Famous Quotes & Sayings

Robert Lane Greene Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 24 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert Lane Greene.

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Famous Quotes By Robert Lane Greene

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

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I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language. I — Robert Lane Greene

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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 the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish has reading any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be when Island it as a young person. — Robert Lane Greene

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A stickler hallmark is that those who speak or write differently can't merely be wrong; they must be depraved, too. — Robert Lane Greene

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Yesterday's abomination is today's rule. — Robert Lane Greene

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Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know in most languages. — Robert Lane Greene

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

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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. — Robert Lane Greene

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

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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. — Robert Lane Greene

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Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or — Robert Lane Greene

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I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd. — Robert Lane Greene

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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 in anticipation that it would help him lead the whole of South Africa. — Robert Lane Greene

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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. — Robert Lane Greene

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Bryson says we have no word for the Danish hygge, then goes on to tell us exactly what it means: "instantly satisfying and cozy" (though — Robert Lane Greene

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

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Bryson says that "we tend to regard other people's languages as we regard their cultures - with ill-hidden disdain." Too true. Unfortunately, Bryson proves himself right with a series of stories that should have set off his own too-bizarre-to-be-true detector. — Robert Lane Greene

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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. — Robert Lane Greene

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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 temper that change by providing a distinguished literary example — Robert Lane Greene

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Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions. — Robert Lane Greene

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for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, "grammar." And — Robert Lane Greene

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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. — Robert Lane Greene

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As economists like to say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data. — Robert Lane Greene

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It is possible to communicate beautifully or boringly, in every language on Earth. But people don't like to believe this. They make self-aggrandizing myths instead. — Robert Lane Greene