Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
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Words on the Move: Why English Won't - and Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally)
We might say, following the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson and the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, that the development of language is the result of human action but not of human design.2 Moreover, the humans performing these actions are just regular people speaking and writing intuitively, not fancy experts who’ve researched the rules.
Moshe Koppel • Judaism Straight Up: Why Real Religion Endures
World we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem
“Properly speaking, of course, we cannot call it chaos. Grammar is like the air: someone higher up might try to set rules for using it, but people won’t necessarily follow them.”
Jay Rubin • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel (Vintage International)
Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.