David Crystal
British linguist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language change is inevitable, continuous, universal and multidirectional. Languages do not get better or worse when they change. They just — change.
—David Crystal, British linguist, How Language Works, January 5, 2006
Posted on March 3, 2006 at 5:45 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Believing in the inviolability of the small set of rules that they have managed themselves to acquire, they condemn others from a different dialect background, or who have not had the same educational opportunities as themselves, for not following those same rules. Enthused by the Stalinesque policing metaphor, they advocate a policy of zero tolerance, to eradicate all traces of the aberrant behaviour. This extreme attitude would be condemned by most people if it were encountered in relation to such domains as gender or race, but for some reason it is tolerated in relation to language. Welcomed, even, judging by the phenomenal sales of Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
—David Crystal, British linguist, How Language Works, January 5, 2006
Posted on February 15, 2006 at 5:40 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language being such a sensitive index of social change, it would be surprising indeed if such a radically innovative phenomenon [as the Internet] did not have a corresponding impact on the way we communicate. And so it can be argued. Language is at the heart of the Internet, for Net activity is interactivity.
—David Crystal, British linguist, Language and the Internet, 2001
Posted on February 4, 2004 at 1:33 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A nonce word (from the 16th-century phrase for the nonce, meaning "for the once") is a lexeme created for temporary use, to solve an immediate problem of communications. Someone attempting to describe the excess water on a road after a storm was heard to call it a fluddle — she meant something bigger than a puddle but smaller than a flood. The newborn lexeme was forgotten (except by a passing linguist) almost as soon as it was spoken. It was obvious from the jocularly apologetic way in which the person spoke that she did not consider fluddle to be a "proper" word at all. There was no intention to propose it for inclusion in a dictionary. As far as she was concerned, it was simply that there seemed to be no word in the language for what she wanted to say, so she made one up, for the nonce. In everyday conversation, people create nonce-words like this all the time.
—David Crystal, British linguist, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1995
Posted on December 6, 2000 at 10:12 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
[A]s the Internet comes increasingly to be viewed from a social perspective, so the role of language becomes central ... [W]hat is immediately obvious when engaging in any of the Internet's functions is its linguistic character. If the Internet is a revolution, therefore, it is likely to be a linguistic revolution.
—David Crystal, British linguist, Language and the Internet, 2001
Posted on September 18, 1998 at 7:54 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Internet users are continually searching for vocabulary to describe their experiences, to capture the character of the electronic world, and to overcome the communicative limitations of its technology. The rate at which they have been coining new terms and introducing playful variations into established ones has no parallel in contemporary language use.
—David Crystal, British linguist, Language and the Internet, 2001
Posted on August 5, 1998 at 11:41 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It is remarkable how often the language turns up as a topic of interest in daily conversation — whether it is a question about accents and dialects, a comment about usage and standards, or simply curiousity about a word's origins and history.
—David Crystal, British linguist, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1995
Posted on March 19, 1999 at 10:39 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
English is a kind of vacuum cleaner of language — it sucks in vocabulary from any language it can get.
—David Crystal, British linguist, Time Magazine, 1997
Posted on January 16, 2003 at 12:05 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Everyone plays with language or responds to language play. Some take mild pleasure from it; others are totally obsessed by it; but no one can avoid it.
—David Crystal, British linguist, Language Play, 1998
Posted on January 11, 1999 at 10:49 AM
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