Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Interview

Stephen Fry

Perhaps unshockingly for someone who is an actor, broadcaster, comedian, director, narrator and writer, Stephen Fry has a deep interest in words and how we use them. After hearing him lecture on that subject, Marcel Steinbauer-Lewis asked him about Artificial Intelligence and how it connects with the extraordinary lure of language.

Recently at Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre you gave a lecture called: ‘Words, Words, Words: The Lure of Language’. Where did your interest in the sound of words come from?

Well, I answer that very question in the lecture! Indeed most of it is taken up with telling the story of the time I happened on a line that hit me over the head like a sandbag when I was 11 or 12. A line from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. This love of language was reinforced by reading and rereading my WWW of early literary heroes: Wilde, Wodehouse and Waugh.

Your lecture was a great showcase of its subject and, leaving, there was real excitement about using language.

…