Don’t Mind Your Language…
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Language. Language, language, language. In the end it all comes down to language. I write to you today on this subject as a way of welcoming you to www.stephenfry.com 2.0 and because, well, it’s a subject worth thinking about at any time and because fewer things interest me quite so much.
Image: Nicole Stewart for SamFry
There are so many questions and issues jostling, tumbling and colliding in my mind that I can barely list them. Is language the father of thought? There’s one. Somebody once said, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?” Is language being degraded, is it not what it was? Is there a right way to express yourself and a wrong? Grammar, does that exist, or is it a pedantic imposition, a kind of unnatural mixture of strangulation and straightening, like pleaching, pollarding and training pear-trees against a wall? Can we translate from one tongue into another without irreparable loss? And many, many more.
“Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” wrote Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds. One of my favourite remarks. T. S. Eliot said much the same thing in a different way: “to purify the dialect of the tribe”. But is there a “higher language”, a purer language, a proper language, a right language? Is language a whore, used, bruised and abused by every john in the street … is the idea of purifying the dialect of the tribe a poetic ideal or nonsensical snobbery?
I suppose we should remind ourselves of the old distinction made by the structuralists and structural linguists. I wrote a sketch about this years and years ago and if you know it, you’ll have to forgive the similarities between what I found to be a source of humour and what I am now apparently taking seriously. Actually the one doesn’t cancel out or refute the other. We can make fun of this kind of language about language and we can value it too. So bearing in mind that I am fully aware that I sound like the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual twazzock, let’s look at that distinction. There is language, the thing itself, the idea of language. And then there is this or that example of language in praxis, in use. There is Chess and there is this or that game of chess. The Game of Chess and that game of chess going on over there. There is language, the human capacity – ‘competence’ as Chomsky calls it, The Game of Language – and there is utterance, the actual instance of its use – this sentence for example. Of course aside from both of these, there is the local tongue, English, French, Cantonese, Basque, whatever.
The two for consideration however as those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance. In this instance of parole I am using not only English, but my own brand of English, an English English salted, spiced, pickled, seasoned, braised and plated up to you bearing all the flavours of my class, gender, education and nature, discourses as you might call them. I am in some sort a language professional I suppose, in as much as I write and broadcast, I linguify for a living you might say. Nonetheless, I can no more change my language and the sum of its discourses than I can add a cubit to my height or, sadly it seems, take a pound from my weight. Well, perhaps that’s going a little far. I can attempt to disguise my language, I can dress it up into even more elaborate and grandiose orotundity, prolixity and self-consciousness, Will Self-consciousness you might say, or I could dress it down into something stripped. Stark. Bare. Simple. It would be hard to dress it down into something raggedly demotic without it being a patronising pastiche of a street argot to which I quite evidently have no access and in whose mazy slang avenues I would soon get lost, innit? In a sense I am typecast linguistically and although I can for fun try on all kinds of brogues and dialect clothes, my voice, my style, my language is as distinctive as my fingerprints.
My language (as the sum of my discourses, as linguistic strata that betray my history, as geology or archaeology betrays history) is my language and it is a piece of who I am, perhaps even the defining piece. In my case it is in part a classical ruin, inherited boulders of Tacitus and Cicero bleaching in the sun along with grass-overrun elements of Thucydides and Aeschylus … not because I was a classical scholar, but because I was taught by classical scholars and grew up on poets, dramatists and novelists who knew the classics as intimately as most people of my generation know the Beatles and the Stones. Without knowing it therefore, heroic Ciceronian clausulae and elaborate Tacitan litotes can always be found in the English of people like me. In part classical ruin, then, my language in particular has also mixed in it elements of my three Ws, my particular world wide web, my w.w.w, Wodehouse, Waugh and Wilde, three writers who greatly excited my imagination and stimulated my language glands like no other. I would add Vivian Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, Peter Cook and Alan Bennett as others of whom I am consciously aware. But the language of British movies, classic novels, sixties and seventies broadcasters like Malcolm Muggeridge, James Cameron, Alistair Cooke, John Ebden, Anthony Quinton, Robert Robinson, they all played their part in informing my spoken and written utterance too, not to mention the elemental styles which in turn informed their language. As Henry Higgins reminds us in Pygmalion, English is for all of us the language of Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. We unconsciously use the tropes, tricks and figures of our great writers, just as we might without knowing it use a tierce de Picardie or a diminished seventh when humming in the shower. And to our native English today we have added the language of American sitcom and drama, American movies and Australian soap operas.
I’ve used this analogy before, but I’ll use it again. Think of London. Some of its outline was determined by the Romans who conquered it two thousand years ago, since then atop the ruins of the Roman, Saxon, Dark Age and Norman London was constructed a medieval city of winding streets, jostling half-timbered mansions and soaring stone cathedrals and churches. Then came, after the Tudor and Jacobean palaces and halls and after the restoration a period of renewed classical elements, the squares and avenues of Georgian and Regency London, elegant, spacious and harmonious. The Victorians brought long suburban streets, warehouses, libraries, schools, town halls and railway stations and in the twentieth century arrived a new architecture, office towers, corporate headquarters, airports, housing projects in glass and concrete, American and European statements of self conscious modernity, statehood, brutalism, socialism, capitalism and democracy. It isn’t I think, too much of a strain to see the history of our language in similar terms. A long sticky flypaper onto which at varying times of their importance the church, royalty, aristocracy, industry, commerce and international entertainment have accreted themselves. Saxon and Roman elements overlaid with the Norman French and Chaucerian and Church medieval English. A great renaissance of Shakespeare, the Bible of King James, Milton and Dryden leading into the classical English of Johnson and Pope. The Victorian English of industry, Dickens and music hall giving way to the English of the twentieth century, all the way through the arrival of radio and cinema, the political language of fascism, communism, socialism and finance, the Americanisms, the street talk, the rock and roll, the corporate speak, the computer jargon … and here we are. Glass and concrete sentences right next to half-timbered Elizabethan phrases, a Starbucks of an utterance dwelling in an expression that once belonged to a Victorian banker, an Apple Store of an accent in a converted Georgian merchant’s lingo. You get the point. Whether or not we are aware of the difference between a transitive verb and a preposition, a verb and a vowel, we are willy-nilly, heirs to Marlowe and Swift, just as that new Waitrose is a descendant (albeit a bastard one) of the Parthenon. Bear in mind that phrase willy-nilly, by the way – I shall return to it later. For the meantime, seal it in a baggie and stash it in your hoodie. Or fold it in scented tissue and lay it tenderly in your hope chest, according to taste.
I’ve mentioned those French intellectuals the structuralists: one of their number, perhaps the best known, Roland Barthes, liked to use two words jouissance and plaisir. Le plaisir du texte. The pleasure of the text. Those who think structuralism spelt or spelled death to conscious art and such bourgeois comforts as style, accomplishment and enjoyment might be surprised that the pleasure of the text, the jouissance, the juicy joy of language, was important to Roland and his followers. Only to a dullard is language a means of communication and nothing more. It would be like saying sex is a means of reproduction and no more and food a means of fuelling and no more. In life you have to explain wine. You have to explain cheese. You have to explain love. You can’t, but you have to try, or if not try you have, surely, to be aware of the astonishing fact of them. We would never notice if the fat and protein rich food with which cows, ewes and nanny goats suckled their young could not be converted to another, firmer foodstuff that went well with crackers and grapes. We wouldn’t go about the place moaning that sheep’s milk was only of any use to lambs, any more than I have ever heard anyone wonder why pig’s milk doesn’t make a good yoghurt. In fact if you suggest drinking pig’s milk or horse’s milk, people look askance and go “yeurgh!” as if it’s the oddest suggestion they’ve ever heard. We take what nature and custom have led us to accept. As Eddie Izzard pointed out, it’s odd that bees make honey: ‘after all,’ he said, ‘earwigs don’t make chutney.’ And take that arbitrary fruit, the grape: suppose grapes didn’t uniquely transmogrify themselves, without the addition of sugar, into a drink of almost infinite complexity? We wouldn’t wonder at the lack of such a thing as wine in the world, any more than we wonder that raspberry wine (despite the deliciousness of raspberries as fruit) can’t, in the proper sense, exist or speculate on why the eggs of carp aren’t as good to eat as the eggs of sturgeon. But every now and again we should surely celebrate the fact that caviar is so fine, that the grape offers itself up so uniquely, that milk products of three or four species have such versatile by-products for us, that the grain of some grasses can be transformed into bread, that the berry, pod or leaf of this plant or that plant can give us chocolate, coffee or tea, and that while the fuzz of this plant can’t go to make a shirt, the fuzz of that unique one canand the thread of this insect can go to make a tie, while the equally impressive thread, in nature, of that other insect can’t be spun into the simplest handkerchief. Is it weird that silkworms exist or is it weird that only the silkworm will do when it comes to silk and only the cotton plant when it comes to cotton? To put it again, in an accidental line of decasyllabic verse, ‘none would be missed if they didn’t exist’. And if language didn’t elicit pleasure, if it didn’t have its music, its juiciness or jouissance would we notice, or would always be destined to find pleasure in it because that’s a thing we humans can do? Out of the way we move we can make dance, out of the way we speak we can make poetry and oratory and comedy and all kinds of verbal enchantments. Cheese is real, and so it seems, is the pleasure of the text.
I’m veering all over the shop. We’ll return to pleasure later. Steven Pinker, the Harvard Professor who writes on psycholinguistics and the evolutionary development of language and the mind, has made quite a tidy living out of popularising what you might call Chomskian ideas. Noam Chomsky may be better known now for his penetrating critiques of American foreign policy, but he made his reputation as a pioneering linguist. His discovery (or theorem if you prefer) was that the mind comes pre-equipped for language, syntax and grammar, much as the body comes pre-equipped for growth and sexual development. A baby doesn’t have underarm hair, but it has the innate program within it which, at a certain age, usually between twelve and fourteen, will be activated to start producing hair under the arms: a parent doesn’t have to teach it, only the right and natural nutrients need to have been ingested over time so as to allow normal growth and it will just happen. So it is, argue the Chomskians, with language: each baby (given normal development) has an innate language faculty, a language instinct Pinker calls it: local differences between Chinese and English are not, according to this theory, so very profound. A parent doesn’t teach language, much as they may think they do, they just occasionally spoon-feed a bit of vocabulary: moo-cow, baa-lamb, colours and so on, usually – you’ll never hear a parent say “and these are called ‘stairs’ or ‘to wash’ means ‘to clean with water’” – the child absorbs that kind of vocabulary without teaching. The really clever bits, the structure and lexical rules … these no parent can teach because it’s highly unlikely they will even be aware of them. You do not say to an English child: “the aorist of ‘to see’ is ‘saw’ the perfect is ‘have seen’”. You don’t even tell them that to give a sense of the past you add ‘-ed’ to the end of the verb. ‘I play,’ ‘I played’. Many parents will not know what a verb is, nor will they need to, any more than you need to know what an alternator is to drive to the shops or, more pertinently, any more than you need to know what a bronchial tree or alveoli are in order to breathe. This may sound obvious to us all, language as a natural, evolved innate faculty; after all, the theory has been understood and mostly accepted for forty or so years, but if you look back over the history of linguistics to beyond the time such a word even existed, over the shoulders of Saussure, Jakobson and the Brothers Grimm to the earliest philologists and language investigators, there was no obvious reason to suppose that language was innate. Or at least not innate in that way. Many believed, quite seriously, that the Biblical explanation in the story of the Tower of Babel was the true answer to the riddle of language, just as they believed in the Flood and the Creation. Others thought that there was a ‘natural’ language, a primary tongue. Some suggested that it was Latin, others, out of religiosity, that it must be Hebrew, Greek or Aramaic. They went so far, under the patronage of bishops and monarchs who took an interest in the subject, as to take foundling children by way of experiment and isolate them completely from all human congress, to give them no access to language at all while they grew up, in the hope that they would revert to some posited universal and original language, the linguistic equivalent of a chemical element or primary tissue, and thereby prove once and for all which of the world’s tongues had primacy. Of course what happened was that such children invented their own language amongst themselves, true languages with wide vocabularies and complex syntactical structures. It is a shame in a way that it would now be considered too cruel to repeat the experiments, just imagine how much would be revealed by a study of these unique languages.
Other theories touching on the nature and origins of language that have had some vogue include that of Professor Jayne’s 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, a fascinating and bold attempt to explain language and, more fundamentally, consciousness itself. Richard Dawkins said that it “… is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between.” Whatever the truth or cogency of Jayne’s central argument, it remains an elegantly written and provocative read and helps raise the issue of whether language is necessary for the subconscious mind, let alone the conscious, to exist. His theories of metaphor are especially interesting. But let’s return to pleasure before we get bogged down in bibliography.
For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be. I hate that, and I particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I’m on their side. When asked to join in a “let’s persuade this supermarket chain to get rid of their ‘five items or less’ sign” I never join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’, and between ‘uninterested’ and ‘disinterested’ and ‘infer’ and ‘imply’, but none of these are of importance to me. ‘None of these are of importance,’ I wrote there, you’ll notice – the old pedantic me would have insisted on “none of them is of importance”. Well I’m glad to say I’ve outgrown that silly approach to language. Oscar Wilde, and there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the injunction: “I’ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and shalls, thats and whiches &c.” Which gives us all encouragement to feel less guilty, don’t you think?
There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.
The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs. New examples from our time might take some getting used to: ‘He actioned it that day’ for instance might strike some as a verbing too far, but we have been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not ‘action’? ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire. Pedants will also claim, with what I am sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness, that their fight is only for ‘clarity’. This is all very well, but there is no doubt what ‘Five items or less’ means, just as only a dolt can’t tell from the context and from the age and education of the speaker, whether ‘disinterested’ is used in the ‘proper’ sense of non-partisan, or in the ‘improper’ sense of uninterested. No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of clarity almost never, ever holds water. Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. You slip into a suit for an interview and you dress your language up too. You can wear what you like linguistically or sartorially when you’re at home or with friends, but most people accept the need to smarten up under some circumstances – it’s only considerate. But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.
