Top 40 John McWhorter Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Stephen Jay Gould has told us that evolution is geared not toward progressive “fitness” but toward simply filling available ecological niches.”

— John McWhorter

2. “Because all languages are and have always been in a state of continual transformation, anything we see in a language today is the result of change.”

— John McWhorter

3. “In Greenlandic Eskimo, “I should stop drinking” is Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga.”

— John McWhorter

4. “Proto-Germanic had not one but three genders – masculine, feminine, and neuter – and in some cases modern Germanic languages retain all three, in such user-hostile cases as each piece of silverware in German having a different gender: spoons are boys, forks are girls, knives are hermaphrodites.”

— John McWhorter

5. “What the deuce? emerged because in cards, number two – deuce – comes from the early French deus, which was associated with bad luck and, pertinently, the devil because it was the lowest score.”

— John McWhorter

6. “Now independent, the Moldovans continue to encourage a perception of “Moldovan” as a distinct “language” from Romanian, in part because Romanians tend to dismiss their dialect as sounding uneducated.”

— John McWhorter

7. “For all but the sliver of poetry fans, over the past forty years popular song lyrics have been the nation’s poetry.”

— John McWhorter

8. “People say “nucular” modeled on other words that end in -ular such as spectacular, tubular, and vernacular. Specifically, because there exist the words nuke and, long before that, nucleus, a temptation looms to think of nuclear as “nuc-” plus the -ular ending: spectacular, tubular, nuc-ular.”

— John McWhorter

9. “The work we should do involves calling for the war on drugs to end, supporting phonics-based reading instruction, and celebrating every political move that helps dilute the conviction that all people need to spend four years living in a dorm before they start training for the workplace. That’s work enough, and it will help change the world.”

— John McWhorter

10. “We need the hard left to point us to new ways of thinking. However, we need them to go back to doing this while seated, with the rest of us, rather than standing up and getting their way by calling us moral perverts if we disagree with them and calling this speaking truth to power.”

— John McWhorter

11. “Okay, but even if my ass is fired, the rest of me will still be coming back to work, and I hope you won’t mind me working assless.”

— John McWhorter

12. “Latin illa became, with some erosion of sounds into la, the definite article.”

— John McWhorter

13. “Goodbye, is strictly speaking a truncated form of “Be with you, be with you!”

— John McWhorter

14. “Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it.”

— John McWhorter

15. “People’s sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality.”

— John McWhorter

16. “Note: There is no such thing as someone who speaks your language with a perfect accent but whose sentences are full of grammatical mistakes. If the person has mastered the sounds, then it follows that before that, he had the sentence structures down. People learn a language’s parts in order of difficulty.”

— John McWhorter

17. “There is a vast gulf in complexity, subtlety, and flexibility between human beings and other animals in regard to language ability, and that gulf is a large part of why humans have been such a successful species of such disproportionate influence on this planet.”

— John McWhorter

18. “English is one of several languages that evolved from an unwritten ancestor linguists call Proto-Germanic;.”

— John McWhorter

19. “Each dialect is just a different roll of the language-mutation dice.”

— John McWhorter

20. “Poetry that tames language into tight structures and yet manages to move us comes off as a feat, paralleling ballet or athletic talent in harnessing craft to beauty. When poetry is based on a less rigorous, more impressionistic definition of craft, its appeal depends more on whether one happens to be individually constituted to “get it” for various reasons. The audience narrows: poetry becomes more like tai chi than baseball.”

— John McWhorter

21. “If language arose approximately when sapiens did, then a combination of the fossil record and modern comparative genetic analysis can point us to language’s time of origin.”

— John McWhorter

22. “To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one’s sense of belonging. Figures of authority are the same color as you. You are thought of as the default category.”

— John McWhorter

23. “More to the point, though, a language consists not only of isolated words but also sounds and sentence structures, and these are at all times changing along with the word meanings.”

— John McWhorter

24. “Even Fijian, spoken on a complex of islands by just seven hundred thousand people, has more than one dialect.”

— John McWhorter

25. “To wit, profanity first involved the holy, and only later the holes.”

— John McWhorter

26. “At the University of California, San Diego the year before racial preferences were banned in the late 1990s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later after students who once would have been “mismatched” to Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to schools such as UC San Diego, where one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.”

— John McWhorter

27. “DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity here – “You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are” – is the logic of the sandbox.”

— John McWhorter

28. “Hence, the notion of the “cheese burger” by the late 1930s, with “burger” now referring to a disk of meat. Today, of course, one speaks of the veggie burger, taco burger, fish burger, and so much else, such that no one would object that burger is “not a word.” Now it is, but only because of grafting. We talk about eating a nice burger, and Abraham Lincoln brought back to life would picture us trying to consume a staid, small-town German tradesman.”

— John McWhorter

29. “Language change, to the extent that we can perceive it, appears to be decay.”

— John McWhorter

30. “This cycle eloquently demonstrates that, in the end, dialects are all there is: the “language” part is just politics!”

— John McWhorter

31. “Shakespeare, as it happens, writing as the 1500s became the 1600s, wrote in a period when English was just becoming what we would recognize as “our language.”

— John McWhorter

32. “If you want to learn about how humans differ, study cultures. However, if you want insight as to what makes all humans worldwide the same, beyond genetics, there are few better places to start than how language works.”

— John McWhorter

33. “The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous.”

— John McWhorter

34. “In the nineteenth century, poetry was a bestselling genre rather than the cultish phenomenon it is now.”

— John McWhorter

35. “We’re all Dennis Hopper now.”

— John McWhorter

36. “Bacteria, toads, wallabies, and orangutans do not fall on a cline of increasing closeness to God; all four are equally well suited to leading the lives they lead.”

— John McWhorter

37. “Just as we would be inestimably poorer to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity.”

— John McWhorter

38. “But Icelandic stands as virtual confirmation that adult learners screwing things up was a key factor in how English came to be the way it is.”

— John McWhorter

39. “The late twentieth century has been the locus of a new lurch on English’s time line in America, where oratorical, poetic, and compositional craft of a rigorously exacting nature has been cast to the margins of the culture.”

— John McWhorter

40. “However, human language is unique in its ability to communicate or convey an open-ended volume of concepts:.”

— John McWhorter

41. “This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with foreign languages.”

— John McWhorter

42. “Dialects follow naturally from the inherently nondiscrete nature of language change.”

— John McWhorter

43. “Today’s “Dialect” Is Tomorrow’s “Language.”

— John McWhorter

44. “We saw how close dialects can be compared to “covers” of an original song. A.”

— John McWhorter

45. “In this chapter we will go beyond the one type of change we saw in chapter 1, and embrace the word in general as a fundamentally impermanent association of a sequence of sounds with a particular meaning.”

— John McWhorter