Robert MacNeil Quotes

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art.

Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.

To go from "gnarly" to "literally," that shows I'm growing up, right?

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

Nor can one word be chang'd but for a worse.

The ways in which language changes never ceases to interest me.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

The truth is that only 1% of all new words are totally new, and of those an even smaller percentage are conjured up out of thin air. The vast majority of coinages are the product of some kind of repurposing, and the result has always been a mix of tradition and innovation.

Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

I believe every change any word has undergone probably originated in ignorance.

You know, words have strange destiny, too. They grow. They get old. They die. They come back.

All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium it only looks like speech.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

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

A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

By such innovations are languages enriched, when the words are adopted by the multitude, and naturalized by custom.