I don’t deny that a small part of me still clings to a ghastly Radio 4/newspaper-letter-writer reader pedantry, but I fight against it in much the same way I try to fight against my gluttony, anger, selfishness and other vices. I must confess, for example, that I find it hard not to wince when someone aspirates the word ‘aitch’. Haitch Eye Vee, you hear all the time now, for HIV. It’s pretty much nails on the blackboard to me, as is the use of the word ‘yourself’ or ‘myself’ when all that is meant is ‘you’ or ‘me’ but I daresay myself’s accent and manner is nails on the blackboard to yourself or to others too, in itself’s own way. Myself also mourns, sometimes, the death of that phrase I bade you upon pain of slapping to remember some time back, ‘willy-nilly’, do you remember? Fold it in your hope chest, I urged, or seal it in a baggie. Well you can take it out now. Willy-nilly. What happened there? Willy-nilly is now used, it seems, to mean ‘all over the place’; its original meaning of ‘whether you like it or not’ (in other words ‘willing or unwilling’) is all but forgotten. Well, that’s ok, I suppose. I don’t mind either that the word ‘meld’ is now being used as a kind of fusion of melt and weld, instead of in its original sense of ‘announce’. Meld has changed … that’s okay. There’s no right or wrong in language, any more than there’s right or wrong in nature. Evolution is all about restless and continuous change, mutation and variation. What was once ‘meant’ in the animal kingdom to be a nose can end up as an antenna, a tongue, eyes, a pair of lips or a blank space once evolution and the permutation of new DNA and new conditions has got to work. If the foulness of the Kennel Club mentality was operated in nature, just imagine … giraffes’ necks wouldn’t be allowed to stretch, camels wouldn’t get humps, such alterations would be wrong. Well it’s the same in language, there’s no right or wrong, only usage. Convention exists, of course it does, but convention is no more a register of rightness or wrongness than etiquette is, it’s just another way of saying usage: convention is a privately agreed usage rather than a publicly evolving one. Conventions alter too, like life. Things that are kept to purity of line, in the Kennel Club manner, develop all the ghastly illnesses and deformations of inbreeding and lack of vital variation. Imagine if we all spoke the same language, fabulous as it is, as Dickens? Imagine if the structure, meaning and usage of language was always the same as when Swift and Pope were alive. Superficially appealing as an idea for about five seconds, but horrifying the more you think about it.
If you are the kind of person who insists on this and that ‘correct use’ I hope I can convince you to abandon your pedantry. Dive into the open flowing waters and leave the stagnant canals be.
But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.
One final thought I should leave you with which only occurred to me the other day. Sometimes, by accident, language fails to provide and when it does the results can be hugely detrimental to the human race. Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it be and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’. Neither of these assertions would sound nearly as good if substituted with those lame letters ‘CCTV’, would they? Well, whether Scunt or SS surely there really should be a memorable and punchy new designation for CCTV – at the moment it is simply too greasy to wrestle. I wonder what other enemies lurk in our society that need names to bring them out into the light? I look forward to your thoughts.
I do not look forward to your thoughts on which inaccuracies and grammatical ‘mistakes’ irritate you though. This is not Feedback on Radio 4, or the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. Oh alright, I take that back. You are welcome, of course, to disagree with my dislike of pedantry and to attempt to convince me that there is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ English.
If I were to direct you to any books about language, I would certainly recommend Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct but above that I would rate Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language. This brilliant linguist mocks pedantry and the idea of stasis in language with far greater elegance and knowledge than I can. His informed empiricism, in this reader’s opinion, knocks the sometimes tortuously conjectural rationalism of Pinker into a cocked hat.
But don’t feel the need to study language as a subject, the sheer act of reading and of writing and of talking is enough. And this too is enough. I shall stop now before I get all … oh, it’s too late, I’ve already got all …
Until the next time, fellow linguists, thank you and goodbye.
© Stephen Fry 2008
A podcast version will be made available on Friday 7th November.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:11 am
I wonder if this lack of enjoyment by English speakers of their own language you describe has anything to do with the generally low uptake of foreign language study in Britain and other anglophone countries. I certainly found that I enjoyed and appreciated my native language more once I was fluent in another language and saw more beauty in both. Having now moved back home after fourteen years in Britain, I’m almost giddy hearing German every day, but on the other hand I already know that I will really miss the conciseness of English. I also have certain subjects I’d rather think about in English.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:36 am
For philosophy of language see Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Great looking new site.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:46 am
Delightful, as usual, but name of the author you mention is spelled “Jaynes”, with a final S. For a contemporary book on the enduring significance of his life and work, see http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Dawn-Consciousness-Bicameral-Revisited/dp/097907441X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225726838&sr=1-3 . For a homonym (unrelated) contemporary author who around the same time revolutionized a different discipline, see http://www.amazon.com/Probability-Theory-E-T-Jaynes/dp/0521592712/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225726838&sr=1-1 — I move in peculiar circles where you don’t just say “Jaynes” to refer to either author, because both the nature of cognition and consciousness, and that of uncertain knowledge (probabilities), are both potentially relevant in many contexts. (I’m _also_ a pedant, but that’s a separate issue;-).
November 4th, 2008 at 2:33 am
Bravo, Stephen. I awfully glad to see you take your seat among the disreputable descriptionists, and moreover, to puncture so thoroughly the caricature of the bloodless, anything-goes academic, who simply doesn’t care enough about actual language or actual speech to accept that there are rules. I’ve written a follow-up of sorts at my own place, http://apodion.net/apo/stephen-fry-it-is-well-to-hear-it
November 4th, 2008 at 2:42 am
Re the aspirated H - in Irish-English (Hiberno-English?), ‘haitch’ is standard pronunciation but in Northern Ireland it’s indicative of background. Catholic schools teach ‘haitch’ and Protestant schools ‘aitch’.
November 4th, 2008 at 2:51 am
I’m afraid the ‘haitch’ thing really annoys me too. My children attend a school (C of E to boot!) in which some of the teachers actually teach them to say haitch but I think I’m winning in my campaign to convert them to aitchers.
November 4th, 2008 at 2:57 am
A thoroughly enjoyable, educational and as always entertaining posting. I am always in awe of your ability to play with language and your immense knowledge and skill of the subject. I can only envy your mastery and hope to learn from it.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:02 am
I’ve always liked (the name of) that close relative of CCTV, the Gatso. It sounds so like “gotcha” and it lends itself very well to verbing.
P.S. Haitch!
November 4th, 2008 at 3:24 am
I have to confess that I am somewhat a “grammar bitch”. I know it’s annoying but I can’t help it. It is true that the joy of language is not in the “correctness” of the language but in one’s own ability to produce language, speech or writing and the use of imagination. Rules and guidelines are good when they serve the purpose but language changes all the time and we should all go along.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:45 am
I use “Haitch”… inherited it from my grandparents and parents. I try to lose it but then i found it annoyed my girlfriend… so have retained it.
I think it came from pride, a very working class attempt to be correct and proper despite a lack of any real education. In roughly the same way the doorstep was always clean and scrubbed and the front of the house always fresh and painted, despite the fact it was always close in the matter of money and having food on the table three times a day.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:53 am
“Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”
Just thought that needed putting out there
November 4th, 2008 at 4:17 am
“Meld” is alive and well and living in Norway under the assumed name “melde”.
http://lexin.no/lexin.html?dict=nbo-eng-maxi&ui-lang=NBO&checked-languages=E&checked-languages=N&checked-languages=B&search=meld*&run-search=
November 4th, 2008 at 4:34 am
When I realised that I enjoyed exploring and experimenting with the English language, it wasn’t long before I naturally thought about studying it. Learning about it in depth. Fortunately, perhaps, I then remembered that I had tried the same with music, but discovering the rules, the forms and the various intricacies of it had (temporarily) destroyed the magic of it. I still feel that I sometimes know too much about how English should be used in order to break free of the rules and write in the way I sometimes dream about, but I remain glad that I didn’t take the extremely academic route and retain some of the magic of discovery.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Etymology fascinates me. Language is such an inter-woven fabric of culture, psychology, and geography.
I once heard a radio interview with notable intellectuals on NPR here in the USA about whether or not Shakespeare would appreciate the modern trends in language, such as the “AIM-speak” phrases such as “LOL,” “BRB,” etc. They wholeheartedly agreed that the Bard would love them.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:51 am
When reading your blogs or articles or whatevers, I find myself speaking the words out loud. I think this can only say good things about your writing.
So I look forward to hearing you say them in the promised podcast, even if it will probably highlight how poor my pronunciation is!
I wonder what your thoughts of creating smiley faces out of punctuation…
I resisted them for a long time, and though I still keep them well away from my blog, I have grown rather fond of them in little notes to friends on sites like twitter. Speaking of which, I am enjoying your tweets from Africa, though it seems strange reading those on one hand and watching you tour America once a week on the other!
x
November 4th, 2008 at 4:53 am
Oh, and now apparently you can’t write/draw an old school smiley face without it being turned upright and painted yellow! I bet equals eyes will do the trick… =)
x
November 4th, 2008 at 5:21 am
Forget Wittgenstein, d’you think you could find the return key so in an article about language the paragraphs aren’t 15,000 words long. Makes it very hard to read. Interesting stuff though.
November 4th, 2008 at 6:37 am
But above all let there be pleasure… How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors. (paragraph 13)
This fills me with confidence, thank you. I have never been able to get my head around grammar and spellings, they have never been my fortay since I was knee high, but it has encoraged me to write more and i am going to, whether my teachers like it or not.
November 4th, 2008 at 7:41 am
Reading this reminded me of Kristeva and how she combined the paternal symbolic essence of language, or Jouis-sense, as Lacan said, and the maternal semiotique essence concerning rhythm and tone, or Juice-sance, as Fry said. The combination of both gives meaning to language, to life. But alas, I’ve recently heard that the French are no longer in vogue; what a shame, they had such playful way with words.
As for requisite words – in my language, Hebrew, there’s considerable deficiency in some departments and affluence in others; Easy enough to make words up, but nowhere close to sth like “a gay-off”, which I consider brilliant. As for lurking social enemies – I’d say the Frenchies did a great job outing and naming most of them, so chapeau to them again.
BTW – I thought this blessay had derived from some abbreviations/net-talk complaints on twitter, till u situation-ed it near a London wall.. Also want to add that I get updated on twitter mainly to enjoy your language swings. Quelle jouissance!
November 4th, 2008 at 7:55 am
Thank you so much for this excellent post! I did love the Fry and Laurie sketch on language, but this post is even better for being at least mostly in earnest. I am going to add it to my list of language-related links in the hope that it might contribute to the salvation and/or redemption of at least one poor prescriptivist. Thanks too for plugging Guy Deutscher’s book. As a devout pieriansipist, his book is one of my all-time favourites and it was a delight to see it so highly praised by someone whose opinion I value.
November 4th, 2008 at 7:59 am
Прошу прощения, что пишу по-русски. По-английски я только читаю и ничего не могу написать, но я в полном восторге от того, что я здесь читаю. Долго собирался зайти и просто сказать что-нибудь хорошее, но стеснялся. А тут пост о языке — такой удобный случай. Сейчас я перевожу все написанное здесь на русский — хотя переводчик из меня получится вряд ли очень хороший, но мои более ленивые соотечественники получат возможность хотя бы приблизительно узнать, что тут написано. Разумеется, перевод я нигде не буду публиковать — просто дам почитать друзьям.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:23 am
Language has always fascinated me, too, though I’m nowhere near as eloquent as this!
I think my fascination probably stems from moving ‘up north’ to Northumberland at the tender age of 5, & all my classmates thinking I was posh because I had a Hertfordshire accent. It has always been my opinion that people who bully others over grammar and/or pronunciation really need to think outside their precious box of academic rules once in a while.
The many essays on my desk, waiting to be written, suddenly seem far more enticing after reading your thoughts; I’m truly inspired…
November 4th, 2008 at 8:28 am
language is such a big influence on how we interpret the world. notice how so many negative words use sexual connotations; how the worst words in the world refer to female genitalia; how the language we use influences how we treat ourselves and others…
I haven’t read the article in full~ but am looking forward to it over a beer later today…
November 4th, 2008 at 10:00 am
This reminds me of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In very much the same way that the ruler of the universe, he assumed, had to be someone that did not desire the job, people who would be more suitable for “correcting” the “misuse” of language are those that are not interested in doing so. And the reason they are not interested is the one that qualifies them: they really understand language, and find in every new facet it shows something interesting and valuable. Even if only the possibility of a new pun.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:28 am
Wow…so many bells rung from my own personal belfry. How did you get in?
I love the lingo in all forms - both slippery and dry - but it has always led me to trouble. From being accused of plagiarising stories at Primary School, to being bullied for knowing and correctly using the word melancholy in Secondary School (I probably deserved that one), to enduring the deathless jibe “someone’s swallowed a dictionary” since, like, OMG whenever.
I’m part of a volunteer committee running a community centre in Cornwall, and at one of our meetings, a member of our committee was ranting about how much she hates samba dancing, because it’s too “Notting Hill”. She went on to say it’s alright for…and then used the N-word. Two of us gently, but firmly tried to explain that she can’t say that in a minuted (sorry, verbsnatchers, I’m having that one) meeting, and probably to cover her embarrassment, she turned on me for using “…all these long words.”
Sad to say, I had the same rush of exposed, effete, bookworm shame as always.
On the plus side, they do like it when I swear.
Thanks for this article, Mr Fry. It’s always heartening to read that you don’t have to know ALL the rules of the game before you are allowed to play. You’re a very generous man.
PS: My favourite word is verisimilitude. This is because it measures the degree to which something is very-similar-to something else. Those bullies had a point, didn’t they…
November 4th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Here’s something I found after I read this blessay- http://www.ventrella.com/Ideas/grammar.html
-that I thought was pretty cute.
And for in case you read or respond to comments, Stephen, I’ve been wanting to make a comment about one of your podgrams from a while back, but that particular podgram didn’t seem to have an entry- in other words, I couldn’t comment on it directly.
