author’s authority to teach me new things, if they had described the things I did know about incorrectly?

But, does any of this matter?

My background is in online search and when I was producing and indexing content for clients’ websites, we were actively encouraged to tag items with misspelt words so that users of Google who, themselves, could not spell properly, would still find our content on the web.

I’m not sure if that kind of ‘black hat’ activity still takes place or not, but I do know that Google would have been immensely useful to me in my student days; yet I too sometimes find myself throwing loose words and phrases into its search bar, and inevitably failing to scroll beyond a couple of pages of results.

Before my school breakthrough, I had managed to make myself understood at home. I used words such as ‘purra’ and ‘purdy’ when I meant ‘perfect,’ while I understand when our children use the inverted meanings of ‘sick’ or ‘wicked’ today. Slang and social media terms can sometimes seem interchangeable, and yet their target groups understand them; so,

"is the 'correct' use of words really an issue?"

Well, correct spelling and punctuation are as important for students today as when I was in that Primary School classroom. Online checkers are all very well, but artificial intelligence has not yet mastered the meaning of words that humans can aim for. How often has WORD’s spell checker reassured you that a word does not deserve a red horizontal line below it, and yet it does not make sense in the context in which it is being used?

I have read many CVs in my professional life – or at least up to the point where the first spelling mistake occurred, and then neither read nor taken them any further. When you do get a job, poorly-written emails, as much as badly-written internal or external documents, will convey a poor first impression of you and thus tarnish all of your other abilities in the eyes of those people you are writing to (who may not know anything else about you).

It isn’t really about conveying different meanings through words but, rather, the meaning you are trying to convey. Lewis Carroll, inevitably, tried to scramble our logical understanding when his Humpty Dumpty suggested that,

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

Alice obviously thought this was backwards-thinking when she examined it in the looking glass and challenged it – as we all should. How often have we met similarly empty-headed, pompous people who use long or complicated words in sad attempts to elevate their seemingly scholarly status, or include them in inaccessible theses that only really separate them from the truth?

The real point, for me, is that,

"words are assembled and published to communicate messages which are meant to be understood by a target group."

Mistakes can affect how those messages are conveyed and even change the meaning of them altogether.

It has been estimated that up to a third of web visitors will leave a website if it contains writing errors. Spelling mistakes influence time-poor consumers’ and prospective partners’ views of a business and – in an increasingly competitive environment – they will never return.

Words must evolve, of course, but that does not mean that they should be treated with any less care. A word may start out in life as two separate words, become hyphenated and eventually joined together as one. Equally, relatively new words – as ‘aeroplane’ was in the 1960s – become shortened and accepted in modern usage after periods of time in which they may have enjoyed the halfway house of an apostrophe to indicate missing letters – such as ‘plane.

Even Barry used a form of poetic license to suggest that ‘it’s only words’ that we have, rather than the correct ‘they are’ or ‘they’re only words.’ His words have provided the backdrop for so many moments in my life that I have long since forgiven him for this, much as the Glastonbury faithful did last year.

After achieving fame and fortune through his use of words, Barry has subsequently had to deal with the horrors of losing each of his brothers. Truly, words as inscriptions are all that he really has left. There are flurries of snow outside my window again, and I’m not sure how many years remain for me either, but I want to describe and understand even more of the world through words – some my own, and some through making those of other people meaningful.