Stephen Fry's Writes Language

By /
Enjoy Don’t Mind Your Language…, I know I did as I sat here slowly recovering from ickiness of a viral/germ/bleurgh couple of days:
... 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.


And I am particularly pleased to see that Mr Fry isn't overly fond of the small pedants amongst us that are constantly implying superiority because they know where the apostrophe should/should not go:
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.


All fits with my early 2007 post, Reading is such an understated skill

Comments

Post a Comment

Be kind

Popular articles

Make Your Public Event Calendar Usable To All

Image
If you run a sports club, this post is for you. If you are on a community committee, this post is also for you If you host events, this is for you. If you put on shows, this is for you. In fact, if you do anything that has a date/time component that you'd like to share with people, this is for you . Yep, probably for all of us. Sharing calendars can be both: an effective way of letting everyone know a complete and utter technical pain in the bottomly region If you've posted up an events page onto your website you know how difficult it is to keep up to date, how the readers have to keep coming back to get the latest changes and don't even think about integrating with somebody else's "events page". Ok, so we all know the problem. What's the solution? iCalendar (normally shortened to iCal) ... yep, it's a geek word that you will come to know and love just as much as RSS. In fact, think of it as RSS for calendars. But that's enough geekery, if you want

The Difference Between One Million And One Billion

Image
It's feels like a billion is just a bit bigger than a million. Obviously it's bigger but it fits on the same scale as a million, surely. It doesn't. A billion is so so so much bigger than a million. I've trawled the internet finding graphics and videos that show the VAST difference between one million and one billion. Oh, and just to finish with a different misconception about space starting with the classic opening line from the great Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy : “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

We All Agree The Climate Is Changing, But Not Why

Image
It seems to me, talking to my more "climate sceptic" friends that even they now accept that the world's climate is changing and we're all in for a bumpy ride of it. If you're one of the very few that doesn't think it's changing, explain this without resorting to lies: Region:  GLOBE Date Range: 1850-2022 / Data Source: UK Met Office Creator: Ed Hawkins Licensor: University of Reading / License:  Creative Commons Licence And for the Kiwis, this is what we're looking like: Region:  All of New Zealand Date Range: 1853-2022 / Data Source: Berkeley Earth Creator: Ed Hawkins Licensor: University of Reading / License: Creative Commons Licence And finally, here's the news for the Welsh Region: Wales Date Range: 1884-2022 / Data Source: UK Met Office Creator: Ed Hawkins Licensor: University of Reading / License: Creative Commons Licence Ok, so it's as plain as the end of your nose that the climate is warming up, we're starting to see the affects of

NO! The Greatest Story: Space Worm

Image
[Update: Poppy Hillstead was removed from the line-up in 2020 and all of series 1 - 3, in which she was a part, has been deleted. I would suggest not bothering with Gossipmongers anymore as this incident left a very bad taste in my mouth. And of course there is no longer anything to embed around the Space Worm, sorry folks] The GOSSIPMONGERS podcast has David Earl, Joe Wilkinson, Poppy Hillstead sharing gossip and rumours which are mostly hilarious, often scatalogical, and sometimes the greatest stories you've ever heard. The 2019 supreme champion is the TRUE Space Worm , listen up (starts at 37:35) and prepare to snort LOL Subscribe to GOSSIPMONGERS

Stop! 3 Signs YOU Need To

Image
This video, 3 signs that you’ve hit clinical burnout and should seek hel p, compliments the post simply entitled, Stop! , where I give a little background on my own life burnout and how stopping was the simplest act that both saved me and changed everything about me.