Wild adventures in the English Language
For someone that actually failed my mock English ‘o’ level (yet managed an A in English Lit which has always puzzled me) I’ve never been an enthusiastic linguist- instead preferring to bury my head in machine code frantically copying pages and pages of the latest Commodore 64 computer mag only to find ‘syntax error at line 163′ the typical result – but that’s a whole other chapter. In recent years I have become more aware and interested in words and language and stumbled across Stephen’s Fry recent post on Language which made me laugh out loud/bow in humble respect/excite me and on a quite a few occasions turn to my dictionary. I feel lacking in alternative words to describe this piece further. Just read it. It’s brilliant.
“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”
“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?”
And his observation about ‘One Nation Under CCTV’ is very interesting.
Oh, and he used the word ‘Twazzock’ i haven’t heard anyone use this since secondary school. Brilliant.
