THIS past week has seen two news items on language and Twitter.
In the slightly unserious category are the comments by Ralph
Fiennes that Twitter is degrading the English language.   "I
think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a
flattened and truncated sense of our English language, so this
always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant?"  The actor,
who has just directed a forthcoming screen adaptation of
Shakespeare's Coriolanus, has his pecuniary reasons for hoping
that viewers' taste for antique syntax and rare words hasn't
been eroded by Twitter.  But is Twitter really so bad? At this
point, one standard response is to recall how some people
(Socrates, famously) opposed writing as a technology that bred
lazy minds, and left words dead on the page, scroll or tablet.
It's hard to find a communications technology that wasn't
criticised for degrading the language.   Now of course the
syntax and vocabulary of Twitter are compressed; the medium
forces it. Is Twitter actually changing how pe