E. B. White 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 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.

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

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

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

You must never aspire to 'finish' a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it's an evolutionary process.

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

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.

First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

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.

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

Remember in the forms of speech comes change Within a thousand years, and words that then Were well esteemed, seem foolish now and strange; And yet they spake them so, time and again, And thrived in love as well as any men; And so to win their loves in sundry days, In sundry lands there are as many ways.

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.

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

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.

Language is a living thing

Language grows out of life, out of its needs and experiences. 828

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

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.

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

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

I use things, I steal things from my life when I want to, when I need to, or when it seems appropriate. But most of the stuff in my novels is entirely invented, ninety-five percent. And even when I do borrow something, it becomes fictionalized.