MY REPLY TO STEPHEN FRY

by James Lincoln Warren

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography – Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo.

Today I’m wearing my Diction Cop helmet. As I mentioned last week, my work in fiction lately has been dominated by trying to find the right voice, and there is nothing more important in voice than diction. So when I stumbled across the above video, it got me thinking.

Stephen Fry is probably best known to American audiences as half of the erstwhile British comedy team of Fry and Laurie, the Laurie part being Hugh Laurie, himself best known to American audiences as the star of the eponymous TV series House. Laurie and Fry were very, very funny. Their interpretations as Jeeves and Wooster (Fry was Jeeves and Laurie was Wooster) are justly considered definitive. Their parting was entirely amicable; Fry is godfather to all three of Laurie’s children.

In the above video, Fry provides a spirited and eloquent defense of what I suppose one might call idiomatic usage. He makes a couple of references in it that may not be readily grasped by an American audiences. The first is to Lynne Truss, who wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a witty and thoroughly charming manifesto calling for a strict adherence to the received rules of punctuation. The second is to John Humphrys, a sometimes controversial Welsh television news broadcaster in Britain who has written several books on the abuse of English. The last reference is to “Radio 4”, by which he means the spoken word-based BBC Radio 4 (in contradistinction to “BBC 4”, a television network). The last is mildly ironic because Fry is a staple on Radio 4.

Although I think that Fry makes several valid points in the video, I can’t agree with him that those of us who fill Diction Cop’s shoes are dessicated pedants whose sole joy is in crushing expressive language in the name of Linguistic Correctness. When he says that only a dolt doesn’t understand what is meant by “five items or less” or when “disinterested” is used to mean “uninterested” instead of “nonpartisan”, he is of course correct. But that isn’t the point. The saddest five words in the English language are, “You knew what I meant.” When “nonstandard” usages, in diction (which is what he’s complaining about) but also particularly in grammar, become accepted uses, it shrinks the expressive punch of language. There are times when nonstandard usages may be preferred—but their purpose, like profanity, should be to convey more information than simple semantics. If there is no distinction to be made between what ain’t standard and what is, a whole spectrum of connotation ends up circling the drain. That’s a net loss. I do not put the same words in the mouths of street urchins, college professors, and private detectives when I write.

His next salvo is aimed at defending “verbing”, and he justly mentions that Shakespeare is the all-time heavyweight champion of turning nouns into verbs. Only a fool does not recognize that Shakespeare is considered the greatest English language wordsmith who ever lived, perhaps the greatest wordsmith in any language at all. His conclusion, therefore, is that if it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it should be good enough for those of us who aren’t Shakespeare. Well, I don’t buy it. In the first place, Shakespeare was writing at a time when English was in a state of great upheaval, when it was more amenable to stretching and experimentation, when it was deliberately breaking boundaries. Spelling, for example, wasn’t standardized by any stretch at all. It was the Renaissance. It’s not an historical accident that during the Enlightenment, English settled down to become something more refined and rational. Secondly, Shakespeare was a genius, and when you’re talking about genius all bets are off. Shakespeare was a professional driver on a closed course. Do not attempt!

Innovation has no value for its own sake—it is only when innovation provides a fresh power of expression that it contributes something. Most innovations suck.

“Actioning”? Fry says it’s ugly because we aren’t used to it, and then compares its use to the rule-breaking of other great artists that provided us with new ways of looking at things. Now, as far as this particular excrescence is concerned, let us first reflect that “action” is already a noun form of a perfectly good and common verb: “to act”. So what exactly is “actioning” supposed to mean, as opposed to “acting”? Doing? Performing? Causing? Those words have shades of meaning; they all tell us something specific about what’s happening. How does an awful neologism like “actioning” give us a new way of looking at things? It doesn’t. It’s pretentious and lazy.

Along the same lines, “five items or less” does not have any semantic or expressive advantage over “five items or fewer”. “None of them are” may be just as clear as “none of them is”—we actually had an off-line discussion over those very phrases here at CB some time ago—but “none” is a contraction of “no one” and “one” is singular, not plural. Fry regards this argument as purist, pedantic, and puerile, and I get that. Frankly, it’s not worth going to General Quarters over, and I get that, too. But on the other hand, even if these expressions provide equivalence in terms of comprehension, they also say something about the care one takes in putting forth ideas. He concedes this point, but concludes that whichever is more appropriate is entirely a matter of context. I, on the other hand, maintain that language usually creates context.

I’ll conclude with my take on something Fry invokes very early in the video, a quotation from his personal hero Oscar Wilde (and a pretty good literary hero he is, too), leaving it to his editor to sort out the woulds and shoulds and thats and whiches. Fry uses this as evidence that Wilde didn’t care about such niceties, but to me, it sounds as if Wilde was trusting his editor to make the necessary emendations to bring his prose to the highest standard. When I write something, I know that only an editor’s eye is going to sharpen it to the edge I want it to have. Similarly, master painters used to make the broad strokes on the canvas and let their students fill in the details. That doesn’t mean that the masters thought the details were beneath their notice.

I think that maybe Fry is mostly objecting to the stultifying voice of petty authority, and he is absolutely right to do so. Language should never be a dictatorship—it must be a republic. But republics can only exist where there is respect for the rule of law.

So I’m letting Stephen Fry off with only a warning this time. Please write safely.