Quotes About Language Usage

#1. Language usage always has a political context.

Jackson Katz

#2. 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.

Bill Bryson

#3. Among people who might be described as having at least a passing regard for the English language, there are few instances of usage that evoke a desire to mutilate more than the perceived misuse of literally.

Ammon Shea

#4. Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.

Steven Pinker

#5. To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Jack Lynch

#6. That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Ricky Jay

#7. Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It's all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

Thomas C. Foster

#8. It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language.

A.E. Van Vogt

#9. If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

George Orwell

#10. Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

Bill Bryson

#11. For proper government, the tribe must have ways to choose men whose lives reflect the way a government should behave. From

Frank Herbert

#12. Language becomes a prison house only poets can escape ... if we do not reject any strict distinctions between ordinary usage and figures of speech.

Arthur Quinn

#13. Usage is the best language teacher.

Quintilian

#14. I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Kathy Acker

#15. Every poll about the Left, the Right, and happiness reveals that the farther left one goes, the less happy the person is likely to be.

Dennis Prager

#16. Do what you love allows us to valorize elite workers, those who choose to overwork, and ignore those who have to overwork.

Miya Tokumitsu

#17. Heat in her birds of prey fingertips, smoke of gilded flowers in her aureate gorging hair.

Laura Gentile

#18. Fate is just another word for people's choices coming to a head. Destiny, coincidence, whatever you name it. It inevitably lies in our hands.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#19. Well you know for me, the action is the juice.

Tom Sizemore

#20. The way I see it, everyone's a Geek of some sort. Football, films, music - it doesn't matter what the interest is; if you're fascinated by it, then you're a Geek. Simple as that.

Andy Robb

#21. One of the hardest things was learning that I was worth recovery

Demi Lovato

#22. My suggestion is that at each state the proper order of operation of the mind requires an overall grasp of what is generally known, not only in formal logical, mathematical terms, but also intuitively, in images, feelings, poetic usage of language, etc.

David Bohm