Did you miss me (yeah!) while I was away? You may have noticed there was no Word of the Week last week and I feel I owe you an explanation. So here’s one. The last week has been Screen-Free Week (although it turns out the NHS were ahead of the game and stopped screening nine years ago), so I assumed you were all foregoing your phones and tablets and laptops and TVs and felt it was pointless writing something you wouldn’t be able to read. Whether that’s an honest explanation is up to you to decide, but it’s a convenient one and leads nicely onto this week’s discussion point.
Screens eh? Pffh.
What is our problem with screens? According to Screen-Free Week, too much screen time is linked to poor school performance, childhood obesity and attention problems. Adults aren’t immune either: other research conducted elsewhere by someone else found that high screen use can strain your eyes, disrupt your sleep, trigger addiction, inhibit self-confidence, change the shape of your brain and – you guessed it – make you die!
In most cases the danger comes not from the screen per se but from the fact that you have to slouch at a desk or lie horizontally on a couch drinking booze and eating crisps to use it. Try walking around or jogging while looking at a screen and you can add ‘increase the risk of being hit by a bus’ to the catalogue of screen-related risks.
These days the average person might look at four different screens every day, whereas back in the 70s the TV was the only one. And it was evil – the goggle box that sent you square-eyed if you watched too much of it. If you were reckless enough to binge-watch The Clangers, Jackanory, Blue Peter and John Craven’s Newsround in one day, you could very easily end up in an asylum. Fortunately the power cuts kept us rationed to little more than Top of the Pops and The Stuart Hall Show, so the kids were alright. Today the average adult spends nearly nine-and-a-half hours looking at screens every day. And they’ve closed the asylums.
Screens were never supposed to be this way. The word screen comes from the Old French ‘escran’, which could be a fire screen, a draught screen or one of those tall, folding screens that 14th century ladies got changed behind and tossed their undies onto. Basically, anything flattish that got in the way of stuff, to quote a rudimentary dictionary of the time.
Screens became something for projecting moving images onto in the early 1800s, when the magic lantern show began to go through something of a tech revolution. Magic lantern shows were the virtual reality of the 17th century and rapidly replaced the cave painting as the acme of visual entertainment. Initially relying on sunlight or candle light, the image was a little flickery and susceptible to sudden gusts of wind, but at the end of the 18th century the technology began to progress. Brighter light sources, such as limelight, gave a far more vivid and entertaining projection, even if it did subject the projectionist to a lungful of toxic fumes that changed the shape of his brain and made him die. Plus ça change…
Throughout this time the verb ‘to screen’ took its meaning from the flattish thing for getting in the way of stuff, ie to protect or conceal. It was not used in the sense of showing a movie until 1915 and it took until 1943 for the meaning of ‘examine systematically’ to be introduced (and until 2009 for the NHS to forget it again). It’s a good example of how a word can evolve due to the shape of the thing being described. From something that prevented you from seeing something to something that enabled you to see something to something that actively looked for something (or inactively, in the case of the NHS). That’s a lot of somethings.
Now go and have a screen break.
Footnote: Anyone screening this article for ethical transgressions will be grateful to have spotted that I opened with one, just to save you time: a line from Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again by Gary Glitter. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t even come here to bury Glitter, let alone praise him. I aways preferred the Sweet. As a confused seven-year-old I watched Glitter on the TV screen singing Hello, Hello, I’m Back Again and all I could think was, “I didn’t even realise you’d been away. Where have you been?” How naive.
But should a piece of popular culture that’s become tainted by the crimes of its creator be scratched from the record? What if one of The Beatles turned out to have been a colossal pervert? Would that render the entire Beatles catalogue beyond the pale? Or if historians unearthed evidence of Shakespeare having amassed a huge collection of depraved magic lantern shows? Would The Merchant of Venice be pulled from the GCSE syllabus? Glister… Glitter… what’s the difference?
You might argue that Gary Glitter never wrote anything worthy of comparison with The Beatles or The Bard, but he did go on to have three No.1s and Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again evolved into one of the most popular and enduring football chants (still sung today) and went to No.2 in the charts, only being kept off the top spot by Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree.
Funny, though, I’ve never met anyone who bought it.
