Stephen Fry, it is well to hear it.
I won’t lie; for all his delightful erudition it has sometimes been a slight pain for me that Stephen Fry has tended to evince a somewhat snobbish attitude towards language. The sword of diction cuts both ways, of course; the schoolboy pleasure with which he (and I as well) explains etymologies to his slightly less intellectual fellows on QI and chews through the pronunciation of foreign words is accompanied by a sort of persnicketiness and, well, Trussian superciliousness towards the same when they commit some travesty of misuse—or, and I know this well from my own schooling days—when they take some aggressively anti-intellectual stance, and on a quiz panel show, no less!
Anyway. Fry now, on a slightly unfocused but still quite enjoyable essay on language on his blog, takes direct aim at the self-appointed language mavens and usage experts about whom I have here bitched in the past, and it’s gratifying. It does seem that these folk are more prominent and more influential in England. I guess that ironic, dry, intellectual culture that we Americans love so much to delineate also bears within it a greater proportion of cranky, humorless, obnoxious people. Fry says, among many other things, this:
He goes on after this to squarely put his own emphasis on pleasure, and I am much gratified for it. For him the point of this is not communication, or correctness, or even art as much as pleasure; the unencumbered and unnumbered proliferation of idiolects and expressions.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?
That is a position that I have myself taken here at times, and I’m glad to hear it taken up in other places. I am, as my readers will know, not a linguist. I have a healthier-than-usual interest in the arts linguistic, and I think, a greater-than-average command of the facts and principles of the matter, but my interest and pleasure have always been more aesthetic than, say, the members of Language Log. And that’s sometimes a hard needle to thread. It seems like the bulk of aesthetic treatments of language tend towards the prescriptivist; that if one cares about and delights in the sound and substance of the stuff, in a way obviously inappropriate for academic study, then one tends much more often than not towards prescriptivism—towards a deep concern about the quality of one’s language, about its degradation, about its aesthetic quality and purity, and about its proper use. But Fry says,
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.
and I am inclined to agree. It’s a bit high-flown, of course, and the you-can-do-it populism has little shine for me (forgive the man; I am told he has just spent an extended period of time in America), but the important part there is the fierce assertion that language, in its naturally occuring form, in its variations and permutations (not warts and all, but with every shape of it and instance its own well-formed, legitimate standard), is beautiful, and it is already beautiful, and moreso ceases to be beautiful immediately upon being constrained and deformed by committee and focus group of pedants. Indeed, as I have also mentioned in these pages, I have a pretty severe aesthetic hard-on for variety itself, and for that most perfect musical exercise, the Variation; so for me the very penumbra and pleroma of language family, language, dialect, regionalism, accent and idiolect is a work itself to be savored. Maybe Stephen Fry agrees; but I’m sure he would have more interesting things to comment on than my punctuation.
Comments
- Language Log » Fry on the pleasure of language on November 7, 2008, at 06:51 PM
- The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry on December 9, 2008, at 02:32 PM
