John McWhorter quotes

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing. (John McWhorter)

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

John McWhorter

Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.

John McWhorter

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

John McWhorter

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

John McWhorter

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

John McWhorter

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

John McWhorter

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.

John McWhorter

Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

John McWhorter

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

John McWhorter

Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's. (John McWhorter)

The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.

John McWhorter

'LOL' is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.

John McWhorter

John McWhorter

John McWhorter - Image

Occupation: American Writer
Born: October 6, 1965
Quotes count: 13

Related authors

Ta-Nehisi Coates 33

American Writer

Shelby Steele 4

American Author

Steven Pinker 200

Canadian-American Scientist

Michael Eric Dyson 43

American Author

Benjamin Lee Whorf 13

American Scientist

David Crystal 44

English Educator

Thomas Sowell 196

American Economist

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran 42

Indian Scientist

Francis Fukuyama 17

American Economist

Randall Kennedy 8

American Educator