Louis de Bernières: 'My children's childhood ended the moment they got smartphones'

English novelist Louis de Bernières recently wrote an impassioned column for The Guardian condemning the creeping use of imprecise and redundant speech, including the word 'like'.

de Bernières - whose fourth novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin became a worldwide bestseller in 1994 - said that junk speak "has to be one of the worst things about life in Britain".

He’s also deeply depressed about the corrosive effects of smartphones, he told RNZ’s Sunday Mornings.

Louis de Bernières: The problem with the word 'like'

Sunday Morning

“As far as I can see, my children's childhood ended the moment they got smartphones. They were suddenly not living with me in the real world anymore. They were somewhere else.”

“You notice this all the time. For example, I was on an underground tube train recently, and there was a girl being quite violently sick. And I was the only person in the whole carriage who noticed.”

Screens and social media are stealing joy by “proxy”, he says.

“You know, I like to sit around a table in the evening with a couple of bottles of wine and a lot of food and friends, but that's my idea of fun.

“But my children or younger people seem to get most of their social life on screen, and so therefore they don't meet each other in the real world. I read recently that in every country where mobile phones have been introduced, the birth rate has dropped dramatically almost overnight.”

de Bernières lives in Norfolk in East England, along with a menagerie of animals, and he wrote about his life there in Smelling of Rooks, Nine Years in the Norfolk Alps.

“Norfolk is exceedingly flat. It's one of the nice things about it, oddly enough, because, for example, you can often see both ends of the rainbow, and artists come here to paint the peculiar landscape that we have.

“It's very popular with cyclists because the hills aren't very steep. It's been a sort of joke in Great Britain about the Norfolk Alps. For example, there's somebody with a van in a town near me who has painted on their van Norfolk Mountain Rescue.”

While he writes with affection about life in the Norfolk countryside, it’s not entirely a bucolic idyll, he says.

“It's strange that everything that gets thrown out of car windows on the lane outside my house is packaging from fast food outlets. It made me wonder whether it's only morons who eat fast food, or whether fast food makes you a moron, or possibly both.”

He has railed against verbal littering in a recent Guardian article. He has a word for pointless speech – misosaskopeslexis.

“I made it up from the Greek, which is how you get any technical term. It means hatred of pointless speech.

“I particularly hate it when people interlude their sentences with pointless things like like, and stuff, and shit. You know what I mean? That lazy, casual way of speaking, which makes you just long for them to finish.”

If people are speaking in a sloppy so to must be their thinking, he says.

“They're thinking in the way that you would think if you had a couple of joints.”

de Bernières, who worked as an English teacher before finding fame as a novelist, says a more disciplined and systematic way of teaching language in schools is needed to address the creep of misosaskopeslexis.

“I was of a generation of English teachers who were told, 'oh, it's okay, man, the kids will teach themselves if you just give them the opportunity'. And this just wasn't true.

“It took me several years of being an English teacher before I realised that it wasn't true, that people actually do need specific instructions and specific exercises to do in order to perfect the clarity of their speech and thereby the clarity of their thought.”

You wouldn't talk to a lover the same way you would talk to your local clergyman, he says.

“You have a different register for everybody you're with. I think that's one of the things that youngsters perhaps don't appreciate is they don't have a grasp of the wide range of registers that one needs to live successfully in a social situation.”

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