I adore Stephen Price. If I were younger, and he were not gay, I would happily offer him sexual favours. And the reason I adore him is his wonderful use of language. Some time ago, he started a blog on which he used to write long, lovely blessays, as he called them – blog essays. Then, I think, he got bogged down in a tv series he was filming, of him driving around the USA in a London cab, and the blessays dried up. Instead he would substitute the articles he was writing for The Guardian on tech stuff – he’s a tech geek from way back.
Now he’s off in Africa, I think, filming a series about vanishing species and has re-vamped his blog to become part of The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry. And last week, bless his little bedsocks, he posted this wonderful screed on language. I emailed a copy of it to #1 Son, asking “don’t you want to take off all your clothes and roll around naked in this man’s use of language?” He’s probably in emergency session with a psycho-therapist as I write.
But what lover of language would not want to get naked with gems such as this:
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 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.
And I confess that I have been known, from time to time, to whip out my Sharpie and correct an apostrophe in a public notice. But the beauty of Stephen Fry is that I don’t care if he’s agreeing with me and my opinions on language. I just want to lie down and listen to him all day – actually, read, since he’s off swanning around a jungle somewhere.
And maybe there’s hope for me yet, as he writes:
I don’t deny that a small part of me still clings to a ghastly Radio 4/newspaper-letter-writer reader pedantry, but I fight against it in much the same way I try to fight against my gluttony, anger, selfishness and other vices. I must confess, for example, that I find it hard not to wince when someone aspirates the word ‘aitch’. Haitch Eye Vee, you hear all the time now, for HIV. It’s pretty much nails on the blackboard to me, as is the use of the word ‘yourself’ or ‘myself’ when all that is meant is ‘you’ or ‘me’ but I daresay myself’s accent and manner is nails on the blackboard to yourself or to others too, in itself’s own way. Myself also mourns, sometimes, the death of that phrase I bade you upon pain of slapping to remember some time back, ‘willy-nilly’, do you remember? Fold it in your hope chest, I urged, or seal it in a baggie. Well you can take it out now. Willy-nilly. What happened there? Willy-nilly is now used, it seems, to mean ‘all over the place’; its original meaning of ‘whether you like it or not’ (in other words ‘willing or unwilling’) is all but forgotten. Well, that’s ok, I suppose.
Perhaps he and I could found Language Pedants Anonymous and become charter members together. A girl can dream, can’t she?