You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity
Robert Lane Greene
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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 somewhat more like classical composition, where established forms and conditions will hold greater sway.”
“A truly enlightened attitude to language should simply be to let six thousand or more flowers bloom. Subcultures should be allowed to thrive, not just because it is wrong to squash them, because they enrich the wider culture. Just as Black English has left its mark on standard English Culture, South Africans take pride in the marks of Afrikaans and African languages on their vocabulary and syntax. New Zealand's rugby team chants in Maori, dancing a traditional dance, before matches. French kids flirt with rebellion by using verlan, a slang that reverses words' sounds or syllables (so femmes becomes meuf). Argentines glory in lunfardo, an argot developed from the underworld a centyry ago that makes Argentine Spanish unique still today. The nonstandard greeting "Where y'at?" for "How are you?" is so common among certain whites in New Orleans that they bear their difference with pride, calling themselves Yats. And that's how it should be.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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 lives such as job interviews, political speeches, literary essays, novels, and the like. They signal education and learning, but they are not the same thing as education and learning.”
“Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions.”
“As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data.”
“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 who feel they belong together, whether they have a country of their own or not.”
“Yesterday's abomination is today's rule.”
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Book Keywords:
compulsions, change, language, evidence-based-decision-making, preferences, obsessions, evidence, writing, generalizations, education, culture, accents, communication, church, rhetoric, humility, unity, graciousness, identity
