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“Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream,”
― The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
― The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
“Indeed, as he increasingly masters his native tongue, he tries to make it conform to more logical rules than the language itself may possess, saying “buyed,” “eated,” and “goed” because, even though he has never heard such words spoken, they seem more logical to him—as indeed they are, if you stopped and thinked about it.”
― The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
― The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
“Science promised us truth, or at least a knowledge of such relations as our intelligence can seize: it never promised us peace or happiness. Sovereignly indifferent to our feelings, it is deaf to our lamentations. It is for us to endeavour to live with science, since nothing can bring back the illusions it has destroyed.”
― The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
― The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
“But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all.”
― The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
― The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way
“History tells us, that from the moment when the moral forces on which a civilisation rested have lost their strength, its final dissolution is brought about by those unconscious and brutal crowds known, justifiably enough, as barbarians.”
― The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
― The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
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