Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit’s mind? One has the feeling that...

Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.

Americans tend to use “nation” as a synonym for “country.” But political scientists and historians, as well as many Europeans, tend to use the term for a much more specific phenomenon: a group of people...

There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.

I’d start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd.

Yesterday’s abomination is today’s rule.

Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules, and then you become good enough to improvise all the time. Writing is...

Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even so, Nelson Mandela made it a point to learn this language in prison...

Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. This time could be better spent listening, learning, and enjoying the vast variety of human language around them.

Though it’s true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn’t rail against it with (Jonathan) Swift’s anger. Instead, he hoped the example of his dictionary would...

To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the vast majority of the world’s humans either speak and something primitive or speak...

A contemporary Catholic opponent of Martin Luther complained, “Even tailors and shoe-makers – even women and ignorant persons, who could read but little – studied it (the German Bible) with the greatest avidity as the...

As economists like to say, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.

Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not to clear thinking and basic decency but to the structured parts of our...

Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change (language); he ascribes it to moral failing.

If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it never has.

His captivating speech came not from his grammar or vocabulary but from the joy he took in wielding them well.

Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was utterly charmed by it. I found the foreigner in myself.