And horror of horrors, the QWERTY keyboard is under threat.
Your standard keyboard is laid out because of a now obsolete requirement; the most commonly used letters on a manual typewriter needed to be set apart from each other to avoid a key-jam when used by women known as typewriters, who could out-pace the machine.
Typewriters had romance. I'd even say they were cool. Jack Kerouac had an Underwood, as did Hemingway and Harper Lee. Robert Louis Stevenson had a Hammond. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on a Hermes 8 and Bertholt Brecht and Roald Amundsen both had Erikas.
I was so poor that my first typewriter, a 21st birthday gift, was a fake Erika that looked and worked as if it had been made by a tank manufacturer in Omsk.
Still, it worked and I managed with it until I got hold of an office surplus thing that was nearly bigger than me. I also did a Pitman's course and passed at advanced level by having a great deal of luck on the day of the exam. As a consequence of sitting in a class with a lot of unusually un-secretary-like women and learning by rote, I am now a hopeless user of QWERTY.
Why hopeless? Because I recently tried to use an iPad and the problem with the virtual keyboard is that, even for my rather effete fingers, the keys are too close to touch type.
Word is that a new kind of key lay out is going to happen, one that can be used by people with just two thumbs. How I will cope if this happens, I do not know, but I actually welcome it, since QWERTY is annoying and stupid. And actually, it always was.
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Jacqui Brooks, a solicitor at the Royal Courts of Justice Advice Bureau bemoans the use of legal jargon in the legal profession, according to The Guardian. Well, she would, wouldn't she? According to Jacqui,
"Many of our clients have great difficulty understanding the terms used in court forms and court orders; it is like a foreign language to many of them"
Well, I suspect that many of your clients not only have great difficulty understanding the terms used, they also have great difficulty understanding that breaking and entering is wrong.
Latin courses through our language like a lost gene. To lose it would be a real shame. Perhaps I should be like the Welsh and start scrawling Latin graffiti all over the place to make my point, and then demand millions of pounds of tax-payer's money to provide all official communication in the language. It would be a darn site more use.
So, until the next time, Culus tibi purior salillo est,
nec toto decies cacas in anno.
A Dominoes Pizza dulce Domestos
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