David Crystal Quotes

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

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

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.

Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

Natural languages generally are not designed by humans, they're just designed by the participants and you say something new and somebody else says, "Oh, that's a cool way to say it," and the next thing you know, everyone is saying it because it's shiny.

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

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.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

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.

We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language.

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

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

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

All words have life cycles.

I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.

The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.

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

Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.

There is something like an explosion in the meaning of certain words: they have a greater value than their meaning in the dictionary.

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.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

In my mind, if you went back to the Middle Ages, in Italy they'd be speaking Middle Age Italian. And at that point, it would obviously be indecipherable for us, but for the people of that time, it was just normal talking.

I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.

I wonder if, as a society, we will ever be able to call someone a jive tofurkey.