Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Descriptivists believe that language should be defined by those who use it; they observe and record, and so “correctness” is an ever-changing notion based on how people are writing and speaking at any given time.
Emmy J. Favilla • A World Without "Whom"
A linguistic concept called the theory of performativity says that language does not simply describe or reflect who we are, it creates who we are.
Amanda Montell • Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
Anne Helen Petersen • "I Resonate With That" [NAILS ON CHALKBOARD]
Language, though, is tough and resilient, a tenacity backed up by a long history. Its autonomy cannot be lost or seriously damaged, however roughly it is handled. It is the right of all writers to experiment with the possibilities of language and expand the range of its effectiveness. Without that adventurous spirit, nothing new can ever be born.
Haruki Murakami • Novelist as a Vocation
as Saki once put it, ‘a little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation’,
Susie Dent • Dent's Modern Tribes: The Secret Languages of Britain
I’ve started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems. In saying a melon, you need to use the masculine article. In saying the melons, you use the plural article, which does not reflect gender and is the same for both the masculine and the feminine.
David Sedaris • Me Talk Pretty One Day
I don't see with my eyes. I see with my mouth. That is to say, I see with language. Things occur as they occur because of language. What distinguishing is, is to take something like an undifferentiated mass and to bring forth from that mass a realm of possibility. Distinction gives existence. It makes existence possible.
