Life is our dictionary. ... I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, American essayist and poet, The American Scholar, 1837