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Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

A Way with Words, a radio show and podcast about language and linguistics.

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Stephen Fry's attack on the grammar police is welcome: enforcing strict rules on language is pointless
Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
1532 Posts
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1
2009/02/01 - 2:37pm

End this pesky pedantry. If Fry were a civilian he would, St Sebastian style, already be skewered to death with a million poison pens full of green ink for the temerity of thinking that language does and must change, but as he is a well-known actor, TV presenter, Wodehousian and Wildean he will probably get away with it. Phrases like “he actioned it that week” are perfectly fine in Fry's book. “It's only ugly cos it's new and you don't like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly”, he explains.

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2
2009/02/01 - 4:02pm

How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don't like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven's sake avoid Shakespeare who made a 'doing word' out of a 'thing word' every chance he got. He 'tabled' the motion and 'chaired' the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.  ~Fry

as I understand,

“tabling a motion” means to place down a proposision on the table a cease discussing it

until the idea is picked up later if ever

which I don't believe Fry meant to suggest.

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3
2009/02/02 - 9:09am

Matt Holck said:

as I understand,

“tabling a motion” means to place down a proposision on the table a cease discussing it

until the idea is picked up later if ever

which I don't believe Fry meant to suggest.


In British usage, "tabling" means pretty much the opposite - to put something on the table for discussion.

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