In that podgram you said that almost every other country gets singular suffix for websites, and one of the examples you listed was South Africa having just a ‘.za’ suffix, as opposed to co.za. Unfortunately, this is not true. I’m live in South Africa, and all our (commercial) websites end in co.za, although we’ve taken to pronouncing them as words and not individual letters, and we drop the dot between the co and the za. “For more info, visit www dot ——– dot coh zah” It’s a right pain in the arse, but then we’re so slow on the uptake that there’s only a bare minimum of South African commercial and useful sites online. If I’m looking for the website for a production company’s short course, I might find articles about it from three years ago on a news site, but not the course itself.
Sorry for the tangent, just thought I’d mention:)
Loraine
November 4th, 2008 at 11:03 am
First of all, thank you for yet another great blessay!
As a member of a language minority, I’m completely obsessed with languages. It came as a shock to me that people who speak English as their mother tongue generally don’t share my interest. When I, for instance, try to discuss my (in my opinion) extremely interesting observation; that the English language seems to lack a verb denoting “the act of not speaking”, most English-speakers only answer me with a polite “Oh, really?” – and change the subject. And yet many of my acquaintances are writers, journalists, intellectuals – in general, people who ought to be interested in, and in love with, their own mother tongue, and whom you would expect to enjoy speaking *about* their language almost as much as they enjoy speaking *in* their own language…
There are so many intriguing aspects of language – the origins of it, etymology, what happens in our brains when we use or learn new languages, how we produce meaning, and so forth! And then there are these tiny details, as my verb problem: There are verbs denoting “the act of not speaking” in most languages; “molchat’” in Russian, “vaieta” in Finnish, “tiga” in Swedish, “(se) taire” in French, “schweigen” in German. But in English? “to keep quiet”, “to remain silent” and such, i.e. idiomatic expressions with auxiliary verbs. Or do you have an appropriate verb hidden somewhere in that hope chest?
I have met several English-speakers who can perform “the act of not speaking” – but how can they do that if they lack the word for that particular act?
November 4th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Bravo, Stephen! It is a testament to how right you were in your autobiography when you said that we often appeal to writers better than ourselves who can articulate our thoughts so perfectly. Isn’t it ironic that thoughts, the very things that we hold so private, so dear and so innate are often better expressed by others?
This blessay is a a shining explication of everything I have ever wanted to say about language. I find, during the course of my ramblings on the generative and evolutionary aspects of language, I often rehash your example of “higgledy-piggledy” England vs structuralist France. This blessay here will definitely feature in my future musings to others.
I will request, and I think that I speak for a few people, that you write a book on the pleasure of language. Much like Ode Less Travelled, but less specific than just poetry, open it up.
I speak with confidence that if I ever had to bibliography the source of my own lanauge (as a reflection of me and my history), your blessed name will feature rather prominently, and I can only thank you eternally for that.
November 4th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Well, I’m not sure that I am prepared to surrender my self image as a language lover, but I really must protest about infer and imply, two perfectly good words with distinct meanings which would happily mind their own business and serve us to good effect if left alone by those who cannot be bothered to use the right one.
You infer that I am a language fascist? I’m sorry, I can no longer tell what you mean by that, whether it’s a conclusion you draw, a statement that you make indirectly, or both. Or, indeed, neither. Because surely if we surrender the idea that words carry definite meaning then we lose the human-defining ability to communicate precisely through language (or, as Reggie Perrin would have it, earwig).
Yes, of course, infer is just joining the luxurious panoply of words which, if looked up in a dictionary (dictionaried, anyone?) will proffer multiple meanings, some of them contradictory. But I can’t see that it has advanced the good of humankind through acquiring this superfluous new apperception, merely muddied the waters around a subtle and beautiful interplay, possible only because we are gifted with the marvels of language, thought, metaphor and playfulness that make it possible for a speaker to say one thing and have a listener infer another (be that through the speaker’s intention or the listener’s imagination / paranoia), and possible for a listener to catch that which a speaker only implies (or appears, through pure mischance, to imply).
Well, that’s it, rant over, but please, can’t we save inference from interference?
November 4th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Thank you for posting this today–those of us on the other side of the Atlantic are, for the most part, freaking out about polls and electoral votes and swing states and other distressing subjects. We need to converse on something other than predictions on what way Virginia will go.
It is a shame in a way that it would now be considered too cruel to repeat the experiments, just imagine how much would be revealed by a study of these unique languages.
It’s known as the “forbidden experiment” among linguists, just because it’s seductive yet ethically abhorrent. However, Nicaraguan Sign Language fits most of the criteria.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
You put that “alright” in there on purpose. Admit it.
(The blessay was good, too.)
November 4th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
The comment I originally started writing turned into a blog post in its own right, but I felt I should still contribute something here.
I don’t consider myself a language pedant, though I will admit there are some trends I see as at least mildly concerning backsteps which might narrow the possibility for communication rather than expand it. If any change in language is to be fought, it is that which makes us less able to understand each other. ‘Constant vigilance’ is, as they say, required.
I do, however, absolutely identify as a language-lover in the fluid, ever-changing, always-something-new-to-discover sense of the term. I hope you will accept that most conceited of conceits (the self-quotation) as proof of my membership in this most excellent society:
“I do enjoy playing with words and though I am, I am told, perfectly capable of throwing them together in normal comprehensible patterns known to many as phrases, sentences or paragraphs, I am moved more to throw them together in ways that seem pleasing or amusing to me. There will be obscure words dredged from dictionaries esoteric; there will be seemingly unrelated and meandering detours; and there will be phrases started with conjunctions.
Because I can.”
November 4th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
This jumped out:
“They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language?”
Yes.
The two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
Language is pleasure, but language is also a collection of symbols. Imagine if we didn’t “agree” that a stick figure with a triangle-for-a-dress meant “Ladies”. There’d be ‘orrible confrontations in the bogs every day.
It’s the same with the Greengrocer’s Apostrophe. We’ve agreed — like it or not — that it’s means, exclusively, Ladies. Or, rather, “it is”. That’s the end of the story.
No amount of blather about “usage” makes any other usage correct, acceptable, interesting, or worthy of preservation. Unless you fancy wandering into the wrong loo every other time…
Language matters. And so do the wee conventions we adopt to make it _possible_ to enjoy it, revel in it, abuse it, celebrate it.
Nothing is more likely to cock-block the pleasure of language in mid “cream” than the cold spoon of a word used ignorantly and/or incorrectly, unless for comedy.
The “pleasure” of watching/listening to a fictional character like “The Sopranos” mobster “Little Carmine” and his delicious misuse of ten-dollar words comes to mind. Without the original meanings being “correct”, where’s the fun?
November 4th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Personally I’m always sad when a word changes meaning to be the same as another, perfectly good word. Your “disinterested”, for example: soon we will have one less way to say non-partisan. (It’s a good job that we still have “non-partisan”, or I wouldn’t have been able to say that at all.)
It seems to me that there should be some objective criteria that would let us tell the difference between pointless radio-four behaviour and genuine fear that our language is being dumbed down.
My personal bugbear is people saying “vee” when they mean “versus”. I know it’s perfectly functional, so I suppose that I have no grounds to object; but to my ears it just makes them sound ignorant.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Thank you Stephen for your generosity in keeping us both interested and entertained. I can hear your voice as I read your words.
My father was a working class man from Shepherds Bush (should there be an apostrophe in there?). He used to say people dropped their aitches in ‘Ammersmith and picked them up in Hislington.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Good lord! I was suddenly transported back several years and several thousand miles to a particularly pleasant semester of theory in linguistic anthropology during my undergraduate years. We had many of the same arguments, though the focus was more on the nature vs. nurture debate and linguistic evolution than on the sheer pleasure of making intelligible sounds. This was the first anthropological topic to grab my attention so thoroughly, that I briefly considered going over to the “dark side” into cultural anthropology and working as a linguist.
The joy of language you speak of so eloquently is what stopped me from going down that path, though. The thought of spending my days dissecting words like lab specimens, looking at individual syllables and phrase constructions like a biologist would look at organs and systems, literally turned my stomach. Eventually, no matter how much I love my work, it becomes just work, and it forever taints my appreciation of the thing itself. I worked on traditional ships for years and loved ever wet, cold, exhausted second of it, but I can never look at Johnny Depp, zipping blithely down a line from the top of a mast, without the instinct to kick someone in the shin. Now that my work involves digging in the dirt, I’m afraid (sadly) that Indiana Jones is the next to be in danger.
So, perhaps we should just feel sorry for those who go to the extreme of linguistic “purity.” I find them just as aggravating, railing against someone else’s earnest (if grammatically flawed) attempt to communicate. I cannot hold myself blameless, by the way, either in grammatical correctness or in holding my tongue against the more blatant violations of my native language. I look upon the extremists as ones to be pitied, though. The ones who have become so focused on minutia, they have lost the grand view. Like someone who has become so obsessed with a mole-hill, he can’t enjoy the rest of the garden. With these folks, I just shake my head, grin, and split an infinitive.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I think that perhaps, maybe, possibly, this lack of enjoyment of language is linked to not being read to when we’re young or reading children’s books that talk down to kids or use over-simplified language….
The greatest children’s books (and the ones that children enjoy the most) talk to children unpatronisingly - kids love the sounds and the rythms of varied language and the change in tone or pitch of the voice. They have an instinctive understanding of words that perhaps they don’t know the meaning of and learn to “feel” what the author is getting at even if they don’t understand the words.
The wind in the willows:
Never in his life had he seen a river before–this sleek, sinuous, full-bodied animal, chasing and chuckling, gripping things with a gurgle and leaving them with a laugh, to fling itself on fresh playmates that shook themselves free, and were caught and held again. All was a-shake and a-shiver–glints and gleams and sparkles, rustle and swirl, chatter and bubble. The Mole was bewitched, entranced, fascinated. By the side of the river he trotted as one trots, when very small, by the side of a man who holds one spell-bound by exciting stories; and when tired at last, he sat on the bank, while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.
PHWOAAARR!
Or Roald Dahl!! He certainly didn’t talk down to kids, but knew exactly how to use language to excite, arouse, scare or upset them.
I am a painting teacher and I have come to realise that children have an instinctive and passionate NEED to draw, paint and make marks. The fact that at a certain age, perhaps where their ambition outstrips their “ability”, drawing becomes uncool and they become filled with awkward inhibition, is a never-ending source of bafflement for me. Sad.
I also have a pet hate of pedants and language tyrants - it’s that sort of thing that destroys the pure, felt, sexy and naughty enjoyment of language in children who don’t or can’t understand what a verb is or how to use commas. Grrrr.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:15 pm
I have the same experience as tinimaus (the first post) of enjoying my own language more after learning other languages and seeing how different the ways to express even same things can be. I have to admit that part of this joy comes from the fact I realise that in my native language I have so many different alternatives to express what I want to say and I am also able to have so much more nuances than in any other language. I realise the fact that my abilities in other languages are poor always when using english with my friends. It makes me love my own language, but is also great motivation to learn more different languages and to find those nuances that I am missing now.
November 4th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
As a new member I’ve sneeked in the back door here not necessarily to post a comment on the above, but to say something to SF concerning his attack of the british for “sneering anti americanism”. I’m sorry if this isn’t the right place to do this but I can’t find anywhere else on your site to answer this. It’s ironic really that i’m answering this in a post about the importance of language as along with most other things, the americans butcher this also. I’m all in favo(u)r of language evolving so they can basically do what they like with it (as well as with the UN) but we do all learn the same grammar at school. Leaving aside their spelling, their use of grammar is appalling.
As for anti americanism, we need this in the world. Although I’m not a huge fan of stephen, I’ve always found his programmes interesting, the subject matter well researched and presented. Suddenly becoming enamoured with the US is one thing, but saying that only people who don;t know america outside of tv or a trip to orlando is naive and ridiculous. Travelling around america, as i have done, only exacerbates how parochial they are. You find the americans polite, friendly, charming and honourable yet they go to war illegally, cause widespread misery to millions of people, lie to their own people and have total disregard to international law. Their “war on terrorism” has left the world a much darker and sinister place. Travelling freely around the world is now fraught with difficulty because of them. So, rejoice that they are polite, friendly and honourable, just don’t speak out against their christian right or tell them that you have a stockpile of oil. You’ll wake up one day with their polite, freindly missiles passing over your head.
Vegetable rights and peace. Persil.
November 5th, 2008 at 12:29 am
“Is language the father of thought?”
Personally I don’t think so, and I’m rather fond of a lyric from the Suzanne Vega song “Language”, which expresses the opposite sentiment.
“These words are too solid,
They don’t move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by and is gone…”
November 5th, 2008 at 1:40 am
** In praise of formalism (but not the way you think) **
Stephen is absolutely right about English, and all the languages humans use to talk to each other in. Too much formality may supress beauty.
However, there are formal languages where the precision *is* the beauty. The languages of mathematics, like algebra, have an elegance to them that derives from their form. Similarly, good computer programs are, at best, a kind of electric poetry.
Lovers of formality might want to look there for a place where their precision and attention to detail is not only appreciated, but required.
November 5th, 2008 at 4:40 am
Thank you for another wonderful piece of writing. I admit to being quite a pedant when it comes to words. If I consider why this is so, it probably has more to do with my not wanting to seem ignorant or be open to correction than about upholding the purity of the language. Some modern trends dismay me, yet I have to concede that language evolves according to use and if enough people adopt something, it becomes acceptable. Ultimately, we are free to choose how we want to express ourselves, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I do also take great pleasure from words and from those who can use them well, and love the richness of English that derives from its many sources. Your invitiation to abandon pedantry and go for the jouissance is delightful and hard to resist.
November 5th, 2008 at 6:41 am
I’m guilty of having been a horrible pedant in the past, but I’m trying to reform. I’m willing to overlook most desecrations now, with the exception of apostrophe catastrophes. The main thing should be that any piece of writing from the shortest email to the epic-est (yes, I really did just use epic-est) magnum opus ought to be carefully crafted. It’s sloppiness that I object to (or “to which I object” as some may prefer to have it).
