Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning light when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, 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, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot."
Watching Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, I laughed so hard that friendly milk just countermanded my trousers. But now to the hard stuff: You meet somebody, say, at a bus stop, and you start having a conversation. How do you do it? How does anyone know what word to say next? Are children wrong when they say "he drived" and "two gooses?" How does anyone know what a word really means? Do we inherit grammar?
What a wonderful way to spend a dull and grey Sunday afternoon!
