7/28/2019 Stephen Fry Takes on the Language Pedants
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Russell Smith: On Culture
Stephen Fry takes on the language pedants
RUSSELL SMITH|Columnist profile|E-mail
From Thursday's Globe and MailPublished Wednesday, May. 25, 2011
5:30PM EDT
A couple of years ago, the British actor and wit Stephen Fry
published a podcast titled
Don't Mind Your Language
, in which he discussed the origins of his own linguistic style.
In onesegment, the kernel of the argument, I think, he
excoriated language pedants in particularthe grumpy,
manners-obsessed followers of Lynne Truss and
John Humphrys and made aplea for freedom and sensual play in
language as opposed to rules and
condescension.This part of the essay, a few polemical paragraphs
about common grammatical peeves
largely inspired by the books of linguists such as Stephen
Pinker was more recently turnedinto a pretty
little animation using moving letters. The animation is
something its creator, a young Australian named
Matt Rogers, calls kinetic typography.It was through this video,
now posted on YouTube, that I first came
across Fry's lecture. The video doesn't add anything to the
substance of the piece, but it is a quick way to
get to Fry'spoint.It is, as usual for Fry, a wonderfully
rambling, eloquent and amusing reflection. It's not
terribly original, but it does a great job of popularizing ideas
more densely put by French
philosophers.The argument is essentially that there is no right
or wrong language any more than thereareright or wrong clothes. (A
sensitive comparison in the upper classes of Britain, of course,
where there
are indeed views on right and wrong clothes.)He wants no part in
the campaigns against correct
apostrophes in signage, or the use of lessand fewer in
newspapers: Yes, I am aware of the technical
distinction between less and fewerand uninterested and
disinterested and infer and imply and all the rest of them but
none of these are of importance to me.The use of the plural verb
are with the singular subject none is,
he stresses, deliberate aproud, mature shedding of his former
pedantic identity. He is all in favour of
action as a verb(He actioned it at the meeting), since nouns
have been verbed since Shakespeare and
before.People find to action ugly only because it is new.Of
people who insist on conventional grammar, he
asks: But do they bubble and froth andslobber and cream with joy
at language? Do they ever let the
tripping of their tongues againstthe tops of their teeth
transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? (Herefrains from asking if
they ever crib shamelessly from the opening of
Lolita
.)Fry has been accused of being disingenuous, because of course
it is rare for speakers to be so virtuosic
and ludic with language without first knowing the rules they
dismiss. Fry's owngrammar and punctuation
are utterly conventional (even his accent is Received
Pronunciation,a.k.a. the Queens English). Still, he is right
about most of the silly obsessions he uses asexamples:
disinterested has come to mean uninterested, and there is
no longer any lack of clarity in its use. Nobody misunderstands
when you say less instead of fewer. (I would bet an
elbow, however, that he himself would never use these words in
their more recent senses.)But I don't understand why he
thinks one can't be punctilious in punctuation and poetic
inpolemics at the same time. After all, he is.The dichotomy
between the playful and the learned is a false one. Most
importantly, it isstrange for someone who claims an obsession
withthe aesthetic to ignore the aestheticpossibilities that come
from having the widest possible range of subtly
differing words andconstructions. For with each of the
metamorphoses he describes comes an
extinction. When uninterested and disinterested mean the same
thing, then we have lost a word: not
anecessary word, by any means, but how many words are necessary?
I lament every vanishing word, for
each minutely differing word adds a colour to our enormous
palette, and with that vast palette we can
paint the wildest pictures. Yes, the linguistic landscape
changes as does the architectural landscape but
we feel sad when we lose our ancient cathedrals and statues, no
matter how irrelevant they are
tocontemporary values. And we can have it all we can have infer
and imply and actioningtoo. We
don't have to choose between an old language and a new.
2011 The Globe and Mail Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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