Robert Lane Greene Quotes

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

Bryson says that "we tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures - with ill-hidden disdain." Too true. Unfortunately, Bryson proves himself right with a series of stories that should have set off his own too-bizarre-to-be-true detector.

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.

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

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

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.

Yesterday's abomination is today's rule.

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.

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.

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.

Bryson says we have no word for the Danish hygge, then goes on to tell us exactly what it means: "instantly satisfying and cozy" (though

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

It is possible to communicate beautifully or boringly, in every language on Earth. But people don't like to believe this. They make self-aggrandizing myths instead.

Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or

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

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

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