Language Erosion Quotes

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

From one till seven, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese. But I can't speak a word of it now.

Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust itsvitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile.

We've been speaking English as a second language so long that we've forgotten it as our first.

This happens to a lot of kids from different backgrounds - they lose a lot of their parents' and grandparents' teachings, language and culture because they have to deal with another language and culture 24/7. By the time I was 44, I was terrible at Spanish. I was always intimidated whenever I had to speak it.

Over my lifetime, heavy usage has woefully eroded profanity's power.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter... [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

We live in a society that compels us to go on using these concepts, and we no longer know what they mean.

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

We use up words like 'spiritual' so fast in this culture. Twenty years ago spiritual had a distinct meaning. But now there's a lot of jack-off thinkers who just love to talk about the spiritual. And there is a lot of bogus - is bogosity a word? It should be - a lot of bogosity in these spiritual seekers. So you have to find another way to express it. I just call it 'how I fit'.