Part of language design is perturbing the proposed feature in various directions to see how it might generalize in the future.

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

Would you trust the linguistic intuitions of someone who has been studying Latin or Greek for three days?

You know, I've got my hands in 30 or 40 different pots simultaneously and so I have a little bit of all of that where I work.

I'm sorry, but you just made me lose my sense of humor, which is deeply regrettable.

It's easier to make up sayings people like to hear than sayings they like to heed.

I try not to confuse roles and traits in my own life. Being the Perl god is a role. Being a stubborn cuss is a trait.