Don’t Mind Your Language. Language. Language, language, language. In the end it all comes down to language. I write to you today on this subject as a way of welcoming you to www.stephenfry.com 2.0 and because, well, it’s a subject worth thinking about at any time and because fewer things interest me quite so much. Image: Nicole Stewart for SamFry There are so many questions and issues jostling, tumbling and colliding in my mind that I can barely list them.
Is language the father of thought? “Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” wrote Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds. I suppose we should remind ourselves of the old distinction made by the structuralists and structural linguists. The two for consideration however as those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance. I’ve used this analogy before, but I’ll use it again. I’m veering all over the shop. Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language. “The Life of Slang” by Julie Coleman. The literature of slang is vast, its two most important monuments being Eric Partridge’s “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” (1937) and Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner’s “Dictionary of American Slang” (1960) . Coleman pays due if reserved respect to the former (she finds it useful but dated, which is fair enough) but mentions the latter only in passing, which is strange given the importance of American slang not only to her overall subject but also to her book.
Given that she is English, a British bias is understandable and forgivable in “The Life of Slang,” but American readers are likely to feel that she gives too much attention to British slang of the 18th and 19th centuries and too little to the American slang that, for better and worse, has become a central part of the English-speaking world’s vocabulary and, for that matter, has encroached on the vocabularies of other languages. Slang “creates in-groups and out-groups and acts as an emblem of belonging.” The History of English in 10 Minutes. The History of English in 10 Minutes. Language Wars.
From the first time we step into an English class, we’re told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it’s appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter? Outside of the classroom, what difference does it make if we write “who” instead of “whom” or say “good” instead of “well”? It does make a difference, at least sometimes. In order to determine when those times are, the question must be asked: For whom are you writing? Take that last sentence, for example. As Joan Acocella wrote recently in The New Yorker, “Every statement is subjective, partial, full of biases and secret messages.”
But how different would things be if I walked into the sports bar down the street on a Sunday afternoon and asked, “For whom are we rooting today?” Why did it go so wrong? People who say otherwise, who say that in all situations we should speak and write however we’d like, are ignoring the current reality. Steven Pinker : The Linguistics of Cursing and Swearing.