Amoeba Quote by Charlton Laird

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 which a…

— 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 be discovered,…

— 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