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.

Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage.

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.

Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such vague Latin terms as intercourse and cohabitation.

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler findings.

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.

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.