Top 41 John McWhorter Quotes
#1. Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it
John McWhorter
#2. We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.
John McWhorter
#3. Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.
John McWhorter
#4. Most of the languages that now exist are almost certain to become extinct within this century.
John McWhorter
#5. People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.
John McWhorter
#6. In an ideal world, the time English speakers devote to steeling themselves against, and complaining about, things like Billy and me, singular they, and impact as a verb would be better spent attending to genuine matters of graceful oral and written expression.
John McWhorter
#7. Our sense of what American English is has upended our relationship to articulateness, our approach to writing, and how (and whether) we impart it to the young, our interest in poetry, and our conception of what it is, and even our response to music and how we judge it.
John McWhorter
#8. Linguists traditionally observe that esteemed writers have been using they as a gender-neutral pronoun for almost a thousand years. As far back as the 1400s, in the Sir Amadace story, one finds the likes of Iche mon in thayre degree ("Each man in their degree").
John McWhorter
#9. Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.
John McWhorter
#10. Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.
John McWhorter
#11. 'LOL' is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.
John McWhorter
#12. Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
John McWhorter
#13. Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.
John McWhorter
#14. The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.
John McWhorter
#15. A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.
John McWhorter
#16. Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.
John McWhorter
#17. As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.
John McWhorter
#18. For all but the sliver of poetry fans, over the past forty years popular song lyrics have been the nation's poetry.
John McWhorter
#19. Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
John McWhorter
#20. Don't tell the Scandinavians I said this, but "Swedish," "Norwegian," and "Danish" are all really one "language,
John McWhorter
#21. People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.
John McWhorter
#22. People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.
John McWhorter
#23. As far as I'm concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I'm not interested in white people loving me. It's an unrealistic expectation. Black people don't love anybody but themselves.
John McWhorter
#24. Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
John McWhorter
#25. Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?
John McWhorter
#26. I am not 'African American' - I am black American.
John McWhorter
#27. If you want to learn about how humans differ, study cultures. However, if you want insight as to what makes all humans worldwide the same, beyond genetics, there are few better places to start than how language works.
John McWhorter
#28. Latin illa became, with some erosion of sounds into la, the definite article
John McWhorter
#29. In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.
John McWhorter
#31. People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.
John McWhorter
#33. Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.
John McWhorter
#34. The late twentieth century has been the locus of a new lurch on English's time line in America, where oratorical, poetic, and compositional craft of a rigorously exacting nature has been cast to the margins of the culture.
John McWhorter
#35. English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.
John McWhorter
#36. The difference between educated people and uneducated people is that educated people have been opened up to the notion that you can disagree without fighting; whereas uneducated people, in conversation, seek to always agree
everybody agrees and agrees and that's considered basic social libation.
John McWhorter
#37. As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.
John McWhorter
#38. This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with foreign languages.
John McWhorter
#39. Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
John McWhorter
#40. the eight main "dialects" of Chinese are so vastly different that they are, under any analysis, separate languages. The
John McWhorter
#41. (I must note that the copy editor for this book, upon reading this section, actually allowed me to use singular they throughout the book. Here's to them in awed gratitude!)
John McWhorter
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
