Stephen Fry Quotes

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation. For what do terms used without skill or meaning, which are at once corrupt and misapplied, denote but a people listless, supine, and ripe for servitude?

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.

The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.

Every individual or national degeneration is immediately revealed by a directly proportional degradation in language.

Not literature alone, but society itself is wormed and rotten when language ceases to be respected not merely by advertisers and politicians, but by persons of learning and authority.

It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools / which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners / desecrated them.

I have difficulties with contemporary language. Big difficulties. I counted, you know, something like 160 words have disappeared from the English language because of the use of the word "like." "I'm like, he's like" - not "thought," not "as if ."

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language.

The pressure on language to deteriorate does not come merely from below, from the "democratic" lev-elers. It comes also from above, from the fancy jar-gonmongers, idle game players, fashionable coteries for second-rate intellectuals.

The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

I'm a professor of media studies as well as humanities, and I'm an evangelist of popular culture, but when there's only media, then there's going to be a slow debasement of language, and that's what I think we're fighting.

I'm a teacher and a writer; my life is words. When I see the denigration of language, it hurts me, and it's easy to denigrate a word by trivializing it.

The corrosion of our public language reflects deep pathologies — societal, cultural, economic — in the body politic.

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

Don't you understand that all language is dead currency? How they keep on playing shop with it all the same.

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

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.

... the progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it.