Linguistic Decline Quotes

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

Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.

I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

At the beginning there was the Word; at the end just the Cliche.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

Hyperbole expands in societies where articulateness atrophies.

In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching remedial English in college.

The subjunctive mood is in its death throes, and the best thing to do is to put it out of its misery as soon as possible.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

Stop worrying about the 'dumbing down' of our language by bloggers, tweeters, cableheads and MSM thumbsuckers engaged in a 'race to the bottom' of the page by little minds confined to little words.

Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.

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 have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.