American language Quotes

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

You cannot learn to curse like an American.

The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform. But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse, the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a bad word in the American language.

The American language should be descriptive rather than proscriptive.

I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.

Be it enacted by the People of the State of Illinois, represented in the General Assembly: The official language of the state of Illinois shall hereafter be known as the "American" language and not as the "English" language.

I guess I'd always mocked the American accent. I didn't consider it a respectable dialect, but I was told that it was.

What I am doing is creating a language. A different American language.

However old-fashioned and right-wing this may sound, the American genius for language lies in understatement, in saying things simply, pointedly and quickly, and in making new and clean and swift what otherwise might be ponderous, round and slow.

American art, like the American language and American education, was as far as possible sexless.

The only authors whom I acknowledge as American are the journalists. They, indeed, are not great writers, but they speak the language of their countrymen, and make themselves heard by them.