Daniel Levitin Quotes

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.

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.

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.

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

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.

Language changes very fast.

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

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

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.

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.

She spent an afternoon staring at their front door. Waiting for someone? Yankel asked. What color is this? He stood very close to the door, letting the end of his nose touch the peephole. He licked the wood and joked, It certainly tastes like red. Yes, it is red, isn't it? Seems so. She buried her head in her hands. But couldn't it be just a bit more red?

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

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

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

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.

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

The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.

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.

Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in Basic Color Terms demonstrate exhaustively and empirically, the very simple thesis that anywhere in the world, as a language develops and acquires names for color, the colors always enter in the same order. The most primitive are black and white. Then red. Then either green or yellow.

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).

There are chemists who spend their whole lives trying to find out what's in a lump of sugar. I want to know one thing. What is color?