Don't Mind Your Language? Siamo proprio sicuri?

Qualche tempo fa ho trovato questo video sull'ottimo blog Terminologia etc. di Licia Corbolante. Il video è tratto da un brano del geniale Stephen Fry, che potete trovare per intero qui, e di cui riporto alcuni punti salienti:

(...) People seem to be able to find sensual and sensuous pleasure in almost anything but words these days (...) anyone who expresses themselves with originality, delight and verbal freshness is more likely to be mocked, distrusted or disliked than welcomed. The free and happy use of words appears to be considered elitist or pretentious. Sadly, desperately sadly, the only people who seem to bother with language in public today bother with it in quite the wrong way. They write letters to broadcasters and newspapers in which they are rude and haughty about other people’s usage and in which they show off their own superior ‘knowledge’ of how language should be.

(...) ‘Because it’s ugly,’ whinge the pedants. It’s only ugly because it’s new and you don’t like it. Ugly in the way Picasso, Stravinsky and Eliot were once thought ugly and before them Monet, Mahler and Baudelaire. Pedants will also claim, with what I am sure is eye-popping insincerity and shameless disingenuousness, that their fight is only for ‘clarity’. (...) No, the claim to be defending language for the sake of clarity almost never, ever holds water. Nor does the idea that following grammatical rules in language demonstrates clarity of thought and intelligence of mind. Having said this, I admit that if you want to communicate well for the sake of passing an exam or job interview, then it is obvious that wildly original and excessively heterodox language could land you in the soup. I think what offends examiners and employers when confronted with extremely informal, unpunctuated and haywire language is the implication of not caring that underlies it. (...) But that is an issue of fitness, of suitability, it has nothing to do with correctness. There is no right language or wrong language any more than are right or wrong clothes. Context, convention and circumstance are all.

(...)  There’s no right or wrong in language, any more than there’s right or wrong in nature. Evolution is all about restless and continuous change, mutation and variation. (...) Convention exists, of course it does, but convention is no more a register of rightness or wrongness than etiquette is, it’s just another way of saying usage: convention is a privately agreed usage rather than a publicly evolving one. Conventions alter too, like life. (...) 

If you are the kind of person who insists on this and that ‘correct use’ I hope I can convince you to abandon your pedantry. (...) But above all let there be pleasure. (...) 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. (...) 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. (...)

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language from Matthew Rogers on Vimeo.

Ho trovato interessante questo brano perché riproduce perfettamente un'eterna discussione tra me e mio marito, dove lui la pensa come Fry, e io, a quanto pare, sarei sulla buona strada per diventare una grammar nazi, come quello che appare in questo divertente video. Io rispondo che se non distinguessi il giusto dallo sbagliato nella lingua potrei anche cambiare lavoro, ma penso anche che Fry non abbia tutti i torti. 

Si tratta però di tracciare un limite, e allora dove lo tracciamo? Diamo il benvenuto alla creatività linguistica dei parlanti ma rifiutiamo, per esempio, i calchi dall'inglese? Perché dovremmo, se rappresentano un'evoluzione della lingua? (Senza contare che possiamo anche rifiutarli, ma non abbiamo certo il potere di arrestarli.) Eppure, come non rabbrividire davanti a espressioni che si stanno diffondendo a macchia d'olio, come skillato, macciare (da match) e schedulare (e io che ero ferma al buon vecchio manàggement), o a parole italiane che assumono proditoriamente nuovi significati, come "confidente" che prende il posto di "fiducioso", oppure "organico" che si sostituisce a "biologico"?

Voi cosa ne dite?