Marshall McLuhan Quotes

a letter ... changes utterly the moment it slips inside an envelope. It stops being mine. It becomes yours. What I mean is gone. What you understand is all that remains.

Human language is local and changeable, and is therefore incapable of being used as the means of unchangeable and universal information.

The image is an image.

The importance of an artist is bringing new signs into a language.

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

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.

By an object, I mean anything that we can think, i.e. anything we can talk about.

I also remembered that you were beautiful." "Memory does play tricks on us." "No. Your face is the same, but I don't remember what beautiful means anymore.

you can make mean anything.

Verbing weirds language.

As our larynxes descended, we were able to make sounds with our mouths in new and far more expressive ways. Verbal language soon overtook physical gesturing as the primary means of communication for all human beings except Italians. (Earth (The Book), p. 36)

It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.

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

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

I worry about images. Images are what things mean.

Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.

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.

Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on. "I do," Alice hastily replied; "at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know." "Not the same thing a bit!" said the Hatter. "You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!

Language is the chief means and index of a nation's progress.

Dont confuse legibility with communication. Just because something is legible doesnt mean it communicates and, more importantly, doesnt mean it communicates the right thing.

Compared to the spoken word, a picture is a pitiful thing, indeed.

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