Charlton Laird

Babies and language are the essential ingredients of civilization, and speakers of language no more know where it came from than babies…

— Charlton Laird

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and…

— Charlton Laird

The great arbiters of language are the women who speak it in the presence of children... What the women pass on to…

— Charlton Laird

You and I who read and write books have very little effect upon language. We may think about it, write about it,…

— Charlton Laird

An amoeba is a formless thing which takes many shapes. It moves by thrusting out an arm, and flowing into the arm.…

— Charlton Laird

Jazz was formerly a crude term for indulging in an action which in polite society is referred to, if at all, only…

— Charlton Laird

Civilization could not exist until there was written language, because without written language no generation could bequeath to succeeding generations anything but…

— Charlton Laird

Amoebas, once they have themselves well pulled in two, go their ways-they practice divorce, but no remarriage.

— Charlton Laird

Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all.

— Charlton Laird

The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures…

— Charlton Laird

Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.

— Charlton Laird

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can…

— Charlton Laird

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

— Charlton Laird

“Most people can swim a narrow river. Water is an alien element, but with labor we can force ourselves through it. A…

— Charlton Laird