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Quote by Kory Stamper

“Back in the 19th century, our marketing folks decided to play up the refined usage angle because prescriptivism was very popular: our dictionary is where you go to learn anything about anything. That really set the tone in North America for how people responded to dictionaries.”

Quote by Kory Stamper

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“We are a people that let the small things just go by because it's a little uncomfortable and nobody wants to ruffle a feather. If you're quiet and you're watching it, you're just as much at fault as the person there. You're watching a victim be berated and you're standing by, knowing that feeling in your gut that it's wrong. Now you have a tool in order to change that.”

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“Mainstream Canadians, what some might call the dominant culture, like to think this racism doesn't happen. It's important to remind people that it does and that we have work to do to end it.”

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“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.”

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“What makes autocorrect really interesting for a lexicographer is we read in a very weird way. A lot of times we'll catch things that are so clearly autocorrect typos, and you learn to tell the difference between an honest-to-goodness, ham-fisted typo and an autocorrect typo because the latter will not necessarily be a difference of one letter apart on the keyboard, which is usually what typos are, or it won't be the wrong its or the wrong there.”

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“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.”

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“We want to emulate the educated class, even if we don't think of educated people as a class these days.”

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“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.”

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“The history of English is full of that, lots of things done with good intentions that 200 years down the road have resulted in a giant mess, where someone's pet peeves - like John Dryden and his hatred of terminal prepositions - could become real standards.”

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