You Are What You Speak Quotes

“Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax.
New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Americans tend to use "nation" as a synonym for "country." But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people who feel they belong together, whether they have a country of their own or not.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Yesterday's abomination is today's rule.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. This time could be better spent listening, learning, and enjoying the vast variety of human language around them.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“A stickler hallmark is that those who speak or write differently can't merely be wrong; they must be depraved, too.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“His captivating speech came not from his grammar or vocabulary but from the joy he took in wielding them well.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison in anticipation that it would help him lead the whole of South Africa.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Saying that English is “under threat” is something like saying that gravity and the use of the fork are under threat. It”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“America’s short-lived experiment with language planning is so obscure to modern memory that while the Klingon language has a 3,000-word entry on Wikipedia, as of this writing, the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres has no entry at all.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Knowing the difference between “infer” and “imply” is no more likely to create a skeptical, bullshit-detecting citizen than knowing the atomic weight of uranium or the capital of Niger. Smart”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls “E. B. White’s disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk’s little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities” or”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, “grammar.” And”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“A stickler hallmark is that those who speak or write differently can’t be merely wrong; they must be depraved, too.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“The sticklers Truss appeals to in the book are distinguished by several features. One is anger out of proportion to the crime. They”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Other “no-word-for” and “can’t-be-translated” myths include the stories that the Irish have no word for “sex” or even “yes” (how, one wonders, is there an Irish people left on the earth if they cannot say “yes” to sex? There”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Virtually anything can be translated—“X cannot be translated” usually means nothing more exciting than “We have a word, X, that you need three or four words for in your language.” But”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Bryson says we have no word for the Danish hygge, then goes on to tell us exactly what it means: “instantly satisfying and cozy” (though”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Bryson says that “we tend to regard other people’s languages as we regard their cultures— with ill-hidden disdain.” Too true. Unfortunately, Bryson proves himself right with a series of stories that should have set off his own too-bizarre-to-be-true detector.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language. I”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Power of Words

“Most people learn their trade – almost always farming – from their parents or village communities. Industrialization changed all that. People had to be able to learn to pick up new skills faster, since the economy had not only to produce but to continually grow and become more sophisticated technologically. Learning one frayed over many years would not do. People needed GENERIC skills, to which only a small amount of extra training would allow them to move around the economy, taking new jobs and responding to innovation.”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

“Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift's anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example”
― Robert Lane Greene, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity