Language Norms Quotes

As for language, almost everything goes now. That is not to say that verbal taboos have disappeared, but merely that they have shifted somewhat. In my youth, for example, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl'.

Those that will combat use and custom by the strict rules of grammar do but jest

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

It's a sin to swear.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

I got all A's and was hated for it; I spoke correctly and was called a punk.

I try not to be too profane around children or old people. Other than that, that's how I speak.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

The American language should be descriptive rather than proscriptive.

In most legislatures, punctilious attention to correct usage is considered elitist. The word 'government,' for example, is normally pronounced 'gummint'; bureaucracy is 'bureaucacy'; fiscal comes out 'physical,' and one moves not to suspend the rules, but to 'suppend.'

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions.

There is no reason why we shouldn't be able to split an infinitive, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?

When the medium of the film is English, even the illiterates also should speak in proper English.

To write well consists of continuously making small erosions, wearing away grammar in its established form, current norms of language. It is an act of permanent rebellion and subversion against social environs.

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.

Here, whatever is not boring is not English.

Homo Americanus is going to go on speaking and writing the way he always has, no matter what dictionary he owns.

Once women are not excluded, I don't think any of us will give a damn what pronouns are used. That wasn't the point.

I don't condone bad language.

I was raised to think cursing makes you look unintelligent.

I think America just needs to get real when it comes to the way our kids speak and communicate. They need to understand what happens in rap.