Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
George Orwell once blamed the demise of the English language on politics. It's quite possible he never read a prospectus.
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.
Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.
The American language is in a state of flux based upon survival of the unfittest.
We gave you a perfectly good language and you f***ed up.
My Mandarin is slowly getting worse.
The corrosion of our public language reflects deep pathologies — societal, cultural, economic — in the body politic.
I can't help but admire the structural linguists who have carved out for themselves a linguistic discipline based on the deterioration of written communication. Another case of men devoting their lives to studying more and more about less and less - filling volumes and libraries with the subtle linguistic analysis of the grunt.
I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.
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.
Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.
I don't see the future as bright, language-wise. I see it as a glass half empty - and evaporating quickly.
A cliché is dead matter. It causes gangrene in the prose around it, and sooner or later it eats your brain.
Their talk was endless, compulsive, and indulgent, sometimes sounding like the remains of the English language after having been hashed over by nuclear war survivors for a few hundred years.
Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.
Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.
In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to he a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
After the golden age of Latinity, we gradually slide into the silver, and at length precipitately descend into the iron.
Poor Knight! he really had two periods, the firsta dull man writing broken English, the seconda broken man writing dull English.
