On Language

by Stephen Fry

There's language, and there's speech. There's chess, and there's a game of chess. Imagine a piano keyboard: eighty-eight keys, only eighty-eight! And yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone. Our language: hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say this sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has ever said it before in the history of human communication: 'Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.'

Perfectly ordinary words, but never before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a unique mother. And yet, oh and yet! we all of us spend our days saying the same things, time after weary time: 'I love you', 'Don't go in there', 'Get out', 'You have no right to say that', 'Stop it', 'Why should I?', 'That hurt', 'Help', 'Marjorie is dead'. That surely is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or a handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God. Language is the dew on a fresh apple. It's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from an old bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the creak on a stair. It's a sputtering match held to a frosted pane. It's a half-remembered childhood birthday party. It's the warm, wet trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

Language circumscribes beauty, confirms, confines, limns, and delineates; it colours and contains. Yet language is only a tool — a tool that we use to dig up the beauty that surrounds and is, we take, our only and absolute real. So I'm finding myself with some surprise and no little alarm hurling a paradox at you. Beauty is our only reality, and yet it is an ideal. It is the surface-tension of the membrane that stretches between us and the vision of beauty that language seeks to disperse, as a detergent might dissipate or dissolve a droplet of oil.

Let me explain, expound, expand, and exposit. I find you beautiful. But you are not beauty. Therefore you contain a property of beauty. Therefore the substance of which you exhibit a property must exist. Where is it? That is language's task.

Language pursues beauty, harries it, hounds it, courses it across the roughlands of enquiry and in so doing can itself be beautiful. Ripple on ripple, image on image, wheel within a wheel like the circles that we find in the windmills of our mind.

Language can be beautiful. 'And Madeline asleep in lap of legends old.' Plenitude, dishes, martita, tumble, emolument, forage, smitten, plenum: words that have their own sonority and beauty which is extrinsic to their connotational or denotational referends.

So I'll leave you with a thought, a breath, a fruit that drops from the boughs of my imaginings. Think beauty, but be beautiful. Say beauty, but say it beautifully. Beauty is duty, and duty beauty. So there. Goodnight.