November 5th, 2008 at 6:54 am
I don’t think that language is the father of the thought. The language is form of the thought, the way to present it to the world. It is more a physical birth of a thought, so it would be more appropriate to call it a mother. But seriously, i do consider language very important for it is the only way to present yourself truly to the world. I do think that the most important aspect of human being is its spirit its soul if you like. Language is the only way to express your being to the world so the nurture of ones language is of essence. Language is what separates us from animals, and makes us human, by language we can communicate share thoughts, ideas… and ultimately in accordance with each other create a society . Vuk Karadzic a Serbian philologist and a reformer of Serbian language once stated that alphabet is the greats invention in human history, for it allowed us to record our thought and correspond with people through the ages.
So in many ways language is the most important aspect of human being (beside from breathing) and as such must constantly be developed in limits of each individual.
November 5th, 2008 at 10:36 am
How about “telepresence” for CCTV? Just thought it up - not sure if it’s a word in use at the moment.
November 5th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
What a wonderful blizzard of thoughts. I’m don’t consider myself a card carrying member of the apostrophe police, but those who resort to banal corporate cliche (’take ownership’, ‘going forward’). Well, damn them to hades too!
November 5th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
KateM said: “in Irish-English (Hiberno-English?), ‘haitch’ is standard pronunciation”
Being Irish, I can confirm this is true. In fact, to me it’s cringe-worthy to hear others say ‘aitch’ — or treat it as a vowel (it’s ‘a historic’, not ‘an historic’!).
November 6th, 2008 at 12:05 am
An interesting piece, particularly the part about being in favour of language evolving (or more accurately, not standing in its way when it happens). Given this viewpoint, I’d love to know how Stephen feels about the way the English language is evolving amongst today’s teenagers, particularly in terms of written English; text speak seems to be the writing style of choice, but also some misspellings of words have actually become so popular that many youths probably don’t realise they are incorrect e.g. “nite” or “donut” (even if the latter is a valid spelling across the pond, it is not how we are supposed to spell it here). I also wouldn’t be surprised if the word “you” officially gets shortened to “u” in a few years’ time, but that is pure speculation on my part.
My question is: does Stephen, or do any other language lovers, approve of such a direction? If not, is it wrong, or is it just that it’s not the direction we ourselves would have wanted it to move in?
And yes, I’m playing devil’s advocate here - I do think we can’t (and shouldn’t) stop language from evolving, as it has done throughout history, but I do also get annoyed by spellings such as the above
November 6th, 2008 at 3:37 am
You wrote ‘A’ sketch about language?? I thought you’d written loads. My personal favourite is the translator from Strom.
But I digress. I am a stickler for grammatical correctness and appropriate punctuation. Nobody has a greater love for the semi-colon than I and I am pleased even to employ it in the occasional text message.
My quirks, however, are not everybody’s and my mother always told me that it is rude to correct people. When I encounter a split infinitive, a rogue apostrophe, mispronunciation or any other deviation from the widely regarded norm, I like to keep my opinions to myself. As Douglas Adams so accurately wrote, ‘the one thing nobody can stand is a smartarse’.
This is my first post as I have only just found the website but it is warmly nestled in my ‘favourites’ box.
November 6th, 2008 at 4:31 am
“Some modern trends dismay me, ”
How are these trends modern? Im sure slang and jargon have been evolving our language for as long as humans have been able to speak.
November 6th, 2008 at 8:50 am
fantastic as always. who knows why i hate the words fruition, copious and the use of the words tasty and treat together.Strange how some words make some hearts flutter and others flounder.
November 6th, 2008 at 8:59 am
“I’ve used this analogy before, but I’ll use it again. Think of London.”
Your analogy reminded me of Peter Ackroyd’s “London; The Biography”.
Wonderful book, wonderful language.
A tip for those reading this.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Can I just say that this blog post has just made my day? I’m sure I can, but of course I should say “may I say”. You can now tell that my view on pedantry is similar to that of Stephen’s. I did love this blog post though, and have noticed on YouTube if you search “Stephen Fry Jonathan Ross” - you’ll find a nice video where some of Stephen’s basic points about language are expressed verbally and visually (much easier for a lazy student like myself).
The post has really cheered me up though as I said, mainly because I love language. I love grandiloquent words (even if I seldom know their meaning), I love how the order of words can change an entire meaning, I love looking at alternatives and how to simplify language, and I love slang and the etymology that goes with it.
I love too that Stephen has also read Pinker and Chomsky - part of what really got me excited (yes, I’m a complete loser). But, I have to just recommend something - as I think Stephen would like it - Buffy. Hear me out! People have such a stigma with this show, but in terms of language, I absolutely adore it. It is so contemporary in its use, the creator himself being at the helm of this linguistic melting pot. The use of simple things like “much” for “pathetic much” (used in response, for instance, if I said something rude - it’s kind of like a rhetorical), is so interesting and so American in my opinion as a form of communication. The ellipsis of “deal”, simply making “no big” when Buffy receives apologies from her friends. Or even the many pop-culture references, like in response to someone saying you have blue eyes, “my eyes are hazel, Helen Keller”, or “you can’t come here and go all Dawson on me whenever I have a new boyfriend”, or even just making a reference into a verb, “I got that just before I King-Arthured it out of the stone”. What about the suffix “ish” (”I’m going to go home first, slip into something a little more breaking and enterish”), or the one Joss Whedon himself uses so much, the suffix “y” (”explainy”, “it’s becoming all focusy”, or “you’re bait, go act baity”). I think these examples of manipulations are so clever and just make you think in a refreshing way. I furthermore love any work depicting the future where language is changed to a writer’s view of it in years to come, and Whedon also does this with his comic series “Fray”, with the taster for example where the protagonist asks “what’s a bullet?”, clips century to “cen”, spin=lie, toy=a joke, spled=good (splendid I would assume), etc etc. I’m being awfully repetitive and listy, and I do apologise, but I find these uses fascinating, and actually view them as a sign of shrewd intelligence instead of elitist boredom with language, who often see divergence as something used by poor or “dumb” people. Pop-culture references in especially I think show great wit and smarts to incorporate this into spoken language such as making them into verbs - a completely new way of communicating a message as well as making it sarcastic and dry at the same time. Just incredible, and I can’t stand those who want to stop language progression. Language is fluid, it is always changing. What if they’d stopped language progression a couple of hundred years ago - we’d never have moved on, and if you share the Whorfian view about language dictating/influencing thought - surely by language’s progression, our critical thinking should also develop. Thus, if you restrict language, you are restricting creativity, vibrancy, and personality.
I have never loved Stephen Fry more than after reading this blog entry.
November 6th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
One of my favorites: Here Lies Miss Groby, by James Thurber. It begins, “Miss Groby taught me English composition thirty years ago. It wasn’t what prose said that interested Miss Groby; it was the way prose said it. The shape of a sentence crucified on a blackboard (parsed, she called it) brought a light to her eye. She hunted for Topic Sentences and Transitional Sentences the way little girls hunt for white violets in springtime.”
Of course, if you love language, almost anything by Thurber will thrill and amuse.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
It was an excellent first comment by tinimaus - by which of course I actually mean that I was to write exactly the same until I read it there.
Learning another language, living another language, creates such a wonderful bond with your native tongue and an inquisitiveness about the one you are studying. As I learned other languages, I became more and more impressed by how english has evolved over time; if that now means growing americanisms and txt speak then that is the price to pay for its contuining vibrancy and the fun you can have with it. I love also finding phrases in other languages that are a product of their own evolution that just will not translate into english.
And if Stephen is willing to let these apparent errors and slips pass by, then I am certainly not in a position to argue. I shall even adopt “twazzock” into everyday usage.
November 7th, 2008 at 2:02 am
i’ll try to say all the thoughts going on briefly
1) is wanting all of the words and tenses and punctuation correct, is it more so in britain? i’m an american and i’d never seen people get so intense over it until being on your forum!
2) a mean fella showed up on your facebook proxy group and kept badmouthing everyone, then he would pick apart the grammar of anyone who responded, instead of listening to them. i railed out a paragraph in southern “redneck” talk and it must’ve overwhelmed him, i never heard back.
3)and what that fella did i think a lot of people do, if anyone interrupts me to correct something i say or finish a sentence for me (sometimes my brain won’t do it) usually they weren’t listening to what i was trying to say. so the whole point of me talking is totally lost.
4) i used to hate language and words…if no one understands what i mean, why fucking bother? like how i’ve seen you respond to dancing & just refuse to talk. i didn’t learn to talk by repeating my parents. and in college, i didn’t talk either. even if my grade was docked. i hated the whole mess.
5)and i used to think i was just downright bad at it. sometime back i bought your poetry book for $1 at a library sale. when you described their rhythm, that made sense…i was learning an instrument at the same time and would think about different words while my hands played the strings. at first i pushed to do the exercises, but your humor made me smile. if you’d made us (readers) write poems about serious, painful, dramatic emotions i might have given up, cause i felt depressed already, but instead you had us write about food or lighter things. (actually, the food poems were hard because i had no appetite. but that’s ok. hell, maybe that helped too.)
6)since then, i started reading more poetry, maybe 80% of what i read. partly cause i can read it even when my eyes are jumping around (just happens sometimes) but really, i like it.
7)i don’t think i’d have ever learned to like (not love yet) language from someone who demanded perfection. if i worry about that, there’s no brain energy to think about what it is i want to say. that’s probably what made me dislike it in the first place.
8)thank you for having that attitude about it. the book was very helpful. if you weren’t so famous, you’d make a very good teacher. well i guess you can do both!
November 7th, 2008 at 2:22 am
i meant: you respond to dancing with not wanting to, i’d respond to talking with not wanting to. my sentence got screwed up badly and sounds like you respond to dancing by giving everyone the silent treatment. sorry!
November 7th, 2008 at 2:28 am
I signed up especially to comment on this.
It’s like a geekgasm!
November 7th, 2008 at 5:47 am
You are right: language can and should be a source of immense pleasure for people. And we also get a very special kind of pleasure from foreign languages if we know them to a considerable extent. I, for example, enjoy my mother-tongue (that is Russian) a lot, however, English makes me happy in a paricular way.
Thanks for the posting!
November 7th, 2008 at 8:11 am
The mind of Stephen Fry is truly wonderful:)
Greetings from a long-time lurker and first-time poster!
November 7th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I must applaud you, Stephen, you have (to use a Meatloaf-ism) taken the words right out my mouth. I am a great lover of the English language and while I was a bit of a grammar Nazi back in the day, since beginning my studies in Linguistics I have eased up on my pedantry: I now only demand correct punctuation. Perhaps it is a failing of the Australian education system, but when I see tutors who do not know how to use the apostrophe of possession, I am filled with a quiet horror. One imagines that if they saw a semi-colon they would get a haemorrhage of some description. But I digress…
I love words, I adore vocabulary, a well chosen adjective to me is like a glorious drop of nectar nestled in the petals of a phrase, and consequently, I am forever being accused of being a private school toff (I say ‘private school’ in the Australian sense; a public school to the Brits out there in cyber-world) merely because I use words of more than two syllables in everyday conversation. Even in my Linguistics course, where one would hope to find people who share one’s love of words, I am shunned and scoffed at for saying nay to language used by the grunting throngs. If only there was some word to describe the sensation of speaking and using language, a sort of haptics of speech, then maybe people would wake up to the beauty that they’ve ignored for their whole lives.
Touching briefly on what you wrote about Orwell and the idea that language precedes thought, you may be interested to know that one of the underlying theorems of linguistic anthropology is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and essentially posits the same idea. Sapir and Whorf believed that, as well as demonstrating what is important to members of a speech community, the vocabulary and structure of a language to some degree dictates the way the people think. For example, in languages where time and space are described differently, they are understood differently, and as a result, completely different ‘laws’ of physics can be developed. Quite a horrifying thought, I imagine, to the physicists out there, when they realise that their ‘laws’ may only work in their English-speakers’ understanding of the world.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Very nicely written. (No joke there, I think).
Right now I am reading your ‘The Ode Less Travelled’ and I can thoroughly extend my hand to you (or perhaps just in a waving gesture) in a similar appreciation.
Your early point of language at a distance versus its use reminds me very much of quantum physics (not to be boring) and the Heisenberg principle within it. The old shine a light on the particle and it changes, study it from afar and not truly know it problem, so to speak. Perhaps with language it is a case of, as I have worded it, studying it from one view to know it, but study it more personally to understand it. But then, I am sounding particularly pathetic with my attempts at wisdom there, aren’t I?
Another thing I was reminded of was ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest’ - O, what was it - yes, “well, at least I tried, damn it” or something to that effect. Or is it affect? (Sorry, simply had to). Anyway, your point on those knit-picking, annoying, irritating, (so on so forth) people who comment so freely with their noses high and their fingers long are indeed a nuisance. Something of that is in us all too I suppose - perhaps again a subject I should not approach. (For a person is a complex thing from afar, but a simple thing when up-close in many ways [you see what I did there? Hee-hee]). ANYway - I was simply going to agree with you, but I am droning out drivel in droves now. McMurphy, convicted on a charge of battery as he is, might still be that minority genius. The one who knows how to live - not one who knows life.
Again…drivel…
November 8th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Certainly an interesting and compelling call for fluidity and tolerance in everyday language.
What irks me more than a poorly declined verb or an erroneously applied apostrophe is what seems to be the gradual, almost casual degradation rather than bastardisation of language in everyday use.
I was taught to use language and to communicate in a clear way (although the best grammatical endeavours often a elude me as much through my own lazyness as through lack of formal knowledge or practice), and I find it soul destroying to hear people, like, you know, talking all kinds of stuff about you know, this and that, innit?
Language will necessarily twist and turn, revolt and evolve, but surely we can retain some kind of “quality” - not necessarily in terms of grammatical rigour, but in the clarity with which we communicate?
English is an especially mongrel tongue, and is widely famed and decried for its lack of dependable structure and the versatility with which it can be deployed, but perhaps the ‘innit’ generation will herald a new-found dialectic direction - the English not of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but of Bebo and MySpace.
I’ll still go off on one if buzzword-spouting business types use the word “leverage” instead of simply “use”, though - some things are just beyond the pale!
