Language Conversation

Automatically generated script; wording may contain errors. Speaker labels are inferred.

1. 00:00
   

   Interviewer

   So let's talk instead about flexibility of language, linguistic elasticity, if you like.

2. 00:05
   

   Interviewee

   Yes, I think I said earlier that our language, English...

3. 00:07
   

   Interviewer

   As spoken by us.

4. 00:08
   

   Interviewee

   As we speak it, yes, certainly, defines it. We are defined by our language, if you will.

5. 00:13
   

   Interviewer

   Hello, we're talking about language.

6. 00:16
   

   Interviewee

   If I can illustrate my point, let me at least try. Here's a question.

7. 00:25
   

   Interviewer

   What is it?

8. 00:28
   

   Interviewee

   Well, my question is this. Is our language, English, capable? Is English capable of sustaining demagoguery?

9. 00:40
   

   Interviewer

   Demagoguery?

10. 00:40
    

    Interviewee

    Demagoguery.

11. 00:41
    

    Interviewer

    And by demagoguery you mean?

12. 00:42
    

    Interviewee

    By demagoguery I mean demagoguery.

13. 00:44
    

    Interviewer

    I thought so.

14. 00:44
    

    Interviewee

    I mean highly charged oratory persuasive whipping up rhetoric. Listen to me, listen to me. If this man had been British would we, under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged up, fired up by his inflammatory speeches or would we simply have laughed? Is English too ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles? Would his language simply have rung false in our ears?

15. 01:07
    

    Interviewer

    We're talking about things ringing false in our ears.

16. 01:10
    

    Interviewee

    Um, may I compartmentalise? I hate to, but may I? May I?

17. 01:15
    

    Interviewee

    Is our language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance to false emotion, humour and so on? Or do those qualities come extrinsically, extrinsically from the language itself? it's a chicken and egg problem

18. 01:30
    

    Interviewer

    we're talking about chickens we're talking about eggs

19. 01:32
    

    Interviewee

    um let me start a leveret here um there's language and there's speech um there's there's chess and there's a game of chess

20. 01:43
    

    Interviewer

    mark the difference for me mark it please we've moved on to chess

21. 01:48
    

    Interviewee

    imagine a piano keyboard um 88 keys only 88 and yet and yet hundreds of new melodies new tunes new harmonies are being composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset alone.

22. 02:02
    

    Interviewee

    Our language, Tiger, our language... Hundreds of thousands of available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can say the following 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.

23. 02:27
    

    Interviewee

    perfectly ordinary words but never before put in that precise order a unique child delivered of a unique mother and yet we all of us spent all our days saying to each other 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 is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a raining Sunday afternoon.

24. 03:01
    

    Interviewer

    So your language is more than just a means of communication?

25. 03:04
    

    Interviewee

    Oh of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is. My mother, my father, my husband, my brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my checkout girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square.

26. 03:18
    

    Interviewee

    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.

27. 03:32
    

    Interviewee

    Language is the creek on a stair. It's a spluttering 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.

28. 03:50
    

    Interviewer

    It's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.

29. 03:55
    

    Interviewee

    No, no, it's...