When I first met Mrs Moran, about 12 years ago, it was during the second great wave of mobile phone ownership. The early adopters, those prophets of The Apprentice, had spent enough on hardback-sized mobile phones in the first half of the 90s that many quite ordinary people could afford trickle-down paperback-sized Nokias in the second.
Much of our early courtship was conducted via the then-novel text message. Never was a medium more prone to misunderstanding. It's a miracle that we're still together today.
Our first months might have been less riven by misapprehension if we'd had access to a new tool developed by the French tech outfit Spotter. They claim to have developed a software agent that can detect sarcasm in online comments with up to 80% accuracy. One assumes that the algorithm has been developed for English, which, as the lingua franca of the internet, is about 80% sarcasm anyway.
Spotter says its clients include the Home Office and the EU commission. Two organisations to whom I have often wanted to send a text saying, "Yeah. Thanks a LOT", but refrained for fear of being misunderstood.
Research published in 2005 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggested that recipients have at best a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any email message. The same study reveals that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of emails they receive about 90% of the time. None of this is any great surprise. Humans were communicating face to face long before the invention of language. We are very good at detecting tiny clues in facial expression, body language and vocal tone that help us understand our interlocutors. That's why even in today's hyperconnected world, businesspeople and politicians stink up the atmosphere with aeroplane flights so that they can forge potential alliances in person. Communication through writing is a comparatively new idea.
The written communications of our ancestors could be quite long documents. Just look at St Paul's epistle to the Romans. More than 9,000 words of it. Today, even if technological considerations don't constrain our missives, the time to compose and consume such epics is gone. Probably for ever.
Stories told through the medium of letters, epistolary novels, were a popular form from the 1480s. The form reached a peak with Dracula in 1897, before sputtering out some time in the early 1990s. While they do still exist today, they are more studies in form than popular entertainment. The trad jazz of literature. It's just not credible that a person would write a whole letter any more. And a novel told through emails could never tell the whole story. Every email exchange must by law feature one important message that is inexplicably quarantined in the recipient's spam folder – a bit like Juliet's fateful letter in Romeo And Juliet.
Emails are generally too short as well. Like their ancestor the telegram, an email is often a gnomic haiku-length data blip open to myriad interpretations. In the dark days following Pearl Harbor, General MacArthur was anxious that he didn't have sufficient men or materiel to hold the Philipines against the expected Japanese invasion. His plea for more of both was answered with a telegram from the US army chief of staff, George Marshall, saying, "We are giving you everything we possibly can." It meant "You are not getting any more". MacArthur, perhaps wishfully, read it as "expect reinforcements". The outcome of that misreading was the disastrous Bataan Death March. Brevity is the soul of misunderstanding.
Even today, with pixels largely replacing ink, we generally communicate in characters of one colour. How much more expressive, and more jolly, our texts and tweets and emails might be if there were an established code of text colour to convey intonation alongside the raw information. An email with key words picked out in blue might come to mean "I am saying this with a raised eyebrow". Pink letters might signify flirtiness in a tweet. And comments printed in green under a news article would carry the inference "I am a dangerous troll, please ignore what I say."
Relying on some software concocted by Frenchmen to make it clear whether we're joking or not seems a precarious strategy. Virtually all modern phones have colour screens. For that matter most of us have colour printers if required. My marriage survived monochrome texts, but future generations need not take that risk. Let's enrich our language with a splash of colour.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
