Words matter. These are the best John McWhorter Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying ‘victim,’ especially when you’re not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you’re not one.
Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just ‘be’ and drops ‘am,’ ‘is,’ and ‘are.’ That’s because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.
Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder’s language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader’s.
People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.
The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.
People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.
As far as I’m concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I’m not interested in white people loving me. It’s an unrealistic expectation. Black people don’t love anybody but themselves.
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?
Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.
