Robert Lane Greene

“Peeves are like that: my peeves are law, yours are unhealthy obsessions.”

— Robert Lane Greene

“Only 8000 different words appear in the Hebrew Bible, compared to the 20,000 or more that the average adult needs to know…

— Robert Lane Greene

“If you look at the historical record, you will find that language has always been in decline. Which means, really, and it…

— Robert Lane Greene

“to form such harsh unharmonious Sounds, that none but a Northern Ear could endure: They”

— Robert Lane Greene

“Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.”

— Robert Lane Greene

“Afrikaans was the language of the white minority in South Africa, and the forced learning of it created resentment among blacks. Even…

— Robert Lane Greene

“I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language. I”

— Robert Lane Greene

“Virtually anything can be translated—“X cannot be translated” usually means nothing more exciting than “We have a word, X, that you need…

— Robert Lane Greene

“America’s short-lived experiment with language planning is so obscure to modern memory that while the Klingon language has a 3,000-word entry on…

— Robert Lane Greene

“I'd start to explain with the outward sheepish and inner pride of the nerd.”

— Robert Lane Greene

“Knowing the difference between “infer” and “imply” is no more likely to create a skeptical, bullshit-detecting citizen than knowing the atomic weight…

— Robert Lane Greene

“It is possible to communicate beautifully or boringly, in every language on Earth. But people don't like to believe this. They make…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Language is not law; it is in fact a lot like music. Speech is jazz – first you learn the basic rules,…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Other “no-word-for” and “can’t-be-translated” myths include the stories that the Irish have no word for “sex” or even “yes” (how, one wonders,…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Bryson says we have no word for the Danish hygge, then goes on to tell us exactly what it means: “instantly satisfying…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Though it's true that (dictionary-maker Samuel) Johnson sometimes seem to feel that the language was in decline, he didn't rail against it…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Thousands of miles from Georgia, beginning that night in England, my dad became a foreign-language speaker to me – and I was…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls “E. B. White’s disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk’s little…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Like so many of his successors in the language-crank world today, though, (Jonathan) Swift not only loathes (the) banal and common change…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly,…

— Robert Lane Greene

“for those to whom Lynne Truss is a hero, everything from spelling convention to word choice to logic is, somehow, “grammar.” And”

— Robert Lane Greene

“To most of the general public, language comes down less to wonder than a rather censorious bifurcated sentiment – namely, that the…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Standard languages are inventions, most of them confined to a recent period in human history. They are codes that give access not…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Too many people are too angry about language too much of the time. This time could be better spent listening, learning, and…

— Robert Lane Greene

“Saying that English is “under threat” is something like saying that gravity and the use of the fork are under threat. It”

— Robert Lane Greene