Select text to annotate, Click play in YouTube to begin
00:00:00
so let's talk instead about flexibility of language linguistic elasticity if you like yes I suggested earlier the dart language English as spoken by us as we speak it yes certain it defines it we are defined by our language if you will
00:00:13
hello we're talking about language illustrate my point let me at least Drive and here's a question um what is
00:00:28
it ah and well my question is this is our language English capable is English demagoguery demagoguery demagoguery and by demagoguery you mean by demagoguery I
00:00:43
mean demagoguery I thought so highly charged oratory persuasive whipping up rhetoric listen to me listen to me if it had been British would we under similar circumstances have been moved charged up
00:00:56
fired up by his inflammatory speeches or would we simply have laughed is English to ironic to sustain Hitlerian Styles would his language simply run false in our ears we're talking about things
00:01:08
winging false in our ears um may i compartmentalize i hate to but may may i is our language a function of our british cynicism tolerance resistance to
00:01:21
false emotion humor and so on or do those qualities come extrinsic extrinsic from the language itself it's a chicken and egg problem we're talking about chickens we're talking about eggs
00:01:33
let me start a Leverett here um there's language and their speech um there's there's chess and there's a game of chess the difference for me market
00:01:45
please we've moved on to chess imagine a piano keyboard um 88 keys only 88 and yet and yet hundreds of new melodies new tunes new harmonies are being composed about hundreds of
00:01:58
different keyboards every day in Dorset alone a language tiger our language hundreds of thousands of available words freely ins of legitimate new ideas hmm
00:02:11
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 news readers nose squarely waiter or friendly milk we'll
00:02:24
count'em and my trousers perfectly ordinary words but never before put in that precise order a unique child
00:02:35
delivered of a unique mother oh and yet we all of us spend all our days saying to each other the same things time after weary time I love you don't go in there
00:02:50
get out you have no right to say that stop it why should I that hurt help Marjorie is dead Shirley is a thought to take out for a cream tea on a rainy Sunday afternoon
00:03:02
so if your language is more than just a means of communication 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 Hall my mistress my checkout girl language is a
00:03:13
complimentary moist lemon scented cleansing square 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
00:03:26
you pluck from an old bookshop a half forgotten book of erotic memoirs languages the creek on a stair it's a sputtering match held to a frosted pane it's it's a half-remembered childhood
00:03:38
birthday party it's the warm wet trusting touch of a leaking nappy the hunk of a charred Panzer the underside of a granite boulder the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean
00:03:50
it's cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot no night
End of transcript