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The great arbiters of language are the women who speak it in the presence of children... What the women pass on to the next generation is right and what they do not bother to pass on to their children sooner or later becomes wrong.

Charlton Laird

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Charlton Laird
Born: 1901
Born: March 16
Lexicographer
Linguist
Novelist
University Teacher
Nashua
Iowa
Next
Pass
Women
Generation
Right
Later
Children
Generations
Arbiters
Great
Becomes
Arbiter
Wrong
Sooner
Language
Bother
Speak
Presence

More quotes by Charlton Laird

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Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.
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You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read about it, but it goes on without us, or in spite of us.
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Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.
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Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where they come from.
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If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.
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The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.
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Grammar is not a set of rules it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.
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Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all.
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