H. L. Mencken Quotes About Language

• A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.

  H. L. Mencken

  Men, Blood, Suffering

  "The 100 best nonfiction books: No 49 - The American Language by HL Mencken (1919)" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 9, 2017.

• The plain people, hereafter as in the past, will continue to make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and not often with much insight into it.

  H. L. Mencken

  Past, People, Language

  H.L. Mencken (1965). “the American Language”

• When I think of anything properly describable as a beautiful idea, it is always in the form of music. I have written and printed probably 10,000,000 words in English but all the same I shall die an inarticulate man, for my best ideas beset me in a language I know only vaguely and speak only as a child.

  H. L. Mencken

  Beautiful, Children, Men

• The notion that anything is gained by fixing a language in a groove is cherished only by pedants.

  H. L. Mencken

  Fixing, Pedants, Language

  H.L. Mencken (2012). “American Language”, p.607, Knopf

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