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

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.

Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit's mind? One has the feeling that the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish has reading any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be "when Island it as a young person.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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