C. Hechos de Importancia:
XXIX. ANEXOS
Figure 6.5 Early citation of OMG in personal letter, 1917
Such indices for intialisms and esoteric emoticon forms suggest affordances of economy in text entry may be outweighed by concern for opaque meanings. Initialisms pre-suppose high levels of familiarisation through routinely situated occurrence or specialised occupational practices where text is entered as a code, with a secondary gloss to hand, as in Morse, telegraphy, stenography, semaphore and similar specialised communication inculcated by programmatic instruction in vertical discourses (see Chapter 2a).130
Figure 6.6 Specialised text reduction methods in telegraphy, British Rail service code, 1960
216
Figure 2.9 Early citation of OMG in personal letter, 1917
2.4.3 Vernacular ‘hetero-graphy’ as a semiotic resource
In this chapter I have presented the issue of ‘variational’ spelling choices in SMS as a recent iteration of an under-documented but longstanding tradition of vernacular orthographic practice, as instantiated in home and community settings, and formalised and disseminated more widely by its recontextualisation in commercial domains (see also Pound 1923, Cook 2004 a and b, Shortis 2007a and b, Crystal 2008). Such choices may have meaning potentials which differ from those circumscribed by standard English. Also, although adumbrated by vernacular written varieties from the historical past - the nineteenth century, for instance - and sharing some routine linguistic and semiotic forms, such choices now operate with different signification. Building on analysis of three representations of vernacular texts featuring respelling, along with a critical survey of relevant studies, I have suggested that the SMS spelling which features in this study can be viewed as a selection made from the active and passive repertoires of interactants, which are likely to shape, and to have been shaped by those respondents’ socio-economic resources and their access to repertoire which follows from that, their attitudes to pre-existing and contiguous practices, and by their being enregistered and relayed by commercial popular culture, as well as by schooled choices. I have proposed that standardised choices of spelling, although unique in their level of resource, representation and influence, are situated in a landscape of other ‘orthographic registers’, which remain influential and ‘uneradicated’, although subject to representational ‘erasure’ over historical duration (Irvine & Gal 2000;38).
16 See Agha’s application of the concept of ‘prestige register’ to received pronunciation (2003).
17 Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations’ (1861) presents a first person narrative of Pip, an orphan, who
tells the story of his growing-up into early adulthood, including his early years being raised in poverty by his aunt and her blacksmith husband uncle Joe Gargery. The young Pip is depicted as coming from an impoverished social background and without formal schooling, although he shows curiosity in puzzling out the wording of a gravestone and he attempts to write a letter to his uncle, as quoted here. His text is presented as an example of how low levels of literacy were enregistered in imaginary representations in popular fiction rather than as a documentary example. Readers are invited to make their own comparisons with the actuality documented in poor law letters, such as those collected and analysed by Fairman (e.g. 2007 in Appendix II), or with the examples of foundling mothers cited by Barret-DuCrocq. ‘Great
Expectations’ has never been out of print since its publication and has sold many millions of copies
without commentary on the intelligibility of Pip’s letter to Joe, which appears to need no gloss. 18 See related discussion in Blommaert 2008, 2013.
19 See application of respelling typology innovated by Androutsopoulos (2002:522) discussed in Sebba (2007:34) and discussion of Anis (2007) in Androutsopoulos (2011).
20 See Shaw 2008 for discussion of regiolectal stylisation in CMC interaction.
21 As with much vernacular writing, not all dimensions of meaning are translatable into standard English and the lexical and grammatical details are particular to its realisation in geosocial context (see Jaffe 2000, Jaffe & Walton 2000 and other articles in that special edition of the Journal of Sociolinguistics). 22 See Urban Dictonary (urbandictionary.com).
23 The word before <James And the giant Peaches> may look like ‘you’ but is more productively interpreted as ‘your’ which makes it easier to understand as ‘ a jocular threat and a rude allusion’ and not an error of any kind. <James And the giant Peaches> is a realisation of the title of the popular children’s book by Road Dahl (James and the Giant Peaches). Thank you to Mark Sebba for this observation. 24 These are not the resistant rituals and behaviour analysed by Rampton (2006) but share with
‘Deutsche’ the sense of a recreational crossing, or stylisation, not prepared for directly by formal schooled instruction.
25 See related discussion in Rampton (2000:introduction), Harris et al. (2011) and on LDC website via kcl.ac.uk.
26 SeeThe Population of Bristol, April 2012 at http://www.bristol.gov.uk/population.
27 ‘Muchos luv’ - muchos (cf muchos cerveza) is mock Spanish not real Spanish, which the author must know. Also ‘muy estimado amigo mio’ seems archaic, in the manner of a deliberately ponderous and obsolete literary formula. (See Hill, J., 1998). Thank you to Mark Sebba for this observation.
28 Contemporaneous studies featuring teaching and learning of school English in urban settings include Kress et al. 2005, Rampton 2006, Harris et al. 2011 See note above. There is little evidence in any of these sources of out-of-school digital literacy practices functioning as a curriculum focus. See also research outputs from the ESRC TLRP programme ( interactiveeducation.ac.uk, for example). 29 See Kataoka 1997, 2003a and b.
30 See Appendix II for facsimile image of glossary required to access the telegram’s coded textual input. 31 Used in UK schools experimentally in the 1960s. See http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ita.htm. 32 See http://freepages.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bradytrilogy/memories/images/bibliography/na-bis-co/ nabisco-history.html .
33 See Labov 1972, Trudgill 1972, 1974, Cheshire 1982, or summaries such as Trousdale 2010. 34 Thank you to Jan Blommaert and Mark Sebba for raising this issue in my Viva.