"I asked Lera how describing the word chair or the word bridge as masculine or feminine changes the way that speakers of different languages think about those concepts."
"Take the word bridge - if it's feminine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are beautiful and elegant. And if the word bridge is masculine in your language, you're more likely to say that bridges are strong and long and towering - these kind of more stereotypically masculine words."
"does the language that you speak matter for how you paint death, depending on whether the word death is masculine or feminine in your language? And to our surprise, 78 percent of the time, we could predict the gender of the personification based on the grammatical gender of the noun in the artist's native language."
" what he found was kids who were learning Hebrew - this is a language that has a lot of gender loading in it - figured out whether they were a boy or a girl about a year sooner than kids learning Finnish, which doesn't have a lot of gender marking in the language."
" Young people have always used language in new and different ways, and it's pretty much always driven older people crazy. All of the likes and, like, literallies (ph) might sometimes grate on your nerves, but John McWhorter says the problem might be with you, not with the way other people speak. John is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He's also the author of the book, "Words On The Move: Why English Won't - And Can't - Sit Still (Like, Literally).""
" dictionaries in some ways paint an unrealistic portrait of a language. They give us a sense that the meanings of words are fixed, when in fact they're not."
" the evolution of words and their meanings is what gives us this flowering of hundreds or thousands of languages. Mistakes and errors are what turned Latin into French."
" there'll be slang, that there'll be new words for new things and that some of those words will probably come from other languages. But I don't think that it's always clear to us that language has to change in that things are going to come in that we're going to hear as intrusions or as irritating or as mistakes"
" in common usage, literally literally means the opposite of literally... it irritates people, but there's a different way of seeing literally. If you take literally in what we can think of as its earliest meaning, the earliest meaning known to us is by the letter. And so somebody says something literally, somebody takes a point literally. Well, if you have a word like that and if it's an intensifier of that kind, you can almost guess that literally is going to come to mean something more like just really."
" you can't know how the words are going to come out, but you can take good guesses. You know, endings are going to tend to drop off. So if you took a bunch of those tendencies, you could make up, say, the English of 50 years from now, but some of the things would just be complete chance. You would never know, for example, that - give you an example I've actually been thinking about. Women under about 30 in the United States, when they're excited or they're trying to underline a point, putting uh at the end of things. And so somebody will say, well, who was it who you thought was going to give you this present? You-uh (ph). And, I mean, really, it sounds exactly like that. I know-uh (ph) is there, or something along the lines of babe-uh (ph)."
"You make the case that concerns over the misuse of language might actually be one of the last places where people can publicly express prejudice and class differences. And as you point out, it's not just that people feel that a word is being misused. They often feel angry about it, and you think this anger is actually telling."
" the educated person can look down on people who say Billy and me went to the store or who are using literally, quote, unquote, "wrong" and condemn them in the kinds of terms that once were ordinary for condemning black people or women or what have you. So I just think that it's something we need to check ourselves for."
" Language is a parade, and nobody sits at a parade wishing that everybody would stand still. If the language stayed the way it was, it would be like a pressed flower in a book"