November 8th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Wordord- I doubt you will see this but I humbly present you with the unashamedly stolen “Shtum”
“shtum
verb
1. to be quiet (rfv-sense)
adjective
1. silent, speechless, dumb
Etymology: (Yidd.) ”
Although, we do tend to use it as “keep shtum”, ah well, nearly!
November 8th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
Firstly, great post. You have obviously thought about this a lot. Though if pressed for an initial critism, I’d have to call your essay ‘a bit waffley’. Though you probably already knew that.
On an intellectual level, my major critism about your post, and indeed, that of almost all western philosophers, is that you seem to believe that all we can know is all we can describe with words. That everything seen and unseen can be described using the letters of the alphabet. That language and conciousness are one and the same, or at least that it is impossible to separate one from the other. I think this is selling us short somewhat, with regards to our imaginations and creativity, and I think that Zen Buddhists would agree with me. After all, the more abstract something is, the harder it is to describe. Thus it follows that there could be things so abstract that they’d be impossible to describe.
I mean, yes, one of my favourate books is ‘Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintainance’, a book written by a man oft criticised by supposed intellectuals as being “the worst kind of pseudo-intellectual twazzock”, and yes, I was confused by the fact that the word ‘rhetoric’ doesn’t appear once in you essay, but even so, I am yet to find a substantial answer to this line of thought.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:59 am
This one little cartoon did more than anything I think to make me see a particular point in the tangential form vs content debate:
http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF060-Penguin_Enemy.gif
If the debate is aesthetic however (joy of words), I would have thought this is precisely where the pedant is entitled to her foibles as much as anyone.
November 9th, 2008 at 11:32 am
You are an inspiration Mr. Fry to millions out there who you have touched with your beautiful mind.
I suggest a reading myself, namely:-
1. The Meaning of Meaning by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.
Regards
November 10th, 2008 at 3:08 am
I am absolutely delighted by this post; not only is Stephen Fry one of my favorite writers and comedians (The Liar is still perhaps the funniest books I’ve ever read), but the post makes the case, far better than I could hope to put it, that I have been trying for years to make at languagehat.com (where I have posted about this). To provide some recompense for the pleasure this post and thread have given me (I’m shaking my head in amazement at how few “thoughts on which inaccuracies and grammatical ‘mistakes’ irritate you” there are), I’ll translate the Russian comment by From_Saratov above (November 4th at 7:59 am):
“Forgive me for writing in Russian. In English I can only read, I can’t write a thing, but I’m completely delighted with what I read here. For a long time I’ve meant to drop by and simply say something nice, but I was too shy. But this post on language is such a good opportunity. I’m translating everything written here into Russian — even if I’m not much of a translator, my lazier countrymen will be able to learn at least approximately what’s written here. It goes without saying that I won’t publish the translation anywhere — I’ll just let my friends read it.”
November 10th, 2008 at 5:07 am
This is so wonderful. All of it. But in my increasing old age, I find it harder and harder to read 5 screens worth of densely packed text with no paragraph breaks.
Stephen, you are one of my Gods. But can you please break up your text a bit more with some white space here and there?
Signed,
Your acolyte.
November 10th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Brilliantly said, Mr. Fry.
A lot of people don’t understand that language is always evolving, and that that is precisely why it can be as useful and beautiful as it is.
Still, I do find misplaced apostrophes annoying. But then I proofread form letters as part of my day job, so I can’t help being a little pedantic now and then.
November 10th, 2008 at 11:48 am
I read this in something quite obscure and thought it was quite apt.
“One word will create a thousand pictures for a thousand men; No one man can ever hope to frame it”
The Grammar’s probably terrible,but I have never got my head around it. Perhaps this stresses the point.
November 10th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Lovely language, but a little more paragraphing might make it more legible on screen.
(Also, elegant implementation of Wordpress. It’s a real showpiece for WP.)
November 10th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Amen, amen.
And can I nominate the half-cousin of the linguistic pedant’s facism for the hall of shame - the “I KNOW WHY THAT WAS FUNNY” laugh…
I sincerely believe that 95% of school children’s first encounter with Shakespeare is ruined because the first time an actor proclaims an archaic quip, the theatre erupts into that horrific, slightly louder than it really needs to be gleeful “ma ha ha ha” noise.
This noise only ever emanates from intellectual snobs who feel a need to let everyone around them know that, whilst lesser mortals may not understand the nuance of that particular joke, “I DO”.
To the kid on the school-trip, whose household hasn’t spent Sunday afternoons reciting poetry over the dinner table, the immediate reaction is more than likely to be “OK - I didn’t get that, whilst all these fusty old folks did. Ergo, there is something wrong with me. Ergo, I’ll never ‘get’ Shakespeare”.
ALL snobbery is an attempt to belittle another human and to exclude from a particular “club”. Language, music, art, drama, dance - we all have a right to participate and to contribute to their evolution. Beware the cretins at the gate who try to bar access through their snobbery.
PS - For perhaps the most depressing example of the “I know why that is funny” laugh, google a video of an audience ‘reacting’ to a performance of that John Cage 3:47 piece (no, I can’t be bothered to google the correct title….).
November 11th, 2008 at 2:47 am
Having just read this, then read an american blog talking about “math”, it just has to be said. It’s “maths”. Very rarely do you only do one sum at a time, you do multiple.
Also, I have to agree with the “haitch” thing. My name is Harry. Originally born in Edinburgh, at a young age, I moved to Essex, where “haitch” is used to such an extent that I wanted to move. To make matters worse, when pronouncing my name, the people I knew insisted in dropping the “haitch” to call me, “‘arry”.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:25 am
I suggest the following to eliminate this kind of prescriptivism:
1) Compile a list of prescriptivist rules, no matter how silly or dishonest. I imagine that the Plain English folks (http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/) would be more than willing to provide such a list.
1) Invent a personal device that emits a loud, obnoxious noise whenever the user breaks these rules. Perhaps a silent but sharp electric shock may be better, provided that it has the same effect–the emitting of a loud obnoxious noise from the user.
2) Have the prescriptivists wear this device everywhere they go.
I’m not necessarily opposed to prescriptivists–but I do think it unfair that they get to wield their prescriptivism when it suits them. The device would take care of that. If this device were around in 1946, Orwell would not have written this line in “Politics and the English Language”: “Look back through this essay, and for certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults I am protesting against.”
Perhaps he would not have written it at all.
November 11th, 2008 at 7:38 am
I know that raspberry wine exists, because I have a carboy in my crawlspace. Not only have I made raspberry wine, I have purchased it from professional vintners.
In general, if it’s a fruit containing sugar, you can probably ferment it, with varying degrees of success.
And if you claim that “raspberry wine” is not a subset of “wine”… well, I think you have already described people who do such things to words.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Thought you (who?) might like this from George Eliot:
“We learn words by rote, but their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.”
A truly masterful use of the colon.
November 11th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
@Pelly:
Sadly, “Telepresence” is taken. It is the marketing name of a video-conferencing product/service from a well-known communications hardware company (which I hesitate to advertise). It recently got some conspicuous placement on a US TV program (which I decline to plug) about forensic scientists in New York City.
On the other hand, I can offer an alternative exegesis of SCUNT: Surveillance Camera Ubiquitous National Tracking. No? Ah well.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
A quick post-script to my previous post…. One of my favourite quotes (heard from Melvin Bragg, although i’m not sure of it’s exact provenance… shall we perhaps attribute it to Michael Fish?) -
“Snobbery is the wearisome badge of authority worn by those desperate to be different but without the talent or imagination to be truly distinctive”
How much more refreshing to have a society which encourages its members to run free with flights of fancy (even if they sometimes cross boundaries - Ross/Brand etc ad naus) than one which always seeks to condescend, to patronise and to censor.
Oh, and I will certainly be calling all CCTV cameras SCUNT UNITS in the future. Brings to mind my favourite (if perhaps apocryphal) parliamentary exchange…. Apparently a particularly insulted Australian MP who represented a rural constituency was heard to demand
“How dare he acuse me of such a thing? I’m a Country Member!”
To which his opponent took the despatch box, and quietly began his respones
“I do remember…..”
November 12th, 2008 at 12:37 am
Wonderful. It’s particularly glorious to discover that Stephen shares my dislike of the aspirated ‘aitch’. No, of course it shouldn’t matter, but it still makes my hair stand on end. And I have very long hair, so it’s a sight to behold.
Currently wading through a Pinker tome, so I’ll be sure to check out the Guy Deutscher book too. Many thanks, Mr. Fry.
November 12th, 2008 at 2:38 am
My knowledge of grammar and my use of punctuation are bad to middling, as my mother delights in reminding me. My spelling is passable; yet in these times of spell-checkers and drive-thru mega-marts I feel like a Cyclops in the land of the blind. It is easy to become bitter and cynical, bemoaning other’s stupidity whereas actually it is blissful ignorance.
However I then remind myself that all of that pretension is trivial in the face of my love of communication, for that is the function of language. Words can be beautiful in their own right, a well-turned phrase or word is a wonderful thing, and the distillation of a thought or emotion into a carefully chosen word is a joy. Yet the real importance for me is how well they communicate the emotion, the intent, and the idea of the writer. The tower of Babel ceased construction once the ability to communicate had been stripped away from its builders, and this provides a good illustration of how no significant human achievements could have be made without the originator of the idea being able to communicate their vision to others. Without this form of communication we would have been without the emotion of all the poets who have ever lived, and without the centuries-long discourse on scientific and philosophical ideas, which has been added to by each generation. Of course there are other ways of communicating: kisses and frowns, music and painting to name but a few, but while each convey a multitude of emotions and concepts in a moment, they cannot separate them, strip them down to their individual components, in the way language can.
So this is what we should be wary of losing, not the language itself but the ability to express ourselves fully. So many people today live frustrated lives, feeling misunderstood by the society they live in. Is this because we’re failing to equip them with the tools they need to express their innermost desires? Or is the problem that we cling so tightly to the old that our understanding of the new is stilted at best? I would suggest that anyone who has self-imposed shackles of elitism and snobbery instead focuses on the real issue: how can we communicate with the people around us?
Maybe it’s a matter of equipping others, maybe it’s a matter of simply listening with a real desire to understand: most likely the truth lies somewhere in between. Either way words are building blocks with which we can help to construct a bridge into the hearts and minds of others, and I really hope and pray that that sense of importance (and joy) in communication is never lost - no matter what form it takes.
Lastly, as proof that I really do love words for their own sake, here is something I created purely for my own amusement:
Please gather round and pay heed to my tale
Of that extraordinary creature,
The striped vengeance snail
This small gastropod with a shell on its back
Has rage in its heart and a desire to attack
Its anger unbridled, its temper extreme
Nobody knows what has made it so mean
Maybe the years of pent-up fear
Each time a giant foot treads near
Whatever reason, when it sees us - its prey
Its rage is unleashed and a chase underway
With a subsonic snarl and a miniature roar
It races along with its foot to the floor
(Of course you see for the sake of the narrative, when I say ‘race’ I’m being comparative. Compared to a rock or a tree it is speedy, but in your or my sight its pace is quite weedy)
Like a slime-powered steam train on miniature scale
It’s a miniscule Ahab, chasing his whale
In its mind a vision of huge crushing feet
A victim no longer, revenge will be sweet
Yet despite self claimed status: executioner and jury
This snail’s vendetta is an impotent fury
As aforementioned, its speed and its size
Are too insignificant to capture its prize
Each time it sees us the chase may be on
But when it gets where we stood, we’ve already gone
So next time you see one, please hurry on past
If you tarry too long it’ll catch you at last
And you may beg for mercy, but to no avail
For revenge has a name, and its name is:
Snail
November 12th, 2008 at 6:57 am
I think that it’s quite difficult for people with a pedantic sort of brain to switch it off; both my mother and my brother get easily irritated by apostrophes floating all about the place. Fortunately I have do not seem to have an active copy of the pedant gene. However, there is one pedantic bone in my body that aches when people misuse ‘literally’ or ‘ignorant’. I think it’s probably because they are both excellent words with very precise meanings that are used to mean things which already have perfectly good words to describe them.
It would be shame to lose their original meaning because I can’t think of other words that could replace them - how can I call someone ignorant without causing offense when I really do mean ignorant and not stupid?
November 12th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Of course in Welsh we have verbs that become nouns, the ‘berfenw’ (verbnoun), although that is of course a common enough feature of English as well, although Anglo-Saxons tend to insist that a word be either one or the other at any given time, never both.
November 12th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Hello Mr. Fry,
I just want to say that I do believe that language in fact is the “father of thought,” although I don’t really have the intellectual background to back this up except for my personal experience. I am a nineteen year old college student studying in the U.S.A. and English is not my native language. Although I’ve always been able to understand it really well, I’ve never had to speak English before I came here which I though wouldn’t be a problem since I had no trouble understanding it. However soon I found out that I actually had a lot of trouble expressing myself and putting ideas into words even when I was trying to say the simplest things. Then I also noticed that I was unable to come up with new thoughts and ideas for my classes, because I was lacking the words to formulate them in a meaningful way. I basically could not think in English which for me meant that I could not think at all. Just as Orwell suggested, the ideas in question were completely lost to me because I didn’t have those words in my lexicon. This frustrated me a lot since I had never had trouble expressing myself in my native language and I really love exchanging thoughts and ideas. I am only hoping that this will get better eventually. Until then I guess I will have to do only with a one-way exchange of thoughts and just continue to read your magnificent blessays, waiting for the day I will be able to express myself half as articulately as you can Mr. Fry.
Thank you so much for everything; you are a true inspiration to me.
November 13th, 2008 at 9:26 am
Words are the clothes we hang on meaning, make sure they fit.
November 14th, 2008 at 6:22 am
It has become clear that “ect” is now part of our language, as an abbreviation for “ecksetra”. They make me want to remove my own ears with a claw-hammer, but they are certainly here to stay.
I can’t prevent my own children from using them, and have come to realise that I probably shouldn’t try. At least my son understands that they are probably best not used in school work.
