This is what we mean by “The Ish”.
As in, Stephen Fry is THE ISH, as the paragraph below irrefutably demonstrates:
But above all let there be pleasure. Let there be textural delight, let there be silken words and flinty words and sodden speeches and soaking speeches and crackling utterance and utterance that quivers and wobbles like rennet. Let there be rapid firecracker phrases and language that oozes like a lake of lava. Words are your birthright. Unlike music, painting, dance and raffia work, you don’t have to be taught any part of language or buy any equipment to use it, all the power of it was in you from the moment the head of daddy’s little wiggler fused with the wall of mummy’s little bubble. So if you’ve got it, use it. Don’t be afraid of it, don’t believe it belongs to anyone else, don’t let anyone bully you into believing that there are rules and secrets of grammar and verbal deployment that you are not privy to. Don’t be humiliated by dinosaurs into thinking yourself inferior because you can’t spell broccoli or moccasins. Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.
Witness, my friends! And get more here.
Language wizards: Firmly among the categories of people that I seriously might have sex with no matter what they look like. ;)
The Ish is also a rare example of words that Google just gets totally wrong. For instance, this top image-search result for The Ish is totally, totally not. Rather, it appears to be what a picture that won the caption contest for "Matthew Good in Jonestown" might look like…
Originally published at *Transcendental *Logic. You can comment here or there.