Quotes from Charlton Laird

Language is a living thing. It must survive in men's minds and on their tongues if it survives at all.

Man can be defined, if one wishes, as a languag-ized mammal.

If language is intimately related to being human, then when we study language we are, to a remarkable degree, studying human nature.

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 workaday world can but seldom afford.