Stephen Fry rounds on grammar pedants

Stephen Fry (pictured), the polymath comic and quiz show presenter, has taken a swipe at the self-styled guardians of the English language, who he dismisses as "semi-educated losers". Although he does not mention them by name, he appears to have in his sights Lynne Truss, the author of the best-selling Eats, Shoots, Leaves, and John Humphrys, the presenter of Radio 4's Today programme, who recently weighed in with a book that decried the "mangling and manipulating of the English language".

Speaking on his most recent podcast, which he launches from his personal website, The New Adventures of Mr Stephen Fry, he says: "The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs.

"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."

Fry goes on to condemn grammatical pedants who dismiss phrases such as "He actioned it that week" as ugly. "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." ·