Language Decay Quotes

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action … Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

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

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

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have

When I came back from Bolivia, my Spanish was in some ways as good as my English. I am rusty today. But I am comfortable talking in Spanish. I am not flawless or fluent, but I am comfortable. It takes me a day or two speaking a lot of Spanish to get back into a rhythm.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

There is no such thing as an empty word, only one that is worn out yet remains full.

To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.

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.

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the name of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

No religion is suddenly rejected by any people; it is rather gradually outgrown. None sees a religion die; dead religions are like dead languages and obsolete customs: the decay is long and - like the glacier march - is perceptible only to the careful watcher by comparisons extending over long periods.

So completely had learning decayed in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could apprehend their services in English or even translate a letter from Latin to English... There were so few of them that I cannot recollect a single one South of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom.

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

I took Latin and Spanish. I can speak a very small amount of Spanish, but Latin has sort of gone away! Unless I was joining the Catholic Church, there would be no need to learn Latin.

We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

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.

Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

My Mandarin is slowly getting worse.

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

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

Language is in decline. Not only has eloquence departed but simple, direct speech as well, though pomposity and banality have not.