"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 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', and all the rest of them, but none of these are of importance to me. 'None of these are of importance', I said 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(...)", 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 way the add apostrophies 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 their tips of their tounges 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 the're guardians of language. They're no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.

   And 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. I suppose 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've been sanctioning, envisioning, propositioning and stationing for a long time, so why not 'actioning'? 'Because it's ugly', whinge the pedants. Well, 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'm 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 for example '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's 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 underlines 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 is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

I can't deny that a small part of me still clings to a ghastly, radio 4, newspaper letterwriter pedantry. I fight against it, in much the same was as I fight my gluttony, anger, selfishness and other vices. I must confess, for example, that I find it hard not to wince, when someone aspirate the word - and it is a word - H. A-I-T-C-H."

- Stephen Fry

som tar orden ur munnen på mig, så jag tar tillbaka dem och postar dem här.

Från
    Kom ihåg mig
URL

Säkerhetskod
     

Kommentar

Heregud, varför skriver jag för långt? Jag postar denna kommentar här istället för fältet för den artikel http://www.rod.se/polisen-ska-f%C3%A5-anlita-fra där den hör hemma.   Åh herregud, råkade trycka bort skiten, men historiken sparade min kom...

Hette en rubrik i Metro idag, tyckte både att rubriken och själva artikeln syftade på det irrelevanta i historien. En 54-årig man kom in på socialkontoret i Hjällbo, sade att han ville ha en lägenhet, hällde en brännbar vätska över sig själv och höll...

Herregud, jag åker hem om typ fyra dagar. Jag ska träffa mamma, pappa, farmor, farfar, mormor och lillebror! Så jävla gött (ett uttryck som återkommer med hög frekvens i mitt dagliga tal numera)! Har fan inte varit hemma sen typ den 5e mars, det är l...

Jag har märkt att det har börjat komma en hel del feministiska sångerskor till populärmusikvärlden och radiostationerna. Det är typ hela tiden musik som Lady Gaga Born This Way   Nikki Minaj Girls Fall Like Dominoes   och Beyoncé ...

Man hinner ju knappt blinka innan någon ny dumhet Tingsrätten haft för sig dyker upp igen. Och jag vet, det är inte bara i Tingsrätten de är dumma i huvudet, det gäller fan hela rättssystemet, men själva idén med en tingsrätt är bara helt sjuk.   ...