Nigger, nigger, nigger. If I don't achieve anything else while I am President, I intend to wipe that word out of the English language.
A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.
Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day.
Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
The one thing - apart from assumptions about German - that I have to challenge frequently is people assuming that lexicographers are fierce protectors of the language when in fact our job is not to put a lid on it.
The traditional statement about language is that it is in itself living, and that writing is the dead part of language.
Nor can one word be chang'd but for a worse.
I suppose that was my first bit of acting, the acquisition of an English accent. It was really just an attempt to be understood.
That which separates ourselves from previous generations is rhetoric.
Changes in language often reflect the changing values of a culture.
That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.
One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.
To lovers of the long and intricate history of language the disuse and final death of certain words is a matter of regret. Yet every age bears witness to the inevitableness of such loss.
It's no big deal about how you get language to evolve. You cause language to evolve by saying new and intelligent things to each other.
The scholars and poets of an earlier time can be read only with a dictionary to help.
Now the word-symbols of conceptual ideas have passed so long from hand to hand in the service of the understanding, that they have gradually lost all such fanciful reference.
When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of 'They reached a compromise'?
And to bring in a new word by the head and shoulders, they leave out the old one.
GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.
The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.
In India I've been to all the award functions, but that was in Hindi; now it's in English so it's a much bigger scale.
You know, words have strange destiny, too. They grow. They get old. They die. They come back.
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.
Trying to keep up with current slang sucks.
