Stephen Fry's Writes Language

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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

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