The pleasure of words
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Stephen Fry’s blog has gone 2.0. That he’s blogging at all seems something of an extra bonus prize for the Internet -- he could be acting or doing comedy or writing his tech geek blog for the Guardian or writing books or doing any other number of things. He’s busy, he’s prolific, he’s very funny and he’s also smart.
This week, he blogged about linguistics and the pleasure of language. In his long, interesting essay, he decries those who over-control language; ‘Do they ever,’ he asks, ‘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?’ Here’s more:
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 pleasure 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.... But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free...
There’s much more -- Fry may be something of a language libertine, but he’s got rules he’ll follow. He also knows that talking about language with language can get a little preposterous, admitting that he lampooned some of these ideas on ‘Fry and Laurie’ (that’s Hugh Laurie, and the sketch is after the jump) that he now takes seriously.
This morning, NPR broadcast a StoryCorps recording of Studs Terkel, at age 93, on how the sound of voices had disappeared from the train. The longtime oral historian got onto a train and heard only silence, and when he tried to break that silence, was met with more.
Taken together, these two pieces remind us -- remind me, at least -- that the beauty of language is best when it is used in communication, not isolation. That words are a kind of communion, meaning the act of sharing, holding in common, participation. And maybe that is why Stephen Fry is blogging at all.
-- Carolyn Kellogg
Artwork from StephenFry.com
