I’ve been thinking and have decided that ‘typing-fast’ should be officially recognised as an independent language. I say this because some of the words that can appear on my screen when I type seem unique to this medium of communication. I doubt anyone would ever say “teh”, “fro” or “nad” in spoken conversation when intending “the”, “for” or “and” but approach a keyboard at speed and these ‘words’ just seem to fly out. In the general spirit of this letter shuffling I propose that such a new language be known as Genlish.

Genlish seems to function at a subconscious level; it also seems to lean towards the conservation of letters. A common phrase I see before me is “withe” an economical contraction of “with” and “the”; it saves the world two letters “t” and “h” by eliminating the repetition. These saved letters can then be used in other words. Hence, Genlish can be marketed as encouraging recycling and thereby being environmentally friendly.

Even when transliterating Rabaic into Genlish I notice my Genlish typing working its magic. The proximity of the ‘U’ and ‘I’ on my keyboard means that, to this day, I still find myself wishing friends “Sausage be upon you.” I only discover this when I re-read an email and spot that the phrase “salami alaykum” has somehow crept in.

The inventor of the QWERTY keyboard, Christopher Sholes, designed the keyboard that most, if not all, of us use in the sequence that is in hoping to reduce instances of keys jamming when commonly used letters are hit in rapid succession. In theory, for most words, you should have to make a significant journey to the next key between each strike, giving the typewriter time to get the associated inked arm back in place before the next hit.

Something I thought bizarre was that when he designed the keyboard he ensured that the word ‘typewriter’ could be written using only the top row of letters. This was intended as a sales pitch to customers who were hopefully going to be wooed by someone demonstrating how easy it was to write ‘typewriter’ without having to divert from a straight line. Presumably the customer thereafter tested out this single line typing method by typing “You twerp” in reply to the salesman.

Not long ago all staff where I work were asked to fill out a survey to assess how computer literate we are and to see if any of us need some extra training. To my friend’s survey I added a note at the bottom saying, “My keyboard is not in alphabetical order, I think it may be an old model.” As I figured that he was more in need of a pc tutorial than the rest of us and hoped that this would have him put on the ‘urgently needs help’ list.

The transposing of letters can take place in speech at times but there tends to be other factors that can cause this, like for instance accent. There is an East European guy that I work with who recently asked me how many vuvvles we have in English. At the time it struck me how this was potentially an excellent name for a new Disney style cartoon about some cute looking furry animals and their misadventures in Vuvvle-land, but apparently he was enquiring about how many vowels we have. So I told him five (although I am liable, at times, to make them don headwear).

I get on well with this colleague despite his brutal rendition of the English language at times. There is a brother, Walīd, who visits periodically to check some paper work; when he arrives I get a call from my Slavic work mate telling me that “Valid is here!” Presumably when “not-Valid” comes he will be denied access.

Things like this are to be expected when someone speaks in other than their native tongue. I also fall victim to this in my attempts to impress others with my language skills. I once telephoned my wife and thought I’d told her to kiss the children from me, she asked in puzzled reply “You want me to soap the children?”

Then there’s a story that Shaykh Sālim al’Amry related in a lecture once about an Arab who came to London and whilst out driving noticed a policeman walking along the pavement. He pulled his car over and beckoned to the police officer, asking him “Do you mind if I bark here and bray?”

When my step-brother and I first accepted Islām we used derive a degree of pleasure from the letter when learning the Arabic alphabet. Whenever the teacher would reach that particular letter whilst reciting the alphabet for us, we would repeat ‘seen’ look thoughtful and then nod affirmatively. The expression ‘seen’ in our prior experience (from a friend of ours) had been slang for “Y’get me?” or “I understand”; such that one says something and finishes his speech with the question “Seen [i.e. y’get me]?” and the reply would come “Seen [I understand] *nod*.” Another thing that caught my imagination in my first Arabic class was that, unlike in English, there are masculine and feminine nouns. An example that we discussed in class was that both shubbāk and nāfidhah mean window but the latter is feminine. Which, after he explained this to me, led to my next question “If someone had both types of windows in their house could they potentially wake up one morning to find that lots of little windows had appeared over night?”

Here’s a pressing issue that I came across during a job interview that I attended when I was seeking promotion. Part of the assessment process involved being sat alone in a mock operations room. Inside I was bombarded with information from various sources/equipment for fifteen minutes. They assess a person on how well they sift out and process the important information. For part of the assessment we had to make a number of recorded announcements and to simulate a public address system they gave us a rather sophisticated microphone and cassette recorder (a funky looking thing that I don’t recollect having seen in circulation since the days of the ZX Spectrum ) combination.

To ‘broadcast’ we were told to release the pause button and speak, then after finishing each announcement to press it again. That way, when they play back the tape to assess our broadcasting skills, they’ll have all the announcements side by side without having to listen to the numerous silent bits where we were doing other stuff.

It was an extremely intensive and stressful test and reaching the end I thought I’d done everything I could as far as the tasks were concerned. I noticed that I had maybe a minute to spare and in order to use this time to its maximum potential, I raised my hands and started to make dū’ā. Seconds after finishing the test examiner came back into the room “Thank you, Mr Abū Ilyās that’s your time up, if you could just wait in the reception area for the next stage of the interview.” I smiled, but as I prepared to leave the room I noticed to my horror that the cassette recorder was still recording. During the test I’d obviously lost the sync of pressing and releasing the pause button and now couldn’t be sure if I’d recorded when I should have been recording and not recorded what I shouldn’t have. Potentially, I could have unintentionally edited out all my announcements.

Despite my fear and after a weekend’s worth of worry I was told that I had been successful and had passed my operation room assessment (wa al-hamdu lillāh) but I always wondered what it sounded like to the examiner when he’d played back my cassette and heard me supplicating at the end “Oh Allāh, grant me tawfīq of passing this assessment, Oh Allāh have mercy on me and grant me this promotion …”