Her older brother having taught her the art, my 10-year-old daughter is now texting people. I have it on good authority that she exchanged several texts the other day with a 44-year-old man. (Who turned out to be her godfather.) Obviously, I’m going to be getting a little more involved in this.

Today she started texting me, and if these texts are any indication, I can see the run-up into adolescence and then womanhood. Because while she may start out by saying hi, essentially she just wants things, and quickly gets around to asking for them. This is not unknown to me from my dating days.

One text read, “Yeah kid castle”. I had offered to take her and her little brother — he of the hair — to the indoor gaming center Kids Castle, and this was her epigrammatic way of agreeing. But by now I was onto her and texted back, “Okay. Are you paying?” Her reply: “What um no”. And that’s where I’d like to spend a moment.

“What um no” at first sounds like bad Indian dialogue from an early John Wayne movie, or perhaps the name of a sinister Asian in a 1930’s pulp thriller. But it strikes a further chord with me. Look how simple but expressive the phrasing is! “What um no” conveys tone and timing in a way that would thrill Harold Pinter, but goes even further by eliding the punctuation and calling up comparison to Cormac McCarthy. And in the subtle wordplay, where “What um no” may be purposely conjuring up our forebears’ unfortunate racial misconceptions, this text brings to mind the wordplay of later James Joyce, but with the added bonus of being intelligible.

When Samuel Beckett finally boiled his writing down to two-or-three-word phrases with lots of space in the margins, critics decided he was at a dead end — and then Beckett proved them right by dying. Looking at “Yeah kid castle” and, especially, its sequel “What um no,” I’m left to wonder sadly how much more work Beckett might’ve produced if only he’d had a cellphone.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 3:12 am and is filed under Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.