language corruption Quotes

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

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

Language is a virus from outer space.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought

Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification.

The word is now a virus.

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

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.

Avoid, which many grave men have not done, words taken from sacred subjects and from elevated poetry: these we have seen vilely prostituted. Avoid too the society of the barbarians who misemploy them.

Only in England is the perversion of language regarded as a victory for democracy.

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.

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?

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

American English is essentially English after having been wiped off with a dirty sponge.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

Like Karl Kraus [Wittgenstein], was seldom pleased by what he saw of the institutions of men, and the idiom of the passerby mostly offended his ear - particularly when they happened to speak philosophically; and like Karl Kraus, he suspected that the institutions could not but be corrupt if the idiom of the race was confused, presumptuous, and vacuous, a fabric of nonsense, untruth, deception, and self-deception.