TRICKY LINGUISTICS

Hugh Laurie: : So let's talk instead about flexibility of language

- um, linguistic elasticity, if you'd like.
Stephen Fry:: Yes, I think that I've said earlier that our
language, English -
L: As spoken by us.
F: As we speak it, yes, certainly, defines us. We are defined by
our language, if you will.
L: [to screen] Hello. We're talking about language.
F: Perhaps I can illustrate my point. Let me at least try. Here is
a question: um...
L: What is it?
F: Oh! Um... my question is this: is our language - English -
capable... is English capable of sustaining demagoguery?
L: Demagoguery?
F: Demagoguery.
L: And by "demagoguery" you mean...
F: By "demagoguery" I mean demagoguery...
L: I thought so.
F: I mean highly-charged oratory, persuasive whipping-up rhetoric.
Listen to me, listen to me. If Hitler had been British, would we,
under similar circumstances, have been moved, charged up, fired up
by his inflammatory speeches, or would we simply have laughed? Is
English too ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles? Would his language
simply have rung false in our ears?
L: [to screen] We're talking about things ringing false in our
ears.
F: May I compartmentalize - I hate to, but may I, may I: is our
language a function of our British cynicism, tolerance, resistance
to false emotion, humour, and so on, or do those qualities come
extrinsically - extrinsically - from the language itself? It's a
chicken and egg problem.
L: [to screen] We're talking about chickens, we're talking about
eggs.
F: Um... let me start a leveret here: there's language and there's
speech. Um, there's chess and there's a game of chess. Mark the
difference for me. Mark it please.
L: [to screen] We've moved on to chess.
F: Imagine a piano keyboard, eh, 88 keys, only 88 and yet, and
yet, hundreds of new melodies, new tunes, new harmonies are being
composed upon hundreds of different keyboards every day in Dorset
alone. Our language, tiger, our language: hundreds of thousands of
available words, frillions of legitimate new ideas, so that I can
say the following sentence and be utterly sure that nobody has
ever said it before in the history of human communication: "Hold
the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will
countermand my trousers." Perfectly ordinary words, but never
before put in that precise order. A unique child delivered of a
unique mother.
L: [to screen] ...
F: And yet, oh, and yet, we, all of us, spend all our days saying
to each other the same things time after weary time: "I love you,"
"Don't go in there," "Get out," "You have no right to say that,"
"Stop it," "Why should I," "That hurt," "Help," "Marjorie is
dead." Hmm? Surely, it's a thought to take out for cream tea on a
rainy Sunday afternoon.
L: So, to you, language is more than just a means of
communication?
F: Oh, of course it is, of course it is, of course it is, of
course it is. Language is my mother, my father, my husband, my
brother, my sister, my whore, my mistress, my check-out girl...
language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square
or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God.
Language is the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust
that falls into a shaft of morning light as you pluck from a old
bookshelf a half-forgotten book of erotic memoirs. Language is the
creak on a stair, it's a spluttering match held to a frosted pane,
it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, it's the warm,
wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred
Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth
on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl. It's cobwebs long since
overrun by an old Wellington boot.
L: [to screen] Night-night.

There is an old fashioned phrase "to start a hare running" which means "to set a topic
of conversation going by putting a view or thought forward". A leveret is a baby hare (a
little hare), so he's being a bit arch and saying "Here's a thoughtlet for you" (here's a
little thought).

It isn't a regionalism. It's something Stephen Fry has made up to raise a smile among
his viewers. However, the joke will probably only make sense to a very small number
of older British people.