Toluu : Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry

Blessays, blogs and blisquisitions

Language. Language, language, language. In the end it all comes down to language. I write to you today on this subject as a way of welcoming you to www.stephenfry.com 2.0 and because, well, it’s a subject worth thinking about at any time and because fewer things interest me quite so much.

Image: Nicole Stewart for SamFry

There are so many questions and issues jostling, tumbling and colliding in my mind that I can barely list them. Is language the father of thought? There’s one. Somebody once said, “How can I tell you what I think until I’ve heard what I’m going to say?” Is language being degraded, is it not what it was? Is there a right way to express yourself and a wrong? Grammar, does that exist, or is it a pedantic imposition, a kind of unnatural mixture of strangulation and straightening, like pleaching, pollarding and training pear-trees against a wall? Can we translate from one tongue into another without irreparable loss? And many, many more.

“Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” wrote Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds. One of my favourite remarks. T. S. Eliot said much the same thing in a different way: “to purify the dialect of the tribe”. But is there a “higher language”, a purer language, a proper language, a right lan

A suitcase of cablesOctober 18

Stephen Fry explains the suitcase of cables he takes with him when travelling

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 18th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk” - The Guardian headline.

It’s farewell for quite a few months, I fear, as I head off to Africa, Mauritius, Indonesia, New Zealand and the Sea of Cortez to make a documentary about disappearing species. I shall be out of reach of broadband, mobile phone and even landlines for much of the time. That will not stop me from taking a suitcase full of cables, chargers, memory cards and connectors, however, and I thought I might, by way of valediction, give you an inventory of what this particular dork packs when he travels.

Photograph: Alamy

First of all, should all else fail, I will make sure that there’s at least one of Trevor Baylis’s products in my bag. Baylis, you may remember, pioneered the wind-up radio. On the eco-gadget site biggreensmile.com you can find his company’s practical and hardy hand-crankable media players, the latest (the Eco Media Revolution) offering radio, video, music, photo, text, phone-charging, memo recording and storage in most of the useful formats and codecs, all for £129.99. One minute of winding makes for 45 minutes of play, that’s the promise: a big British bargain. The same site has a

Stephenfry.Com 2.0October 15

A notice to staff and parents, a little housekeeping…

Hello all. I have flown to Nairobi to start work on the five films I am making with Mark Carwardine for the BBC. Mark Carwardine, you may remember, wrote Last Chance To See with my late great friend, Douglas Adams. This was a pioneering, prophetic book which saw the pair travelling the world in search of eight critically endangered species. Twenty-five years later Mark and I are revisiting the same places and looking for the same animals to see how world wildlife has fared in a quarter of a century. We already made one film in Brazil earlier this year, searching for the shy and endearing Amazon river manatee. It was during this expedition that I broke my arm. Who knows what will happen in Africa? Well, I hope that whatever does befall, you will be the first to know and witness it, for I intend to make use of the superior options available on this all-new re-skinned, revamped, reworked website to keep you as up to date as possible.

The new Stephenfry.com 2.0 is out of its box

I have written a general hello which greets all who visit, but I will add for you, loyal blessay subscriber, an extra warm welcome. I aim to provide more and more content on this s ite as time goes on: before long there will be greater opportunities for you to contribute too, in new and different ways. Visito

Listen to thisOctober 10

Stephen Fry explores the high-end of digital music technology

Column “Dork Talk” published on Saturday 11th October 2008 in The Guardian “Dork Talk Listen to this” - The Guardian headline.

Mankind’s hunger for what Emerson called “a better mousetrap” is unquenchable. I can think of few technological solutions perfect enough to force inventors and innovators to proclaim, “Right, that’s it. Problem solved. Let’s move on.” The Screwpull came along in the 80s and was declared the last word in corkscrews, yet innovations continue to stream from the world’s drawing-boards. Coffee makers: I could hymn on coffee makers until you begged for mercy. Pencil sharpeners, umbrellas, cigarette lighters: mankind will never cease from reaching ever upwards towards the paradigmatically perfect implement. Actually, you might argue that in the last category Zippo reached the sunlit uplands decades ago: wind-proof, reliable, a design classic that works every time and comes with a lifetime guarantee. Pity no one smokes any more.

Katie Melua listening to her iPod. Photograph: Linda Nylind

There is surely no climb to perfection more impossible of completion than that of the ascent towards the ultimate high-end sound system. How can we hope to recapture the first fine careless rapture with which music originally smote us amidshi

Stephen Fry in AmericaOctober 10

I was so nearly an American. It was that close. In the mid-1950s my father was offered a job at Princeton University - something to do with the emerging science of semiconductors. One of the reasons he turned it down was that he didn’t think he liked the idea of his children growing up as Americans. I was born, therefore, not in NJ but in NW3.

An excerpt from my book Stephen Fry in America
Stephen Fry in America on BBC 1 from Sunday 12th October @ 9.00pm

I was ten when my mother made me a present of this momentous information. The very second she did so, Steve was born.

Steve looked exactly like me, same height, weight and hair colour. In fact, until we opened our mouths, it was almost impossible to distinguish one from the other. Steve’s voice had the clear, penetrating, high-up-in-the-head twang of American. He called Mummy ‘Mom’, he used words like ’swell’, ‘cute’ and ‘darn’. There were detectable differences in behaviour too. He spread jam (which he called jelly) on his (smooth, not crunchy) peanut butter sandwiches, he wore jeans, t-shirts and basketball sneakers rather than grey shorts, Airtex shirts and black plimsolls. He had far more money for sweets, which he called candy, than Stephen ever did. Steve was confident almost to the po