John H. McWhorter famous quotes

04-17-2025

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Challenges #Excuse #Genuine
The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Priorities #Feelings #Racist
People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Dog #Latin #People
We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Children #Honesty #Behave
Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Writing #Texting #Speech
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Mean #Vocabulary #Loving You
Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Black #Dialect #Great Men
Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Racism
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.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Queens #Real #Drama
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?
-- John H. McWhorter

#Thinking #Texting #Letters
Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Fashion #Moving #Men
Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Writing #Issues #Insecurity
English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Lonely #Night #Dressing Up
People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.
-- John H. McWhorter

#Thinking #People #Black

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