John McWhorter Quotes

John McWhorter — American Writer

John Hamilton McWhorter V is an American academic, political commentator, and linguist, professor at Columbia University where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specialties are how creole languages form and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena... (wikipedia)

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

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.

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.

'LOL' is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.

John McWhorter Quotes

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