Preamble: this is a slam poem and probably works better aloud. I'll try to make a video one day.

I’m here today to speak to you about something of great importance:

We have to save the words!

Dozens of words each day are being lost

We cannot underestimate the intellectual cost

As their natural habitats become corrupted

And their reproductive patterns are being disrupted

Words are essential to successful communication

But they are being driven out by emojis and silly little animations.

 

For example…the other day, I was typing on my phone

And the predictive text tool, instead of the word “cake”

Offered a little picture of a slice of cake

But I didn’t want to draw “cake”, I wanted to write”cake”

I was talking about lemon cake, not cartoon cream cake

It wasn’t even the right sort of cake

There’s a reason it’s called a TEXT message for goodness’ sake!

 

And if your phone doesn’t have the latest 3 million emojis uploaded

Chances are your message will look like some kind of warped morse code

A friend sent me a mini picture of an elephant – or so she told me

But as my phone’s more than 5 minutes old, none of the latest thingumys installed

The message showed me … nothing at all.

But then perhaps that’s for the best, because I’d have been wondering –

What was the elephant trying to say?

Is she suggesting I’m fat? I’m heavy? I’m grey? I’m slow?

(Although elephants can move pretty fast, I know)

Was it an intertextual reference to Hannibal? The Jungle Book? Dumbo?

Or was it just a cute picture in an attempt to brighten my day?

 

Now it seems we’ve all become artists of the dots and dashes,

The colons, semicolons, hyphens, for-and –back slashes

I get it: colon, hyphen, close-bracket: smiley face :-)

Colon, hyphen, open-bracket: sad face :-(

Blow a raspberry using the letter “P” :-p

And it seems we can no longer use irony

Without relying on a semicolon to do our winking for us

To show we are being tongue-in-cheek. ;-)

 

But if an image can speak a thousand words

best make sure they’re the right ones

And that applies just as much for emojis and emoticons

Same friend sent me “angle bracket, number 3” <3 – I really did feel silly

She had to tell me it was a bunch of flowers

To me it looked like a ****y.

 

Anyway, while we’re fighting for the words

We must also defend the spaces between them

These web addresses and hashtags are all very well

But I’m a person, not a machine!

I need to see my writing breathe,

I think they are just trying to confuse us

With all this www.runthewordstogether.com

hashtag #spacebarsareforlosers…

 

So we’ve got try to keep our language clear and precise

Or the writers of the future will pay the ultimate price.

I’m told to get with the times, it’s just linguistic evolution

But to me it seems more like catastrophic verbal pollution.

Only when the last word has been forgotten, and the last grammar rule broken

Only then will we realise that punctuation cannot be spoken...

So, if you care for the written word, sign up for linguistic duty

And do not forget our alphabets are tools of creative beauty

We must rally to the verbal cause and join the wordy fight

Against the graphics and hyrogliphics, to defend our rights to write.

 

So here today, I have to say, this is my plea to you:

Poets, to your pens: you have a job to do.