Elizabeth Drew Quotes

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

A poem is a form of refrigeration that stops language going bad.

There is only one way to degrade mankind permanently and that is to destroy language.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.

The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.

A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.

If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free.

What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation.

A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.

Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.

Life-actors never rehearse and need no script. A life-actor uses whatever he has available, nothing more, nothing less.

The pressure on language to deteriorate does not come merely from below, from the "democratic" lev-elers. It comes also from above, from the fancy jar-gonmongers, idle game players, fashionable coteries for second-rate intellectuals.

If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilised of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought.

In the province of Quebec where I come from, we speak French and the only cosmopolitan city is Montreal. Every time we tackle the subject of immigration and racial tension, it's an issue that concerns Montreal. Also, in Quebec, we have this added issue that we want people to speak French, because French is always on the verge of disappearing to some extent. I work, play and do everything in French.

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singularly generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most important challenge of our times.

Educated people do indeed speak the same languages; cultivated ones need not speak at all.

In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.