Russell Smith’s eloquent article for The Globe and Mail comments on Stephen Fry’s ramblings on language (see video below) and language use:
The argument is essentially that “there is no right or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.” (A sensitive comparison in the upper classes of Britain, of course, where there are indeed views on right and wrong clothes.)
He wants no part in the campaigns against correct apostrophes in signage, or the use of “less” and “fewer” in newspapers: “Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between less and fewer and uninterested and disinterested and infer and imply and all the rest of them but none of these are of importance to me.”
The use of the plural verb “are” with the singular subject “none” is, he stresses, deliberate – a proud, mature shedding of his former pedantic identity. He is all in favour of “action” as a verb (“He actioned it at the meeting”), since nouns have been verbed since Shakespeare and before. People find “to action” ugly only because it is new.
Of people who insist on conventional grammar, he asks: “But do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss?” (He refrains from asking if they ever crib shamelessly from the opening of Lolita.)
Fry has been accused of being disingenuous, because of course it is rare for speakers to be so virtuosic and ludic with language without first knowing the rules they dismiss. Fry’s own grammar and punctuation are utterly conventional (even his accent is Received Pronunciation, a.k.a. the Queen’s English). Still, he is right about most of the silly obsessions he uses as examples: disinterested has come to mean uninterested, and there is no longer any lack of clarity in its use. Nobody misunderstands when you say “less” instead of “fewer”. (I would bet an elbow, however, that he himself would never use these words in their more recent senses.)
But I don’t understand why he thinks one can’t be punctilious in punctuation and poetic in polemics at the same time. After all, he is.
read all via Stephen Fry takes on the language pedants — The Globe and Mail