November 14th, 2008 at 8:08 am
Hmmmmm, I’d suggest, dear Stephen, that until you know the rules you can’t break them, and that to teach an elegant usage of English to everybody and then let them free to shape and reshape it, would be a fine idea.
I can have joy of language and consort with it and it with me and we can copulate wildly on every piece of paper in my office or indeed on any screen. But I don’t have to have a stick up my overeducated arse to do that. I do think you draw the lines (at length) rather too strictly…perhaps because you still fear criticism?
Well, yeah, so do I - but we’ll both have to put on our big girl panties and get over it.
November 14th, 2008 at 9:21 am
Hello Stephen and all,
I hope everyone is well and happy.
I have just enjoyed reading the this latest offering, and I must say it has definitely provided much food for thought. As part of an undergraduate degree in anthropology I took a course in cognitive anthropology. The debate between Chomsky’s theory and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were hotly debated then, and it seems nothing has changed.
I wasn’t convinced by Sapir-Whorf then and I don’t think I am now. Although, there are features that are very interesting. I think the very fact that every society has a symbolic language means that there is a definite biological need for for language, or else the capacity to use language wouldn’t have developed. Evolution would have retired it early had it been of no use. Another universal is that children the world over all, more of less begin to speak etc. at about the same time. Something switches on inside our heads at about the eighteen month mark. Nature determined that humans would start to speak at this age. It doesn’t matter what the language, just that there is a language. Take a baby from Iceland at birth and give it to an Australian Aboriginal family, when that baby reaches the right age it will learn to speak what ever dialect it’s adoptive parents speak. Why? Because its brain is hard wired to develop linguistic ability at that point. The sounds, that is the words, are in and of themselves meaningless until the individual learning them is capable of comprehending a whole series notions. Language is after all symbolic. The word dog has no direct, literal connection with a four legged, meat eating mammal. Saying the word dog to someone who has never seen a dog doesn’t tell them what that animal is. The collective representation of a dog must exist in that persons mind before they can use the word dog properly, or, more importantly understand what that word means. Likewise, the fact that there are hundreds of word in hundreds of languages that refer to what in English we call a dog, does not have any direct effect on what that animal is. A dog, is a dog, is a dog, no matter what you call it. If you see what I mean. So for me, thought must come before language. There must exist, in the collective consciousness a representation, an archetype, a thought of something before words can be hung upon it.
If anyone is interested an anthropologist named Chris Knight has been working on the evolution of language for more that a few years. He suggests that language developed directly out of ritual, which itself was initiated as a result of a biological imperative.
Blimey, haven’t I gone on for ages!
As we’re on the subject of language. What do you think, Stephan, about the PC fascists and the damage that they are doing to the English language? I mention this in light of Salisbury council banning its workers from using the phrase: Singing on the same hymn sheet? As in the councils view it may offend atheists. Perhaps this could be a topic for a posting or podcast.
Thanks,
Jason.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Perhaps “One Nation Under Surveillance” might have worked better. Or, if we wanted to be crass, “One Nation Under Plod”.
November 17th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Just wanted to thank you for this fun and inspirational look at language and words. It got me actually picking up a pen and writing again, for the love of writing, words and expression, and without a care for what other people think of it.
I saw a suggestion somewhere in the swarm of comments above this one, that you should write a book on writing more than just poetry. I just wanted to second, third and fourth the request! Please please do write it! I’d be first in queue to buy such a book, and it would go in my “must have with me at all times” book pile, along with The Ode Less Travelled.
Pretty please? x
November 17th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Very well put Stephen. I believe that those who feel language shouldn’t evolve and change as mankind grows and evolves are misguided and to some extent pompous since evolution, whether it be scientific or linguistic, is inevitable and necessary.
I have read your books, including ‘The Ode Less Travelled’ and would like to fifth the suggestion that you should write a book on writing and the evolution of the English language in general.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:23 am
While I am willing to accept changes in the language and agree it is in fact an enriching factor, this morning I raised my eyes heavenward at the CNN business anchor who informed us that” this action raised the decline of the market.” So it went up, down, or what one might ask. In the context of the day, I assume it probably went down. Still, shoddy use of the language, I thought.
On which came first thought or language, after years of study and teaching, I am still unsure. I am going to read “The Unfolding of Language” and see what G.D has to say.
I love this blog. Don’t ever stop!
November 20th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
I will freely admit that I get a little burst of endorphins, and I probably get a tell-tale smug look on my face, when I see that someone has used incorrect grammar or spelling in an official or obvious setting. I’ve almost learned my lesson though, not to share these moments with my friends and co-workers.
November 20th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
I just got to read this–actually, I should have read this the moment I saw the title. Now that I’ve finished it, I can’t wait to send a link to friends of mine who would love this post.
“The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got.”
Filipinos have been doing this for a LONG time. However, in our case, we’re doing it bilingually: we take a Filipino word or phrase and “Americanize” it (or Englishify it–whichever tickles your linguistic bone) into a noun or a verb. Case in point was a comic strip I chanced upon one day during the election period in the Philippines.
Guy 1: I hate the elections. All these politicians going about pretending to be the Messiah of the Philippines.
Guy 2: More like MESSIADS, actually.
Guy 1: LOL
Messiad is a play on the Filipino phrase “may sayad”, which means “crazy”.
Sadly, a lot of linguistic purists in the Philippines don’t like Taglish (Tagalog + English) very well. It’s either English or Tagalog or just shut up. Odd, considering that our main dialect happens to be a compendium of Spanish, Indo-Malay, and Chinese words.
And I’m also guilty of [automatically] correcting a few people with their mispronunciation of certain words. Habit I carried over from teaching, I’m afraid. :[
November 21st, 2008 at 6:52 am
I have the (bad?) habit of correcting the use of incorrect Dutch, especially when spoken or written by my children. I’m pretty sure they don’t like me doing so, and I think they are right. It’s just that some of these errors really work on my nerves. For example, the Dutch possessive pronoun “hun” is used as a personal pronoun. Just imagine someone saying “their are walking down the street” in stead of “they are walking down the street”. (difficult to translate the Dutch error : ‘hun lopen over straat” ). Johan Cruyff makes this error very often in his footbal commentary.
However, I’m aware that language evolves. So within a few decades, this error will be proper Dutch. Have to learn to live with this.
November 21st, 2008 at 7:53 am
I love bad grammar because it can be so damned funny. Take this classic howler from “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, in which a nuclear plant comes to life and advances along the bridge towards our heroine, Luisa Rey:
“Crossing the long, long bridge, the Swanneke B plant emerges from behind the older, greyer cooling towers of Swanneke A.”
Dangling participles don’t come much better than this.
November 23rd, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Great piece of writing. And although reflecting on language would be considered a futile task by most people, it is important to try to rescue the value of conscious use, not of grammar, but of our words and the worlds we can create with them. I don’t refer to the creation of fictional worlds, but to the day-to-day creation of worlds of meaning and beauty. If there’s an art I cherish, it is the art of conversation, of fleeting literature, of forgettable beauty. There are some things that can be said or heard only once, and we shouldn’t despair about the uniqueness of them, for there is also beatuy in forgetting. A spark can only be a spark once. And after that… silence meant to be broken. Besides, all things are forever unique every time we open our eyes to them.
I would like to relate that to something you wrote. Namely, the possibility of translating something into another language without irreparable loss. While we would need to ponder on the philosophy of translation (not to mention linguistic theories about the Saussurian dicotomy and semiological theories about meaning), I think the answer to that question is a simple two-letter no. There is irreparable loss in every act of speech, regardless of the language. You would have to be born again to understand my words perfectly. Furthermore, you would have to have lived my life, grown up speaking Spanish, and have read the words of a certain Stephen Fry on a Sunday morning. No, there’s no perfection in human communication. What makes art possible is the divergence of interpretations, that explosion of meanings that makes us grow and build and love and kill… and love.
November 25th, 2008 at 12:14 am
Jolly good article. Perhaps standarses are slipping, people may be cavalier about grammar and syntax but language is art and to coin the phrase most used in politics - ‘ you can’t bullshit a bullshitter’. I’m a glorious bum at the moment and watching Minder, the Sweeney and the Professionals on telly is fantastic fun. By comparing the vain attempt not to offend anyone that has pushed ‘management speak’ bollox to uses that I bet the authors don’t know what they’re gibbering.
Anyway, must go forward and interface through the proofing matrix with my kettle and a tab. Tinkety tonk.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:53 am
The symmetrical sound of this is very nice: “I linguify for a living!”
And I am pleased to discover that Wodehouse is one of the three Ws.
Incidentally, only the other day when I was describing the contents of “Laughing Gas” by Wodehouse to a friend, I thought “this sounds like a plot Stephen Fry would come up with”, and resolved to read it again as soon as I finish what I am currently reading.
November 25th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Ah, but it is wonderful when you go on, Stephen!
November 26th, 2008 at 12:24 am
When is the Podcaste Coming?
November 26th, 2008 at 7:30 am
So glad to read that you’ve seen the light. Especially as your QI persona so often gives Alan Davies a hard time whenever he slips up.
I think that Lynne Truss & her followers have done a terrible disservice to the cause of enjoyable communication. When we speak and write with empathy for the recipient, the better parts of grammar flow naturally and the more arcane rules can go hang.
One last thought, didn’t you use one of the characters in The Liar to issue a diatribe on your behalf on the subject of any noun can be verbized?
November 26th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Does the ‘S’ in ‘Scunt’ stand for secure?
November 26th, 2008 at 11:20 am
As in curation?
November 26th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Sick-cure, but that’s a word-game, so, so , pseudo-intellectual
November 26th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Rambunctious
November 26th, 2008 at 11:38 am
And otherwise un-orderly
November 26th, 2008 at 11:40 am
(I don’t actually know what rambunctious means)
November 26th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
I am rambunctious. I define it.
I commend to everyone a book I enjoyed greatly in college, called BABEL-17 by Samuel R Delaney, in which a language is used as a weapon. Wikipedia refers to the novel’s “implicitly Whorfian view of language”, which may take us down alternate theory paths of language.
November 27th, 2008 at 1:28 pm
This entry is so fantastic that I could write enough praise to stretch beyond the moon.
I must admit that I mumble bumble and stumble my way along language the same way I mumble bumble and stumble around my life, but oh how amazing they both are. I am often in wide-eyed shock over those who enjoy neither.
Also, “one nation under surveillance.”
November 28th, 2008 at 6:12 am
“Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss?”
Yes! That’s why I like you, and Wilde and Wodehouse and everyone else who plays with language. It’s why I love being bi(and a quarter)lingual, I can compare and revel in it. Did you know the chinese words for psychology and atheist mean “knowledge of the heart” and “not have theory of spirit person”, and that Norwegian has a special word for “weather where it’s appropriate to use the Blå Swix brand of ski wax?”
And we (Norwegians, that is) can’t use sentences like “…she said, lying through her teeth”.
November 28th, 2008 at 11:02 am
“So glad to read that you’ve seen the light. Especially as your QI persona so often gives Alan Davies a hard time whenever he slips up.”
I agree with every word!
November 28th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I think that when someone writes with incorrect grammar, it shows a lack of understanding of the process of language. For example, the confusion of ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ shows that someone has no idea what a pronoun is, or at least what differentiates them. To come at the creation of texts as pleasure, it is first necessary to understand the basics of language. Painters must first learn to draw before the challenge boundaries like Picasso. In the same way, you must know the rules of language before you break them. When this occurs, it becomes a conscious act, a blurring of boundaries, and there is suddenly an element of defiance, or at least some intentional meaning belying whatever grammatical transgression has occurred. It is the linguistic exploits of a master rather than the blind attempts of an ignorant person which truly enable us to derive pleasure from language.
However, I do agree that pedants who cannot see beyond corrections are misguided. I proudly carry a sharpie for the many necessary sign corrections but that does not mean that I don’t appreciate language, I think it means that it increases my appreciation.
November 29th, 2008 at 6:55 am
Like many who Twitter and use SMS I am prone to ignoring classical grammar and spelling, but I had to laugh with appreciation when I read Simon Heffer’s irate email to Daily Telegraph journalists on the correct use of English. I love particularly live his repeated insistence that the newspaper is not the Daily Star. I was wondering where all the tits were.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/28/simon-heffer-daily-telegraph
November 30th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Stephen, on the one hand I think you’re barking mad and on the other, a brilliant purveyor of what it means to love the sound of language. By barking mad, I mean that you, in a sea of those who would disagree with you given half a chance, dare to be an iconoclast. You’re also not a snob, which I am very, very gratified to find out. Always liked your acting but now I get to immerse myself in the other things that interest you.
I AM a snob about language but only in one way; that people don’t care enough to educate themselves to the possibilities. Right now I work at a University and the conversations I hear as I walk about nearly drive me to tears, or my head to explode. You see, we are not all granola-eating surfer dudes and valley girls here. There is no excuse for using the simile “like” (… “and I’m all like, fuck no, I’m not going out with him, like no way, like can you believe that?!!” urgh) to replace other forms of speech in everyday conversation. I love quips, colloquialisms, turns of phrase, but when you are at a university with libraries and knowledge all around you and you’re studying something of worth, ostensibly, why don’t you try expanding your boundaries of discourse!! And even if you don’t have the advantage of a wealthy family, there are these things called public libraries here. They’re full of books, I understand, where you can go lose yourself for hours on end and read your ass off.
True, I am not the typical Californian. In junior high school I was reading at practically college level. But reading for me was an escape from my family life and pretty much the only thing that saved my life and sanity. But it pains me to hear these young people mangling meaning and dumbing themselves down (not to mention middle-aged people who STILL talk that way). This, to me, is not embracing the full scope of what language can mean, sound, taste, and feel like.
You said it best in your essay: “Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it?” Words are beautiful. I wish people would use more of them.
~~ T
November 30th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
I’m clearly destined to have to contact Radio 4 as a pedantic, linguistic facist. I’m fully from the prescritivist “fewer” rather than “less” group (I blame my mother for that). But, that aside your diatribe is an excellent read.
The newer meaning of the word “meld” has a lot to do with Gene Roddenberry and Leonard Nimoy, it was clearly the Vulcan Mind Meld that served to steer the definition towards it’s current meaning.
