{"id":2700,"date":"2011-01-26T10:17:21","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T19:17:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/?p=2700"},"modified":"2011-01-26T10:17:21","modified_gmt":"2011-01-26T19:17:21","slug":"a-quote-on-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/26\/a-quote-on-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"A Quote On Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"390\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/J7E-aoXLZGY\" frameborder=\"0\" allowFullScreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don\u2019t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with  language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They  write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and  haughty about other people\u2019s usage and in which they show off their own  superior \u2018knowledge\u2019 of how language should be. I hate that, and I  particularly hate the fact that so many of these pedants assume that I\u2019m  on their side. When asked to join in a \u201clet\u2019s persuade this  supermarket chain to get rid of their \u2018five items or less\u2019 sign\u201d I never  join in. Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between \u2018less\u2019  and \u2018fewer\u2019, and between \u2018uninterested\u2019 and \u2018disinterested\u2019 and \u2018infer\u2019  and \u2018imply\u2019, but none of these are of importance to me. \u2018None of these  are of importance,\u2019 I wrote there, you\u2019ll notice \u2013 the old pedantic me  would have insisted on \u201cnone of them is of importance\u201d. Well I\u2019m glad to  say I\u2019ve outgrown that silly approach to language. <strong>Oscar Wilde, and  there have been few greater and more complete lords of language in the  past thousand years, once included with a manuscript he was delivering  to his publishers a compliment slip in which he had scribbled the  injunction: \u201cI\u2019ll leave you to tidy up the woulds and shoulds, wills and  shalls, thats and whiches.\u201d Which gives us all encouragement to  feel less guilty, don\u2019t you think?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>There are all kinds of pedants  around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys  than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They  whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public  signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter  at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and  slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the  tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth  transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible  words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce,  charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I  doubt it. They\u2019re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer\u2019s less  than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They  think they\u2019re guardians of language. They\u2019re no more guardians of  language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I found this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stephenfry.com\/2008\/11\/04\/dont-mind-your-language%E2%80%A6\/#more-64%22\" target=\"_blank\">quote on the Stephen  Fry website<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don\u2019t enjoy language. Music is enjoyable it seems, so are dance and other, athletic forms of movement. People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days. Words, it seems belong to other people, anyone &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/26\/a-quote-on-writing\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;A Quote On Writing&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[235,10,230],"tags":[555,554],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1qkdN-Hy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2700"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2700"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2700\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2721,"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2700\/revisions\/2721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yousephtanha.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}