Among his count­less occu­pa­tions, Stephen Fry acts, writes scripts, per­forms com­e­dy, writes books, broad­casts on the radio, writes plays, presents tele­vi­sion pro­grams, and writes poet­ry. Words, it seems, have served him well, or, rather, he’s made indus­tri­ous use of them. Any­one involved with such a wide range of the ver­bal arts must give quite a bit of thought to how lan­guage works, but Fry has act­ed direct­ly on this inter­est. His and Hugh Lau­rie’s com­e­dy show A Bit of Fry and Lau­rie fea­tured lin­guis­ti­cal­ly themed sketch­es; more recent­ly, his pod­cast Stephen Fry’s Pod­grams offered com­men­taries on lan­guage. He even went so far as to host Fry’s Plan­et Word, a five-part BBC tele­vi­sion series on lan­guage, “how we learn it, write it and some­times lose it, and why it defines us.”

Giv­en Fry’s posi­tion as a bas­tion of mod­ern British wit who cares deeply about the words we speak and write, you might assume he uses only the high­est, most refined kind of Eng­lish. Not so, it seems; Fry can get down into the ver­bal gut­ter with the best of them, and the inter­view clip above con­tains his defense — or, to be more pre­cise, his endorse­ment — of swear­ing. “It would be impos­si­ble to imag­ine going through life with­out swear­ing, and with­out enjoy­ing swear­ing,” he attests. Some would call swear­ing unnec­es­sary, and Fry recon­tex­tu­al­izes their argu­ment like so: “It’s not nec­es­sary to have col­ored socks. It’s not nec­es­sary for this cush­ion to be here. But is any­one going to write in and say, ‘I was shocked to see that cush­ion there! It real­ly was­n’t nec­es­sary’? No. Things not being nec­es­sary is what makes life inter­est­ing.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry Gets Ani­mat­ed About Lan­guage

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage In Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Eng­lish And Its Evo­lu­tion

Have you ever dreamed of becom­ing a word? NPR’s Adam Cole has, and he’s writ­ten a song about the immor­tal­i­ty that comes from hav­ing your name turned into a noun. But as his col­league Robert Krul­wich points out, many of the peo­ple whose names are now in dic­tio­nar­ies would be hor­ri­fied. Joseph Guil­lo­tine, for exam­ple, hat­ed the death penal­ty. And James Thomas Bru­denell, sev­enth earl of Cardi­gan, must be turn­ing over in his grave: “Here’s a brave cav­al­ry offi­cer, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade dur­ing the Crimean War, watched his men cut down, butchered by the ene­my, a man of action, a sol­dier, and what do we remem­ber him for,” writes Krul­wich on his blog? “Yup, by some trick of fate, he is now a sweater with but­tons down the front. I mean, real­ly…”