15 Quotes by John H. McWhorter

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.

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.

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

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.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

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.

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.