John Maynard Smith Quotes

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

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

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

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

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?

Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.

I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.

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.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

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

Words change their meanings, just as organisms evolve. We would impose an enormous burden on our economy if we insisted on payment in cattle every time we identified a bonus as a pecuniary advantage (from the Latin pecus , or cattle, a verbal fossil from a former commercial reality).

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

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.

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.

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

When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.

Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

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

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

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