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.

- Marcel Steinbauer-Lewis

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. Clearly, it's something we can all appreciate. Nonetheless, even in academic studies of literature, we have to approximate, use technical terms to discuss particular instances, and can never seem to address the thing itself; what do you think makes 'the lure of language' so difficult to pin down or talk about?

I feel it's because we take language for granted and consider it somehow pretentious to dive deep into it. But words can be like jewels, like living creatures – words can repay the closest study. They contain the wisdom of our ancestors. Take a word that can seem dull, abstract and obvious – education, for example. We think we know what it means, but it can tell us more if you take it apart. It has a Latin root ... educere. Ducere means to lead, to draw in the sense of pull, as in a horse drawn carriage; e or ex in front of a verb gives a sense of 'out'. So educere is to draw out, to lead out. Education is not a putting in, it's not stuffing a head, it's drawing out from a student what is already in them. Encouraging, enabling .... If only (some) educators were more aware of that!