I Learnt Something A Bit Worrying Yesterday…
The Oxford English Dictionary, who are to all intents and purposes the authority on all things English (language), are retiring the phrase “cassette tape”, and are apparently adding in “<3” alongside the definition for “heart”. Time News Feed and The Huffington Post have both written articles about this and have done their best to remain objective, but I don’t have to do that. I’m perfectly allowed to express just how absurd I think it is that a phrase that, if no longer in common use, is at least still relevant to contemporary society is being removed from the dictionary while archaic words that haven’t been used in every-day conversation in centuries upon centuries are allowed to remain. I suppose this is because such words crop up in canonical literature from time to time and one may wish, their curiosity having been inspired, to find out the definition of whatever strange word they have been presented with.
And yet there must be an enormous range of literature, written in an era that had never heard of mp3s, iPods or Spotify, that makes reference to the humble cassette tape. What if the readers of the future, too young and wrapped up in modern technology to have much awareness of what came before, come across this obsolete term when reading from the plethora of books from this era, want to know what a cassette tape was, and turn to their dictionary for help? Well, they’ll be sadly disappointed, I suppose, and will probably have to assume that the device was something that exuded from the author’s imagination and never really existed.
But it did exist, and in my relatively short lifetime too, which calls into question how obsolete a term it really is. I remember being a small child and listening to all sorts of stories on cassette through my amazing pink tape player; when I was 7 my parents bought me a portable tape player, the original “walkman”, and I remember being 11 or 12 and borrowing Now 42, and various other things, on cassette. Even as recently as 2006, my Ford KA was made with a tape player in it, and I’m sure I read somewhere that cassette tapes are still used in many places, and are definitely still being produced. How, then, can the OED justify removing the term from the dictionary, when they are adding in new words like “sexting” and even non-words like “<3” on an almost daily basis?
Which brings me onto the second part of my rant. I distinctly remember, not so long ago in 2003-2004ish, when I was doing my GCSEs, my English teacher drilled into us the importance of using “proper” English and writing our essays formally and without slang. She told us of examples where students had failed their papers for using too colloquial a written style and saying things like “Cleopatra, like, killed him, innit”. Even then, text language was becoming quickly integrated into Standard English and we were warned against the perils of using text abbreviations in formal assignments. Probably as a result of this, I quite quickly drew myself away from communicating in anything less than Standard English and have maintained that even to this day; by no coincidence, I have never had the quality of my written English called into question. Legitimising the use of text language, slang and non-words by including them in the dictionary only encourages children to compose formal communications in this way, and that is, linguistically, completely unforgiveable. The government have recently been talking about the moral collapse of the country and I daresay that relaxing the rules of proper speech plays a part in this. Allowing children to speak in text language both when they verbally communicate with others and when they write is just as bad as failing to punish them for going out looting. Small things can make the biggest difference. You’ll see. You’ll ALL see!
