No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

The dictionary is a closed system in which someone interested in the meaning of a word can go around and around and end up exactly where he started, simply because words are defined in terms of other words, and these, in turn, are defined in terms of still other words.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

Gestures and facial expressions do indeed communicate, as anyone can prove by turning off the sound on a television set and asking watchers to characterize the speakers from the picture alone.

Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.