Mario Pei
American linguist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It does not behoove us to despise a man by reason of his present lowly estate, because only God knows what potentialities that man may store within himself. Neither is it fitting to scorn words which today are heard only in the slums or within the restricted confines of a trade. Tomorrow those same words may sweep the nation and find their way into the everyday vocabulary of a twenty-first-century Shakespeare,
—Mario Pei, American linguist, The Story of Language, 1949
Posted on November 22, 1999 at 4:53 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
While slang may be condemned by purists and schoolteachers, it should be remembered that it is a monument to the language's force of growth by creative innovation, a living example of the democratic, normally anonymous process of language change, and the chief means whereby all the languages spoken today have evolved from earlier tongues.
—Mario Pei, American linguist, The Story of Language, 1949
Posted on June 14, 2000 at 6:16 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Of all the words that exist in any language only a bare minority are pure, unadulterated, original roots. The majority are "coined" words, forms that have been in one way or another created, augmented, cut down, combined, and recombined to convey new needed meanings, The language mint is more than a mint; it is a great manufacturing center, where all sorts of productive activities go on unceasingly.
—Mario Pei, American linguist, The Story of Language, 1949
Posted on September 2, 2000 at 11:30 PM
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