There's an old little jingle: 'The chief use of slang is to show that you're one of the gang.' What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there's a group of lawyers, they… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
You don't usually get a compound word where the first part is a slang thing and the second part is a rather ordinary or formal thing - they don't usually mix - but 'gobsmacked' is a perfect exception to that… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
There's an old little jingle: 'The chief use of slang is to show that you're one of the gang.' What that means is that… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
One of the places the full stop is really being revised in a really fundamental way is on the Internet. You look at the… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly. — David Crystal Copy Share Image
We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible. — David Crystal Copy Share Image
It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
“Here are three elements we often see in town names: If a town ends in “-by”, it was originally a farmstead or a small… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
