Battling for Words

This may be the last message you get from me. The forces of Technology are closing in on all fronts, and I don’t know whether ths sntce wil evn gt thru 2u.

Poor old Parkinson has alrdy bort it. He snt an sms to his editor and the poor sod didn’t realise he had predictive text on. He sed he jst prest “H”, got distracted, and instead of “Hope 2 send article soon”, the msg came out the other end as “Hope u rot in hell u big fat lump of gresy lard”. That was the last msg he’d sent to his ex wife. The Editor’s ordered poor old Parky over the top 2 go intervu Chief of Plce about bribry, so won’t c him alive no more.

Th r ’s hop , th r ’s som r spite, thank God. W ’v manag d to find an old Olympus typ writ r in the attic. It’s a bit dusty and th l tt r “ ” isn’t working but at l ast w ’ll be abl to string tog th r words to form an unambiguous s nt nc .

Ponsonby Smith says it won’t work. H says you can’t writ anything int lligibl without th full alphab t. Ponsonby is such a pissimist. Whin you’v got your backs to da wall you hav to mayk a plan. If this do sn’t git through to HQ soon, how can wi possibly hop to git rinforcimints, lit alon git paid.

That’s better, what a relief. Ponsonby says there was a dead peanut beetle under the e key so now we’ve got the old Olympus firing on all cylinders. We can lay down a withering string of elegant, grammatically correct sentences on all fronts, peppered with colourful epithets. Try this for size you cocky teenaged faceblog twitters: The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness. Good on you, Joseph Conrad! Look at the little weasel’s scurrying for the cover of their laptops. Yeah, run for it, you bunch of lily-livered, semi-literate techno brats. Call yourself writers!

Attack is the best method of defence. There’s no point in simply hunkering down under a constant barrage of incoming email or worrying about being caught out in the open by an sms. We’ve all got to die sometime and it might as well be in a blaze of literary glory. Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; or close up the wall with our English dead. Or is that dead English? Never mind, Shakespeare couldn’t spell proper anyway.

Good news, at last! Ponsonby’s managed to lay his hands on a cache of Oxford English Dictionaries and is scattering them on the perimeter. That should hold them for a while. We should be able to pick off quite a few with well-aimed, pithy witticisms when they stop and try to look up words like “lol”. Doesn’t exist, you bunch of abbreviated thumberleeners ...

hOlD oN. The DaMnED CAP kEy iS sTICKiNG. JUsT As I HaD HaLF A dOzEn oF The BLiGhTeRS in MY SiGhtEs. JUsT One LucKY BReAk, ThAT’s ALL I ASK.

Oh crap, the typewriter ribbon broke. I don’t know where that leaves us. This ballpoint pen is almost out of ink and after that it’s just pencils. They’ll be all over us soon. We can hear the chatter of Blackberrys and Nokia 6520’s from the office over the way. Ponsonby says they’re bound to bring up the ipads soon. He says the final assault will probably come at dawn, thousands of screaming eight year olds armed with stuff we’ve never even heard of. It’ll be a slaughter but we won’t go down without a fight. Take this you miserable little heathen writer wannabes: THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPED OVER THE LAZY DOG, RAT-A-TAT TAT.