“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.” LanguageEnglishLinguisticsLanguage Evolution Book:Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries Source: Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
“Etymological fallacy is the worst sort of pedantry: a meaningless personal opinion trying to dress itself up as concern for preserving historical principles. It misses that language change itself is a historical principle: a language that doesn't change is a dead language” LanguageChangeHistoryAliveDeadDead Language Book:Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries Source: Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries
“Most people, if they think at all about the dictionary, think of it as this fixed object given to us from on high. It is the thing that legitimizes language and makes language real. You never think that it's actually compiled by living, breathing nerds like me. When you realize that it's compiled by people, it becomes a different thing, a different kind of document.” PeopleThinkingKindDifferentRealLanguageRealizingDifferent KindsNerdDictionary Author:Kory Stamper
“There's a measure of prescriptivism and descriptivism in every dictionary. Prescriptivism believes that the language should mirror the best practices of English, and editors are prescriptivist in so far as they don't want to let things they consider to be inelegant or ungrammatical into print.” BelieveLanguagePrintDictionary Author:Kory Stamper
“Language is the primary way we communicate with each other, and we have really strong feelings about what words mean, and about good language and bad. Those things are really based on sort of an agglutination of half-remembered rules from high school or college, and our own personal views on language and the things we grew up saying, the things we grew up being told not to say.” MeanFeelingsSchoolLanguageStrongCollegeHigh SchoolCommunicateStrong Feeling Author:Kory Stamper
“I make the case in the book that Standard English, that language we all aspire to live and move and have our being within, is actually based on a fiction. It's not anyone's native way of speaking or writing. That's why we have to take classes in it. Language is just really squishy.” WritingBookMovingLanguageNative Author:Kory Stamper
“Whenever you try and simplify how people speak, it's just hard to squish them into a simple rule. Language doesn't work that way.” PeopleTryingSpeakLanguageSimpleSimplify Author:Kory Stamper
“I certainly self-police my language depending on who I'm talking to. I try to be very careful about using filler words, about not drawling certain vowels, even when I can't say "drawl" without drawling. That's kind of sad, because self-policing inhibits communication. You're more focused on the words coming out of your mouth or that should not be coming out of your mouth than making a connection with the person you're speaking to.” TryingKindLanguageCommunicationCarefulFocused Author:Kory Stamper
“The initial 18th-, 19th-century intention was to give the less-educated lower classes a way to move up into this new, rising middle class, to enable them to fit in. So our view of language as being class-based is an unintended consequence of the drive to help educate rising businessmen.” GivingHelpingMovingLanguageFitConsequenceIntentionMiddle ClassEducateBusinessman Author:Kory Stamper
“It's very easy, when things like the gay marriage write-in happen, to get sick of how people view language and say, "ah, come on it's just a dictionary." But then you hear from people who say if you take out "retarded" it won't exist anymore, and there will be no slurs for people to call my child. And that's just heartrending.” PeopleChildrenLanguageEasyGaySickMy ChildrenGay MarriageDictionaryRetarded Author:Kory Stamper
“Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.” SometimesLanguageGoing AwayThings ChangeDictionary Author:Kory Stamper
“You will hear people say the C-word. Except, it's a regional language: in British English, c - t has much less of an inflammatory sense than it does in North American English. You can hear someone on British TV called "a c - ting monkey" or a man being called a c - t. The particular fascination of profanity is how culturally specific it is and how it evolves.” PeopleMenLanguageEvolveProfanity Author:Kory Stamper
