Remember all those think pieces about the bleak future for the English language in the era of text messaging? That GR8 and OMG would level the ornate syntax of the tongue while rendering the young and their dexterous thumbs incapable of grasping the finer points of grammar and punctuation? Newsweek took up the debate a couple of months ago with the cheeky title “The Death of English (LOL)” while the BBC challenged its readers to decipher this particular hobgoblin of TXTese:
“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 :- kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.”
The argument over the baleful effect of TXTing is probably a Seinfeldian debate about nothing, and I particularly enjoyed Lynn Truss’s retort
in The Guardian in July about the pleasures of learning (and subverting) this relatively young medium of communication (“As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.”) But for those who have argued that TXTing would crunch the language into a comma-less mishmash of sloppy abbreviations, has Chad Post got a present in store for you!
As the Chicago Tribune reported this week, Post, the director of Open Letter Books at Rochester University, has acquired and is publishing Mathias Énard’s prize-winning French novel Zona. The book’s 500-plus pages long, and it’s one 150,000-word sentence. The Tribune article nominated it as comprising the longest sentence in print. And of course it’s not slight on punctuation marks: As Post told the Tribune reporter, “It’s told from inside this guy’s mind as he takes a train trip. It has a lot of commas.”
So is this the revenge of the long Jamesian sentence? The return of the repressed relevant clause? The answer is TK. Either way, Zona appears in stores in 2010.
