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You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity QUOTES

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity QUOTES

1 " Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

2 " Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

3 " Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

4 " Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

5 " There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

6 " Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison in anticipation that it would help him lead the whole of South Africa. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

7 " Yesterday's abomination is today's rule. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

8 " If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it never has. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

9 " Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

10 " Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. This time could be better spent listening, learning, and enjoying the vast variety of human language around them. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

11 " To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the vast majority of the world's humans either speak and something primitive or speak something badly. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

12 " I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

13 " His captivating speech came not from his grammar or vocabulary but from the joy he took in wielding them well. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

14 " Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

15 " for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, “grammar.” And "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

16 " Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

17 " Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

18 " A stickler hallmark is that those who speak or write differently can't merely be wrong; they must be depraved, too. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

19 " As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

20 " A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax.
New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be. "

― Robert Lane Greene , You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity