The Words of Mr. Fry

In a podcast available on his web site, Stephen Fry says he is annoyed bypeople who criticize others’ use of language as “incorrect.”  He says he far prefers people who take pleasure in language, who “froth and cream” with delight over words.  He doesn’t care about supermarket checkout signs that beckon to shoppers with 5 items or less, or about people’s use of “infer” when the word they probably want to use is “imply,” or about the tendency to coin new verbs out of nouns, e.g., “impact” (“Your behavior impacted me.”)

There’s nothing quite like listening to a smart man with a posh British accent telling you that the very idea of speaking correctly is rubbish.  It’s kind of like getting French-kissed by Grandma.

But I can handle it.

Mr. Fry says that English is always making verbs out of nouns and that if you don’t like that, you’d better stay away from Shakespeare, who does it all the time.  He also has no patience with people who criticize new words on account of their “ugliness.”  He says they’re only “ugly” because they’re new.  But Picasso, Stravinsky, and Eliot were once new, and thought ugly.  Until, presumably, people got used to them, and decided they weren’t that ugly after all.

Finally, the relativist Mr. Fry thinks the most one can say of any given use of language is that it is suitable; one cannot say that it is correct.  Language is only to be evaluated relative to a context or situation; there is no right or wrong.  No good or bad.  Only appropriate.  And oh yes, there’s the creaming and the frothing ... that Fry thinks is pretty good in every way.

There are a number of things in this piece of Mr. Fry’s that I’m not going to touch with a ten-foot pole.  I’m not going to point out, for example, that there’s a big difference between what a master craftsman like Shakespeare or Wilde does and what the average bonehead does.  I’m not going to point out that breaking the rules can be incredibly expressive, but you have to know what the rules are to break them that way.  Ignorant blundering is not art.

I’m also not going near the assertion that it doesn’t matter whether a person says “infer” or “imply” because in the end we “know” what they meant.   By this logic, I could jump up and down and point at my mouth repeatedly, and we would probably figure out that I was hungry, but it doesn’t follow that this is a fine use of language.

No, I’ll pass on this stuff.  I’d rather go after the bigger game.

First off, there’s nothing the least bit new in any of this (unless it’s Mr. Fry’s use of the phrase “Sod them to Hades!” which I don’t believe I’ve heard before and which I love).  The battles between partisans of the classic and the romantic, the old school and the young turks, positivists and relativists, we will always have with us.  Each side claims a high ground built of doctrinaire pomposities, from which they launch salvos of angry words across the divide at each other.

Obviously we all know it’s pointless, and a little pathetic, when some version of an Académie française tries to tell us how we should speak and write, because that’s like one man trying to hold back a tidal wave.  It’s barely possible to understand the rules that govern language, let alone impose rules on how we should use it.  So there’s a sense in which a snapshot taken of language use in a given culture at a given moment would show only “correct” usage – but then the word “correct” would be completely meaningless, since nothing could be incorrect.  And maybe that’s how Mr. Fry wants it.

Still, I can’t help feeling he’s giving short shrift to the value of cultural conventions.  Culture, after all, is defined by convention.  There is no objective reason to put a matzo ball in a bowl of chicken soup.  But we do, and the fact that we do (or some of us do) is part of our culture.  To put a scoop of Cherry Garcia in our chicken soup would not only be disgusting (though that, I’m sure, is only a matter of opinion), it would be incorrect.  If incorrect and correct have any meaning at all, in other words, it is because they are not absolute; they exist only in terms of a spread of values, institutions and habits constituting a culture.  If language is conventional, so is culture.  No one ever said there’s a Platonic idea of language up there in the Land of the Forms.  (Well, someone probably did, but they shouldn’t have.)  Culture is a moving target, and it’s against that moving target that language is experienced.  Not judged, but experienced.

Further, culture is embodied in language in ways that individuals can rarely control.  And not only the linguistic conventions that abide in the present moment, but a trail of traditions that stretches back way beyond any living memory.  Words trail their past, the countless instances in which they were used by people now long dead, most unremarkable, some brilliant.  There is a strange hubris in saying we get to decide, as a matter of conscious preference, how we are going to “use” a word.  We seem to forget that in fact language uses us.  We are born into a world infused by language.  We have to learn its rules: not just the grammar or spelling conventions of a specific version of a specific language, but the grammar of language itself.  Or rather the glamour of it (look up how grammarand glamour are etymologically related).  How arrogant of us to believe that this magic is only for us to arrange, codify and judge!  Language is a mystery into which we are initiated; it shapes our sense of self, it fosters our membership in a tribe; it makes our very thought possible.  The fact that we’re not all of us aware of this doesn’t make it any less true.

We are contained and restricted by language, as we are by history.  It’s only the slick, textureless, solipsistic moment we happen to live in that says we can shape all reality to suit our conception.  Every circuit contains resistance, all matter rebels against form, like the Titans against Zeus.  If we listen to language, we can hear its No.  And then we have a choice: we can pretend we didn’t hear it, or we can wrestle with it and see who wins.

Consider the sonnet or the haiku.  These poetic forms thrive on the limitations imposed by the form.  Remove the conventional limitations and there is no struggle against the arbitrary.  There is no sonnet.  No haiku.  Art only emerges when we dance in chains.

In any here and now, we are all between times, whether it’s a lifetime or a decade or an instant: we are a species of straddlers.  It’s our misery and our glory.  There’s lightning in the moment when the matter of language comes to grips with the form of human intention.  Restriction is itself the necessary condition for freedom.  I think this is what Heraclitus means by eris, “strife.”  He said all things come into being through eris. 

I was born in a world where the distinction between “infer” and “imply” was one worth maintaining.  It was very cool to realize as a boy that when someone said something, the statement could conceal a subtext, and that subtext might have been “folded into” the statement or I might have “carried it out.”  Which was it?!  Over the years I’ve loved the subtle differences of tone and nuance carried in these two words – “imply,” always accompanied by its evil twin “insinuate” lurking in the shadows nearby, and “infer,” with its musty Jesuitical perfume of deductive logic.  Then there are all the times I’ve encountered these words in novels and histories and movies and my own personal life.  And here I am in 2010, straddling that world, which is my inner world, and the world of now where these two words are losing their difference from one another.  And in that straddling too there is eris, and you know what? I think I will hold up my end of the bargain, as we all have to, like it or not.  Every antithesis needs its thesis, every revolutionary his crusty codger.

So I say: Bring it on.