“Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A good swimmer can cross a wide river, a lake, even the English Channel; no one, as far as… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies know where… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
The great arbiters of language are the women who speak it in the presence of children... What the women pass on to the next… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it, and read… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm. It multiplies… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only with such… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but its simpler… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage. — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all. — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered,… — Charlton Laird Copy Share Image
![“The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.” quote by Charlton Laird](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/7e6/charlton-laird-34745_belly_the-truth-seems-to-be-that-they-teachers_1806946.jpg)
