Stephen Fry on language

Stephen Fry has a podcast, kewl. In the latest one, he delightfully educates and waxes lyrical on the delights of language, particularly the English one.

Funny thing: when I heard that he was also railing against linguistic pedantry, I said: "hah, that's rich. I saw him on the TV show Q.I., giving a stern lecture to somebody about how it is supposed to be "there is none" and not "there are none". But then of course who is more likely to be interested in helping the world with a problem than those who themselves have suffered from that exact problem?"
And lo: it turns out that in the podcast, Fry admits he has had problems himself with excessive linguistic pedantry. And not only that, the "there is none" thing is the exact example he uses! He now proudly says "there are none". (The theory for "is", is that "none" is a contraction of "not one", and so is singular.)

I'm delighted in how he compares English to London, being a big, rich mishmash of times and styles, and in constant evolvement, so it can't be said that anything is "correct" or "incorrect". And I agree that we are better off delighting in the richness and variety, rather getting hung up on details of grammar.

I also applaud Fry for admitting in public to having issues also with "gluttony, anger, and selfishness" (me too), and saying part of his life is fighting these issues. I think recognizing our own issues and working on them despite the odds against fully winning any time soon is the mark of maturity.

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I didn't know Stephen is a super-uber-geek.
"Tribal loyalties have riven the world of personal computing since Bill Gates came late on the scene and took every IBM-compatible user with him. A triumph of business manoeuvring, a triumph of opportunism, a triumph of financial acumen, a triumph of all kinds of things except computer science or technological advancement, in the opinion of people like me at least. Every time Windows had a rebirth I would get hold of it and buy a new machine to run it on believing that they must now have got things right and finally created an operating environment that could excite, impress and enthral me. But each time their system got more ham-fisted, more insulting and more indifferent to the pleasures and interests of the consumer."

Update:
"Weird to remind ourselves yet again of just how unanimous in their scepticism the press and professional techies were about the possibility of Apple being able to make a dent in the market as an untried newcomer while now we’re already thinking of them as the big brutal bullying champion. How could the major players have left a gap in the market so wide that a complete novice in mobile telephony could so instantly shame them? Shame them in the eyes of the world, at least, if not in their own. The excuses made by the CEOs and spokesmen of BigCell for their failures remind me of publishers I have met who have tried to explain why they turned down the manuscript of J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel. ‘Ah, yes. You see it was our publishing house’s policy not to consider MSS over 40,000 words for the children’s market… nothing I could do. No point even reading it….’ ‘Ah, yes, well, you see it’s not our fault it was the networks/It was not our fault it was the manufacturers.’ Hmmmmm."
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