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.

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.

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.

Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.

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.

An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies by pulling itself in two, without permanently diminishing the original. So with words. A meaning may develop on the periphery of the body of meanings associated with a word, and shortly this tentacle-meaning has grown to such proportions that it dwarfs all other meanings.

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