Quality | 2009.08.02
Oh, for a charming con | Jon Canter
I might give in to an email scam done in style. But when fraudsters can\'t spell, it just makes me sad
Please, it\'s very kind, but there\'s no need to read this piece twice. I\'ve done that for you – it\'s all part of the journalistic quality control service. But if this were an email instead of an article, there\'s no guarantee I\'d read it at all, not even once. I\'d simply write it, one word tumbling out after another, with no going back; then get to the end and press Send. Everyone agrees that\'s what email\'s all about: it\'s fast, it\'s sexy, it\'s careless and it\'s gone. Punctuation doesn\'t matter we all know that. As for spelling, well, as long as you convey the sense of the word, how you spell it is neither hear nor their. If you type who\'s when you mean whose, whose bothered? If you miss out a word at the end of a sentence, who gives a? You\'re speeding down the information superhighway. Naturally, words will fall off the back of your sentences, as loads fall off the back of lorries.
I subscribed to all these articles of email faith, till this message arrived in my inbox: "It has came to our attention that your PayPal billing information are out of date. This require you to update your billing information as soon as possible." Shortly afterwards, this one arrived: "Warning!!! Account owners that refuses to update his or her account will lose his or her account permanently." That was followed by this further warning: "Warning!!! Whosoever that refuses to update his/her account after two weeks of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently. We apologize for any inconveniences."
Inconveniences? No, there was no inconveniences. There was only sadnesses. Why were I sad? Don\'t get I started. I were sad because it has came to this. This are the culture now and it have gone too far. Even criminals is at it! Whosoever that wishes to defraud you don\'t feel the need to pay attention to spelling, grammar or the avoidance of excessive punctuation!!! Once upon a time, a conman – here, with due disrespect to Mr Madoff , I speak of an English conman – took a pride in his work. A conman was a handsome fellow, somewhat resembling Dennis Price , Leslie Phillips, Michael Caine or the pre-Christian Jonathan Aitken . He moved into your village and claimed to be the Duke of Hartington, which later turned out to be a pub. When he\'d fleeced the vicar, the doctor, the farmer, the librarian and the love-hungry spinster (who often doubled as the librarian), he\'d leave without warning, to be arrested next day a hundred miles away. Then all those he\'d conned would say the same thing: he had charm. He charmed us with his looks and his manner and his clothes – shiny black brogues, pinstripe suit, white collar perfectly offsetting his black and white (stolen) Old Harrovian tie. Above all, he charmed us with his language. Who could resist him, when he tapped you on the shoulder and said, in his beautifully modulated upper-crust accent: "I appear to have come out without my wallet. Would it unduly incommode you to furnish me with a G&T?" That\'s a long way, is it not, from: "Your PayPal billing information are out of date." The old-fashioned conman used language beautifully. He respected it. He followed its rules.
If I seem to be arguing that today\'s criminals should spend their time in the prison library, ignoring the pernicious email culture and studying Lynne Truss – well, yes, that\'s exactly what I\'m arguing. Here\'s why. A few months ago, I gave a talk at my local prison on writing as a career. I went down a storm. At the end, the audience had to fill out a form, rating the quality of my talk. Two-thirds said that, after listening to me, they\'d like to be professional writers. Two-thirds! (OK, I admit it: two-thirds amounted to four prisoners – all writers, including me, have a touch of the conman about them.) When I got those emails, I thought of those four. Are they out now? Are they busy with illiterate internet scams? I hope not. It\'s not that I want them to be busy with literate internet scams. What I want is for one of them, at least, to write as elegantly, successfully, legally and grammatically as, er, Jeffrey Archer.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/26/internet-scam-literacy
