Larry Wall Quotes

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.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

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

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.

Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development

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.

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

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.

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

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

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

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.

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

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

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law

As any custom is disused, the words that expressed it must perish with it; as any opinion grows popular, it will innovate speech in the same proportion as it alters practice.