Verbing Fry punctures the punctuation bubble

First Lynne Truss revived the art of punctuation. Then John Humphrys weighed in with a book that decried the “mangling and manipulating of the English language”. Now Stephen Fry, whose linguistic dexterity remains unmatched, is tired of being told off by these new guardians.

“The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs,” he declares in his latest podcast. “How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare, who made a ‘doing word’ out of a ‘thing word’ every chance he got. He ‘tabled’ the motion and ‘chaired’ the meeting in which nouns were made verbs.” Pedants whinge that phrases such as “He actioned it that week” are ugly, says Fry. “Well it’s only ugly cos it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly, and before them Baudelaire.” Something to debate when Fry appears next week on Jonathan Ross’s comeback show.

Boris Johnson isn’t scared by the property slump. The London Mayor has placed his £1,700,000 house on the market. The four-storey property in Islington has five bedrooms – enough for Johnson, his barrister wife Marina, and their four children – and is described as “most elegant and extremely light”, although the front garden is something of a jungle. The red front door, in front of which Johnson was regularly snapped in a state of bewilderment, is an added attraction. The clan is believed to be moving to nearby Highbury Fields.

President Bush is not the only leader leaving the White House next week. Winston Churchill is too. In 2001 Tony Blair loaned Bush a bust of Churchill, knowing how much he admired the wartime leader (Bush said he was “the best example of how individuals can shape history”). The bust, by Jacob Epstein, returns to the Government Art Collection next week, but will Barack Obama receive a similar gift from Gordon Brown? “It would be an honour to lend a work from the collection,” a government spokesman said.

The City Uncovered, Evan Davis’s take on global finance, began on BBC Two last night. The show was originally to be called Evan’s Tales of the City but BBC producers were worried that viewers might think it was related to Armistead Maupin’s book and TV series Tales of the City. How Maupin’s chronicle of hippyish gays and bisexuals in San Francisco could be confused with the flamboyant Today presenter, nicknamed “tinsel tits” by colleagues because of his nipple piercing, is anyone’s guess.

Postscript

Nerds are picking apart Valkyrie, Tom Cruise’s new film about a German attempt to assassinate Hitler. Cruise’s character, Claus von Stauffenberg has amputated fingers in one scene but is fully fingered the next, and a bathtub that appears in another has “modern fixtures, including a hand-held massage/rinse nozzle”. Some say the biggest mistake was making the film.

Donovan, the Sixties “good vibes” merchant, will receive one of France’s highest honours, the Officer’s Medal in the Order of Arts and Letters, this weekend at a ceremony in Cannes. Could the award be the influence of fellow acoustic folkie and wife of the President, Carla Bruni?

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