Quoting Illiterates

The BBC have an interesting report on the baby who was mauled to death by the family rottweiler. The story talks about the child’s mother’s reaction to the death. It’s interesting because of the way that they report what she says.

The quotations from the mother in the story obviously come from two sources – one is is probably a spoken interview and the other is things that she has written on her Bebo profile.

In the spoken interview, the BBC reporter has translated what she has says into standard English. So she’s quoted as saying “My boy was my world. He is loved by many. He will always be in our hearts, never to be forgotten”. But the Bebo page is quoted verbatim, so we suffer the full force of the mother’s illiteracy – “RIP my lil angel mummy knows your still here love u always and foreva”.

Oh, I know what you’re all thinking (the less cynical of you, at least). You’re thinking that I’m being too harsh. That people should be allowed to be illiterate in their grief or that this kind of language is raw or even poetic. I say nonsense. If there’s one time in you’re life when you want to hang onto whatever dignity that you can, then surely it’s when you’re in mourning. Going through something like the loss of a child is bad enough at any time. It can only be worse when you’re going through it in the public eye as this family are.

Which makes the way that the BBC has reported this seem a bit strange to me. I’m not sure that “woman writes about her dead son on social web site” is really newsworthy anyway, but if you’re going to report it you could at least spare the poor woman the embarrassment of her obviously tenuous grasp on the English language.

Or perhaps I am just being too harsh.