Pedantry, Stephen Fry and I

[desperance]

I am, I confess, guilty of much that Stephen rails against here. I am that pedant who rails against improper apostrophisation (tho' I've never written to Radio Four about it)*, and I deliberately do not split infinitives because I love the contortions that are sometimes necessary to avoid it - but that's the point, because I am also the other half, the creature he denies here: the pedant who loves language, who capers in it, who uses it effulgently, absurdly, sometimes grotesquely, simply for the pleasure of the shape and the feel and the sound of it in my mouth and on my page.

Having said which, I do love this, and I do find myself in reluctant sympathy with much of what he says:

*My best-ever misapostrophe? Was - of course - a greengrocer's offence. On a board outside his shop, it said:

FLOWER'S
BOUQUET'S
WREATH'S
DELIVER'Y