Thursday, November 11, 2010

It's your language; use it

I am inspired by this today... I could write for decades and never come close to such an indulgently sensuous use of words... but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try.

Stephen Fry, on language:

"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... 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 and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors." 


I was tipped off to Stephen Frye's whole essay, Don't Mind Your Language, along with Matthew Roger's mesmerizing kinetic video excerpt of that essay by the good folks at Lifehacker, who this week are writing about... writing.

1 comment:

  1. Stephen Fry's writing is brilliant - what a great quote. Just a shame he has to open his mouth sometimes - those recent comments about women did not go down well!

    ReplyDelete