William Stafford Quotes

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Change is legitimate and inevitable, for our language is a mighty river, picking up silt and flotsam here and discarding it there, but growing ever wider and richer.

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

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

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.

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.

The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

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.

Samskrit is the unsurpassed zenith in the whole development of languages yet known to us.

If I were in a position to announce a public competition to coin a new word, I would do so right now.

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

Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.

Here is a language so far ahead of its time, that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors, but also on nearly all its successors.

Our biggest technology that we ever, ever invented was articulated language with built-out grammar. It is that that allows us to imagine things far in the future and things way back in the past.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.

Nonsense, n. The objections that are urged against this excellent dictionary.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.