I’m hoping that the word (or more correctly acronym) “scunt” will soon enter the OED. That should cause some trouble with Internet profanity filters in just the way that the poor residents of Scunthorpe suffer at the hands of the net nannies.
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Okay, there’s a useful distinction in there that I’d like to keep hold of. I am a PhD student and my supervisor’s written English is… well, that’s the problem, defining what’s wrong with it. He sends out emails full of typos and misspellings. If I send him written work or a paper, it comes back rewritten in a way that makes me want to take an axe to him. What I get twitchy about is the poor spelling and the misused words, because they’re easy to point to, but I also don’t like to see myself as a letter-writing language pedant and in normal life I let these things slide because it doesn’t matter. It matters more in a paper that’s going in a scientific journal so no-one thinks I’m being petty for wanting to get it right there, but I want to correct all his emails and random communications too because, well, after reading this I think it’s just his attitude to English that appalls me. He doesn’t care for it, he doesn’t understand that other people do and the only care he will take with it is to try and make anything academic sound like other academic English must sound to him; full of big words and stuffy constructions. Some of the best and most useful scientific papers I’ve come across have been written clearly and simply and I’d like to follow that style, but he will change a clear and simple sentence because to him it doesn’t sound *clever* enough. Which I wouldn’t mind as much if he wasn’t incompetent with English. He adds the word ‘respectively’ to the end of every list because that’s what goes on the end of scientific lists, isn’t it? regardless of how many times I have explained to him when it’s necessary. He doesn’t believe that I could have a better idea of how to use English than he does because he assumes that everyone else must be bluffing at least as much as he does.
The question is, does anyone know how to inspire him, or any of the other people who don’t, to give a toss?
December 3rd, 2008 at 12:21 am
Nice text! I completely agree with you.
A very interesting book on language change (also for non-linguists) is ‘Language Change: Progress or Decay?’ by Jean Aitchison.
An even more interesting book is ‘Het Einde van de Standaardtaal. Een wisseling van Europese taalcultuur’ by Joop van der Horst (linguist at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium). Sadly it’s only available in Dutch. The title in English would be something like ‘The End of the Standard Language. A Change of European Culture of Language’. His main point is that this period is a period of transition: we are going from a Renaissance viewpoint to something different. It’s only the last century that we have been living the end of the Renaissance. In his book, he gives a lot of evidence supporting that idea. A great read. He has received a lot of criticism for this book, mostly from pedants.
(PS: sorry for my English, I’m no native speaker :))
December 4th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Interesting. The dusty tales sat atop the bookshelf shall be brought out once again; as for the Chekov - Amazon.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Many moons ago I listened to a song on the car radio. One line ended something like, “…this minute”, and my brain went straightaway in overdrive. What word could possibly finish the following line and rhyme with ‘minute’? Then it came, “A box with 20 roses innit”. I had to pull over because I was crying with laughter. Language is wonderful. And, in my opinion, the English language is so much more versatile than my mothertongue, Dutch. Shorter words, more to the point, kneadable, adaptable… It regularly happens that I read a word, sentence, parapraph, and I just have to read it again, because it tastes so good. Recent exemple: ‘The Road’, by McCarthy.
December 6th, 2008 at 8:43 am
Thanks for that Stephen. I’ve not commented before now because….well, I’ve just felt out of my depth; out of my element.
Put me on a forum talking about how the sodium salt of R-Lipoic acid (Na-Rala) promotes healthy blood glucose, by reducing glucose tolerance and increasing insulin sensitivity etc etc….and I’m in my element. But to leave a comment on one of your blessays? It’s would be less daunting trying to outshine that Amstell fella on Buzzcocks….with Russel Brand as the guest Captain.
Well, that was up until I read this rollercoaster ride of a Blessay. You know, I think I actually let out a few yelps of delight along the way!
Thanks for the emboldening. A room full of Rembrandts, Dalis and Picassos, will always need a Pollock in the corner.
Scunts. Haha.
December 8th, 2008 at 5:53 am
I, too, believe that language should be allowed to evolve, meanings of words change and new words invented and/or adopted from foreign languages. That’s what’s made English great.
I worked in France for a couple of years and the French, of course, have l’Academie francaise which is supposed to protect the French language against Anglicisation. Whenever an English word threatens to entrench itself they invent an all-new French alternative and enforce it’s use in public communcations, signs, etc. which is why they have le stationnement instead of le parking(once common) and l’ordinateur instead of le computer(I still hear the French say this in preference though).
One day, in the French company I was working for, we had a meeting in French to discuss the new version control system we were going to use - VCS allow you store the evolving versions of computer files and recall old versions if needed, etc. With VCS you “check” files in and out of the system as required. The woman giving the talk in French started to use the words “checkiner” and “checkouter” much to the amusement of all concerned who’d never heard these brand new French verbs before;). L’Academie would not have been amused but was a good example of the evolution of the French language in the modern age;).
Myself is, however, partial to a “not bad, how’s yourself” in response to the usual “how are you?” Not sure where I picked the habit up. Think it’s an Irish thing;): http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/27/news/edsafire.php
December 8th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Just spotted my “it’s” instead of “its”. Mortified and in a blog about pedantic apostrophism too;). Blush. It was a typo, honest;).
December 21st, 2008 at 11:01 am
You know, I could listen to you talk about language all day, Stephen. Or read you write about it, if you know what I mean. Words, written in particular, have always been a passion of mine and you seem to use them to their fullest potential. I can only compare reading your words with reading sheet music… in my head I can hear the words flow over each other in their own melody. Such a joy!
December 24th, 2008 at 12:18 am
I’ve just listened to your podgram version of your blessay and found it to be very interesting and eye-opening, in particular when you talked about the clumsiness of “CCTV”.
I think another sort of sinster phrase which suffers from this is “Reality TV” or “Reality Television”. I’ve been trying to think of better ways to say it and my first thought was “Bazalgette”.
I too find pedants deeply annoying. I work on Wikipedia and while the vandalism is annoying, the pedantry is just as if not more annoying. You think you have written the perfect article, and then someone tells you that you have used the wrong “There”. It so bloody infuriating.
December 24th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Stephen, Callum Robson here, long time listener/reader(ish), first time typer/replier to a blog (etc)…I read the blog and listened to your podgram at the same time … fantasic stuff! What must be said, is your way of speaking/writing (more the former, so to speak) is like an continuous onomatapeia, so colourful, so full of life, it would bring ‘pleasure’ to any reader/listener.
You are indeed right, when it comes to enjoying language/words. I am fascinated by some of the ‘old language’ that has been lost, words like ’scrogglings’ (little apples), and defenestrate (to throw (someone) out of window), how did these end up becoming extinct?. In saying that, words are ‘abstract’ in themselves, so unlike the dinosaur, ”extinct words” have the possibility to return…some day…
Articulation for the nation.
Express yourself without compromise…
Callum
December 29th, 2008 at 12:18 am
Very interesting stuff there. I wonder how the actual sound of words, the phonology of them, could perhaps be related to the meaning. This is probably moving into the rather obscure realm of psycho linguistics, but could it be possible, as you suggested with the lovely SCUNT example, that if a word sounds nasty, then we interpret its meaning as nasty. For example, take the word, i dont know, Noodle. Lots of lovely soft vowels, the two syllables merging easily into each other. So noodles, even if they were poisonous, seem rather nice. Whereas words like Grit or SCUNT have more fricatives, plosives, consonants which you spit out contemptuously, syllables that are fired out and fragmented from each other, to highlights their nastiness. Just a thought, it would of course be interesting to hear anyones ideas on it.
anyway, lovely stuff, keep it up.
January 3rd, 2009 at 3:28 am
I am a great fan of yours, Mr. Fry. I have watched as many of your sketches as I have been able to find and have been a subscriber to your podcasts almost since you began recording and webcasting them and this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to point something out to you. In reading, listening to or watching anything of yours, I always enjoy exploring the avenues of thought that you set my mind upon and usually enjoy you and your work without the need to tell you all about it.
I agree with the most of your argument about how the obsession with the rules of the English language can detract from its effectiveness and the distinct individuality its “parole” can have and some “protecting” is simply unnecessary shit-stirring done by people with no lives. But, when you compared people who turn nous into verbs to great contemporary composers, I struggled to believe that you could be so unreasonable in argument.
My personal qualm with people who turn nouns into verbs, is the fact that they generally do so out of sheer laziness and only wish to get their message across with as little effort as possible. Of course, there could also be beauty in this efficiency, but it does not match (for instance) Stravinsky’s motives for writing atonal music. He did so in an active and rebellious attempt to explore new possible ways of self-expression, whereas the average person only turns lunch into “do lunch” or “lunching” because they can’t be bothered to waste their precious breath on forming a complete sentence.
I have lived in French-speaking Switzerland for nearly twelve years now and I’m afraid my sensitivity to this sort of shortening has only been heightened by my constant exposure to young French-speakers who have the insatiable need to abbreviate any word they use frequently: “Sarkozy” has become “Sarko”, “Adolescent” has become “Ado”, “Bolognaise” has become “Bolo”.
Thankfully, your podcast has made me realise that I may be becoming one of your so-called Radio 4 listeners at age 17. None the less, I still find your comparison preposterous.
I am passionately in love with both literature and music and I appreciate freaky free-verse modern poetry just as much as I appreciate well-ironed classical poetry. As an extremely young and green composer, I also find great satisfaction in writing and listening to music that obeys the rules of harmony and uses them cleverly, just as I find great pleasure walking in the shadows of Shostakovitch and Shoenberg. By no means would I reject any worthwhile artistic movement, but Mr. Fry, please don’t go so low as to say that people are actively trying to start some sort of revolution of the English language in the same way the great contemporary composers did with modern music.
Thank you for your time, deeply thoughtful work and brilliant comedy and wit.
With gratitude and admiration,
Jamie
January 4th, 2009 at 4:35 am
The quotation, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say,” cited in the Language podcast made me wonder if Stephen knows the wonderful essay by Heinrich von Kleist called “On the Gradual Production of Thoughts while Speaking,” An English translation is available in a collection of Kleist’s Selected Writings edited by David Constantine. He probably does and can probably read it in the original German, but, if not, it might just be his cup of red zinger.
January 4th, 2009 at 6:12 am
More than anything - inspiring! You make me want to write despite my numerous technical flaws. It gives me courage - as a non-native speaker - to dare, invent, ‘meld’ and twist this tongue into something new, odd, exciting and, perhaps ridiculous. Thank you so much for this!
January 7th, 2009 at 11:20 am
You certainly have a wonderful grasp on communication, as is evidenced by your truly excellent blog pages… I am becoming a fan of your masterly skill with the written word!
I was pretty much awestruck by your use of the marvelous english language the way you grab it by the scruff of the neck and make it WORK for you too (ref `A Little Touch of Fry and Laurie)
A thoroughly interesting blog: thank you!
January 10th, 2009 at 9:26 am
I probably wouldn’t listen to Stephen talk all day about language - there is only so much decoration I can bear and you really can have too much sugar in your syntax - but he canters through the touchpoints at a decent pace and in doing so raises enough to make us re-engage, so he’s done us a service. Thank you. Perhaps the dynamics and inate physics - as Pinker covers them elsewhere - of the way we learn and use language would have been another interesting point, but who’s counting?
However what has surprised me is that the texture and mouthfeel and reference points of the CCTV example hasn’t provoked the obvious reaction: that the natural thing for those that wish to promote the protective and feel-good nature of CCTV is to find a much less mechanical and harsh name. You always know the intention of the writer by their terminology. Stephen takes a privacy-oriented viewpoint so chooses SCUNT which I think is clumsy and unusable in common speech by anybody except the up-themselves brigade. Petrol stations want you to know you’re being watched so use a phrase that makes you know that you won’t get away with driveaway theft. Shops (and malls and so on) typically draw a middle ground between protection and deterrence so call them security cameras. I might, or might not, choose to call them, oh, I don’t know, “people information reference devices”, or PIRDs. Or something equally soft. There’s a new PIRD on the corner and it’s stopped me worrying about going out for a loaf of bread late at night. I wonder what Jackie in “Red Road” would use?
As my daughter says in her biog on poemhunter.com, “words can change the world”. Individually, or in phrases. You don’t even have to get them right. Ich bin ein Berliner. But would today’s media have taken him to pieces for that as a gaffe, or recognised the common humanity that lay behind it?
All of which, to end on a more trivial note, lets me use my favourite linguistic term to describe the thing we agree on: pedant me no pedantacisms. Which is not only a neologising imperative retort straight from what, C17?, but indeed the conversion of a noun to a verb and probably mixing up all kinds of other things while I’m doing it. Fun, isn’t it?
January 12th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
As to the question of which came first, the language or the thought, I have only anecdotal evidence to present. I have one distinct memory of being a baby. There were white wicker walls around me, something with sprigs of blue flowers, a dark window and the sound of crickets. I was far to young to have the words that represented these observations, or even the concept of anything other than to feel what I felt, which is to say a distinct feeling of loneliness.
This, to me, demonstrates that the thought came first. I am not disagreeing that the human mind is designed to absorb language like a hungry sponge, especially at first, but that only makes it incredibly difficult to imagine what it was like without it. If only you could forget the Narrator, that chattering commentary that is a construct of your memory and imagination, if you could, in effect, switch all your brain off except the baser instinct, all that would be left would merely be a howl, a grunt, a whimper. But of course, this, in itself, IS language. As is a facial expression, the comfort of taking a hand gently, the release of built-up air in your lungs. Language is more than just words. Which is, of course, why I sound so pompous and pretentious to everyone else who reads this!
As to English, have you ever noticed with the blurb on the back of shampoo bottles, international packaging and the like that English is the most often shortest entry? We have so many different words and influences that we can pick and choose the shortest to fit the space available (hence 10 items or less, perhaps?) and still get the message across. This forces other languages to use a very different texture and many more words to create the same effect. For example the incredibly over-stuffed phrasing of French love-songs.
