Moveable Type

For some time an urge had been growing in me to write on a manual typewriter. I didn’t know why exactly but it felt a strangely inappropriate lust, possibly a form of gerontophilia. I disinterred my mother’s old Olivetti, dusted it off, and resolved to type my daily word count, Blu-Tack the sheets to the scarified wallpaper of my Liverpool gaff, and invite the other residents up to view them.

It required a combination of strength and accuracy scarcely imaginable today to take a piece of steel as small as an ant and cut away the extraneous material to leave, for instance, this 9.5 point letter ‘a’. Even the most experienced punchcutters could only complete one letter a day: in 1818 Anthony Bessemer testified to an anti-forgery inquiry that it took him 12 weeks to finish a set of 61 punches.

What’s the most frequent question writers get asked? ‘Do you use a pen or do you type?’ Readers read; writers write, right? Well no.

To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise philosophical, rather than mechanical, questions. Technical concerns masqueraded as ‘irresolvable Zen kōans’: ‘What is Morse code without letters? What is a typewriter without keys?’ A Chinese typewriter was an oxymoron.

Hanzi script relied on concepts – pictography, ideography, logography – that the phonetic alphabet had superseded. The Roman alphabet, it was argued, had prevailed not because of its association with the British and American empires but because it was intrinsically superior to all other systems of inscription. Who in their right mind would argue against simplicity, efficiency and speed?

Heidegger fretted energetically about the impersonal touch of the typewriter. Still, that’s no reason to set off for the Black Forest with a rucksack full of virgin postcards. Compositions at the keyboard often have the fluency of the longhand draft, the letter, the note penned in haste.

Let’s unwrap this. Let’s shine a torch back into the mouth of the underworld, and take some notes in the mouth of the cavern. Let’s return there, as the fabled dog to its vomit. Let it be a trotty dog with an eager curled tail.

In English, zo is not a very useful word. In Scrabble, ZO is the only eligible two-letter word with a Z in it: this makes it almost as useful as QI (neither, incidentally, is allowed in the United States). SQUALID in Scrabble may have nothing to do with DIRTY apart from an I and a D, but it has meaning nonetheless: it once meant for me 136 points (my best score ever, and much less than the 302 that the British champion Brett Smitheram – a student at Exeter University whose other hobby is bowls – once got for QUATORZES).

The ubiquitous @, which had seemed so analytically secure, turns out to be engorged with potential meanings. That, presumably, is what people hope for when they sign up for Twitter: that they can be anyone, and in 140 characters or fewer can produce a digested version of whatever personality they choose.

The internet’s contribution to language has been to give us more ways to communicate without saying anything at all :(