Finally I would like to submit to all that one of the most fascinating languages I have seen, to date, is Japanese. Not the spoken language… but the written. The spoken can be almost devoid of inflection, and yet the written seems to be where they stored all layers of meaning, puns, misdirection and wit. Of course, that is from the point of view of a gaijin, and one not very good with the language at all!
x
January 13th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
I think anyone who attacks the tranformation of nouns to verbs on general principle is deluded, but I don’ t think it can be argued that the practice is never objectionable, that ‘evolving’ the language (intransitive to transitive is another awkward one, but I digress :P) is always desirable. But, to use an entirely unfair analogy, in the right circumstances a creature could evolve to be blind, deaf, crippled and listless.
Greater expressiveness is wonderful, after all, and there’s always room for more words, with entertaining specificness or subtlely differing connotations. Like nickb123, I’m a great fan of Joss Whedon; his neologisms have a wonderful vitality and aid expression.
But so many neologisms, particularly of the noun-to-verb kind, that we see today are bureaucratic euphemisms which have a sort of eerie dehumanising vibe about them. I remember just recently reading, on a poster for the film ‘Man On A Wire’, the exhortation to “maximise the uplift” by seeing it on a big screen. No strict neologisms, and I might be alone in getting this feeling, but isn’t that a weirdly emotionally null phrase? It embodies the sort of connotation I have with many neologisms. If I have to choose between words with a richly textured connotational tapestry (cliche, that’s another issue for another day >_>) and those which exude a dull, bureaucratic sort of flatness I’d unhesitatingly choose the former. It’s because of a love for the poetry of language that I’m sometimes irked by its abuse.
That said, with regard to “One nation under CCTV”, I think that very same effect works in its favour — the final staccato is like nails into the coffin of the original phrase which it is already undermining through sense. Form follows function or something like that. ‘SCUNT’, to me, would just result in a perverse anticlimax, while ‘CCTV’ has a sort of monotony that fits the idea it describes. It’s interesting, though, to think about the phrases and poems that don’t and won’t exist or have power on the sole basis of how we represent the concepts they involve.
January 13th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
More briefly, I think that the kind of person who corrects split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences cares a lot more about being right than about language, but that there are nevertheless good reasons to object to the liberties taken by some with language and the ubiquity of such liberties. If Orwell’s Newspeak really did become the primary mode of communication, wouldn’t we have lost something?
January 13th, 2009 at 9:31 pm
And if you’re posting two times in a row, why not three. tjo, I don’t believe “Ich bin ein Berliner” was a gaffe, I gather that’s just an urban myth. But then again, I wouldn’t put it past contemporary media to tear someone to pieces for an imagined gaffe, so it’s a moot point.
January 15th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
I signed up just to say how enjoyable I found this entry (that’s what she…..nevermind!).
I distinctly remember being taught in school (in Ireland) to pronounce it ‘haitch’. Oddly enough, I also remember the only reason given was that “the English pronounce it ‘aitch’”.
Strange.
January 18th, 2009 at 6:42 am
Just listened to the Language Podgram, thought I’d offer a few quotes in response to the question ‘Is language the father of thought’
In ‘The Doors of Perception’ Aldous Huxley discusses the theory that the brain and senses are eliminative. That we are capable of knowing so much more, but in order to deal with the information we receive through our senses we developed language and conscious thought systems. Huxley suggests that we are
simultaneously the beneficiary and the victim of our linguistic tradition. ‘The beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness [and as such] it bedevils his sense of reality.’ He goes on to say that in the far reaches of the mind we operate outside of a system of conceptual thought. Baudrillard acknowledges this possibility, when asked what status he accords to thought he gives two possibilities, ‘imagine that it plays a regulative role… by creating around us a rational configuration, an imagining of the world in which the species can find its own reflection. Then it would have a positive mirror function, and would contribute to an informing of the world…Or, alternatively, it’s a challenge, a trap for reality to fall into, a way of moving more
swiftly to the end,.. whatever that is.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein did not believe that the unsayable should be rejected out of hand either. as he explains ‘The things we [can] not talk about [are] the ones that really matter… My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’
January 22nd, 2009 at 5:49 am
I don’t have to like new words Mr Fry. Some are spotty butt ugly.
I can moan about Americanisms if I want to. I can also moan about snobs who sneer at ’semi educated losers’.
Have you “diarized” your weekend yet? Sounds like you’re planning to pass abnormal amounts of urine…
January 24th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Language can be fun, if a little distracting. After watching a repeat showing of QI last night, I kept myself awake for a few moments longer than I had hoped, puzzling over anagrams of each of the contestants’ names. I’m no anagram-meister, nor do I have the calculating capacity of a computer-powered anagramiser – hence, I came up with:
Alan Davies – Advise anal
Jo Brand – Dr Banjo
Clive Anderson – Scone and liver
Vic Reeves – Verse vice
Stephen Fry – Frys pet hen
Hardly imaginative, I know, but mildly satisfying.
Tonight I shall have to make up for the minutes of sleep lost.
January 27th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
And now, for our collective lingual enjoyment, I have flipped through my dictionary and written these fun-to-say-aloud words as a mock post:
kinematics epoch humdrum quisling rambunctious nibble octamerous thistle loblolly salutatory xanthoma veterinary jambalaya helical pavilion fallacious chinchilla brawl peculiarity
now wasn’t that a giggle?
January 28th, 2009 at 6:29 am
I have posted a reasoned response at http://areyouhappynownormanmailer.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/say-what/.
You got me thinking, which is something of a gift you have. Thanks.
January 30th, 2009 at 7:25 am
I’m generally with you on the idea that we must be open to the evolution of language, despite my pedantic instincts. However, I would be interested to hear your thoughts on an evolutionary strand that riles me enormously, and that is the playground use of the word ‘gay’ to mean, in essence, ‘inferior’.
I can’t abide it, and I think it’s more than evolution; it’s an insidious scrap of hate. To me this is more than a question of language. It is, perhaps, politics. But I know people who say that the use of ‘gay’ to mean ‘inferior’ should be seen as completely separate from the word ‘gay’ meaning ‘homosexual’, even if the origin of the new meaning is tied to the old. I can’t stomach the usage in my presence. I’ve rowed with friends about it.
I appreciate the irony, of course, that it should be the word ‘gay’ that lies at the heart of this question, given that there is still a dying breed who take offence at the idea of ‘gay’ being co-opted to mean ‘homosexual’.
January 30th, 2009 at 11:08 am
Your interest in the subject, Mr. Fry, is almost, but not quite, exhausting. Given your obvious voraciousness for insight into language, may I suggest the work of my father, Dell Hymes, and his contemporaries on the topic of langauge and culture?
As Chomsky’s cult of scientific linguistics gradually loses its cachet, I hope many will notice its inherent helpfulness to utilitarian and de-humanizing ideologies, so oddly at variance with Chomsky’s public politics. I also hope that some few might discover the rich body of work about language and its socio-cultural meaning, in its original forms, before and behind the Deborah Tannen style popularizations.
Language is no one’s property, and everyone’s. Every act of linguistic creation, however humble, is a form of conversation with the language itself, and between the language and its social environment. In some way, it’s magic, or at least alchemy.
Fun site, thanks for your work. I still laugh at the pompous linguist of the Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch every time I see it.
February 7th, 2009 at 1:15 am
Why not simply Surveillance TV (STV)? Then we could call them Stevies! Have you been Stevied?
February 27th, 2009 at 10:59 pm
So… pretty…
*linguistic ferret-shock*
Ahem. Having finally battled through my admiration of the prose to interpret what was actually said, I both agree and disagree.
A certain amount of agreed-upon structure is necessary; one can’t just pile words in any old older and expect people to understand it. Language is for communication, whether of the time for tomorrow’s meeting or the feeling at the moment butterfly emerges from chrysalis; anything that impedes that conveyance of ideas from mind to mind is to be shunned.
Thus I couldn’t give a toss whether something is ‘less’ or ‘fewer’; the meanings are equivalent, less a little pedantry, and both are understood easily, immediately. But a misplaced apostrophe jars, makes me pause, drops me out of the meeting of minds to staring at marks on paper (or indeed a screen) to unravel the meaning that is meant from the one that is written.
Language should not jar, save where it is intended to jar. It should not mislead, save where it is intended to mislead. Somewhere between straitjacket and anarchy is the perfect balance; only everybody disagrees about exactly what it is.
March 15th, 2009 at 4:52 am
I blame my history teacher from school. Mrs Phillips (or Flo as she was affectionately and fearfully known) would regularly warn us of the dire consequences should we refer to a ’secret ballot’ in any history essay dealing with whatever piece of legislation she might happen to require of our form.
There are few phrases that cause me great angst other than the terrible ‘This door is alarmed’ but journalists reference to secret ballots will send me away muttering.
Oh the damage caused by well meaning parents and teachers…
March 23rd, 2009 at 9:54 am
Surely there exists the distinction between spoken and written language. A point to ponder: being a native English-speaker (should one hyphenate there?) I tend to English as a written langauge.
Without wanting to offend anyone I am prone to describe langauge in terms of purpose. For opera then Italian. For romance, French or Spanish. For direct purpose and order, German. For literature, English. “There can be no whitewash at the Whitehouse.” But there can and has been. For political and public idiocy then Bush-speak and HRH Philip-isms are close to gold medal winners.
We, as English speakers (satisfy both hyphenated and non-hyphenated camps), have the most florid language at our tongue or finger tip. It is only when set down on paper that it appears to be at its least attractive. Grammar and syntax aside, the prolific use of ‘textspeak’ in place of full language is not a thing I care to adopt. A second point to ponder: do non-English-speakers (full, un-neccessary hyphenation) butcher their written word when SMS-ing?
A short response as I am about to dash off to lunch…or should that be hyphenate?
March 27th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
The English language and I have always had a sort of love-hate relationship. On one hand I find it very hard and most times impossible to fit my thoughts into the crude little boxes that are words. On the other hand I love the story that every word holds, and the more complex the word the more interesting.
I am a synesthete (a condition, incidentally, that I remember you mentioning on Qi) so every letter and thus every word has a color for me. This makes writing a beautiful experience, because in my mind each plain black letter is surrounded by a warm glow of the appropriate color. Because of this I find just thinking about words (’handling’ them if you will) more enjoyable than writing with them, since writing is frustrating, as I mentioned.
What you say about translating languages and contrasting them struck a chord: I’m getting closer and closer to fluency in French and as I do I really begin to see the familiar meanings of words in a totally different context — I’ve stopped translating in my head to English and just let the French word trigger the meaning directly. It’s amazing, when you realize that some languages are just made for saying certain things better than others, and I’m really fascinated by the whole culture-language tie in: for instance the Eskimo tribe that has many many meanings for different kinds of snow, since it’s such a centerpiece of their culture, vs. a language originating in a warm climate that might not have even one word for it. And obviously, this example is only on the most basic level and there’s potential for even deeper investigation…
That makes me think too — is there one language that is more suited to a certain individual’s writing/thinking style? There are certainly languages where the words seem more like what they mean for me: Yiddish, for example, though I only know a few words in it, has always really resonated with me, whereas Spanish seems totally counterintuitive. It’s comforting, I think, to think that there’s a language out there that is more or less tailored for me… if only I can find it.
March 29th, 2009 at 11:33 am
(heaving a deep sigh) Well, I suppose it falls to me to be the curmudgeon. At least it gives me an excuse to use the word “curmudgeon,” which is always fun.
Yes, I am one of those people who snickers at misplaced apostrophes, who winces at phrases like “between he and I,” who cares deeply about the pronunciation of “nuclear.” One of *those people*–those you’ve lambasted here as killjoys who don’t truly care about language, but only about being right–your premise apparently being that if we truly loved the language and felt any sort of joy in it, we wouldn’t waste our time picking at linguistic nits. To be frank, this accusation wounded me to the quick, particularly coming from someone like you, whom I’ve always looked on as rather a kindred spirit–someone to whom language is at once a marvelous plaything, a noble cause, and a trusted friend.
With all due respect, Mr. Fry, it’s precisely because I *do* love language in general and the English language in particular, and I *do* take joy in it, that it bothers me so much to hear it mauled about. Yes, yes, I understand that language is constantly evolving, and it’s not merely futile but counterproductive to try and keep it fixed at some arbitary point in its development that we’ve decided is more “correct” in its conventions than any other. But the language as it is right now, this minute, does have its conventions, and those who wantonly disregard them, to me, come across as disrespectful. Disrespectful to me, the listener, and also to the language itself. It hurts me, almost physically, when people spell everything phonetically and shove their punctuation marks in anyhow as if it didn’t really matter. It’s got nothing to do with clarity; usually (though not always) the meaning is more or less discernible under all the layers of rubbish. But as you pointed out yourself, language is far more than just a means of communication. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate” means roughly the same thing as “Gee, you’re cute,” but the way it’s said makes a difference.
Sure, you could argue that as long as the meaning comes across, it shouldn’t matter whether the conventions are observed. By the same token, you could argue that there’s nothing wrong with showing up to work in your pajamas, because they serve all the essential functions of clothing (keeping you warm and covering what you’d rather not show). But as you noted yourself, to do so would be inconsiderate, would imply “not caring.” And to my mind, using “infer” in place of “imply” (a specific example you cite as an inconsequential nit that people like me can’t resist picking) has just that same aura of laziness. “Yeah, infer, imply, whatever. I know there’s some difference between the two, but I can’t be bothered to remember what it is. I’ll just use whichever one I feel like at the time. People will know what I mean anyway, so who cares?”
Well, I care. I find this kind of linguistic sloppiness downright offensive. I think a glorious, rich, creamy, fattening language like English deserves more than a shrug of the shoulders and an “Oh, you know what I mean.” Yes, and I may know that my husband loves me, too, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care whether or not he says it in no uncertain terms.
And incidentally, the reason I object in so many cases to turning nouns into verbs is that usually there are already perfectly good verbs that mean the same thing. To use “impacted” when you mean “affected” strikes me as sheer bureau-corporate pretentiousness.
And now I must be off for my nightly ritual of sucking down prune juice and sneering at the local greengrocer.
June 7th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
where can i find out more about 150 wedding anniversary?