“Metaphor… is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.”

— Laura Riding Jackson

"The Matter of Metaphor" in Rational Meaning and Supplementary Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).

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Laura Riding Jackson42

poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer 1901–1991

Charles W. Morris (1903–1979) American philosopher

Source: "Foundations of the Theory of Signs," 1938, p. 57

“We're trapped in linguistic constructs… all that is is metaphor.”

Robert Anton Wilson (1932–2007) American author and polymath

“The central doctrine of Cartesian linguistics is that the general features of grammatical structure are common to all languages and reflect certain fundamental properties of the mind.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

"Acquisition and use of language"
Quotes 2000s, 2007-09, (3rd ed., 2009)

“The 4 aspects of each of the media actually constitute the four features of all metaphors. In other words, all human technologies whatever are, in the fullest sense, linguistic outerings, or utterings, of man.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1990s and beyond, The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan (2011), p. 275

“[A register is constituted by] the linguistic features which are typically associated with a configuration of situational features - with particular values of the field, mode and tenor.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Source: 1970s and later, Cohesion in English (English Language), 1976, p. 22 cited in: Helen Leckie-Tarry (1998) Language and Context. p. 6.

“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 McWhorter (1965) American linguist and political commentator

Source: Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English

“Croatian linguists proscribe words that are common to the majority of the Croatian people just to make a difference to the language in Serbia.”

Snježana Kordić (1964) Croatian linguist

I linguisti croati rifiutano le parole in uso presso la maggior parte della popolazione solo per dare artificiosamente corpo ad una diversità nei confronti della lingua parlata in Serbia.
[Kordić, Snježana, w:Snježana Kordić, Snježana Kordić, Purismo e censura linguistica in Croazia oggi, Studi Slavistici, 5, 284, 2008, http://www.fupress.net/index.php/ss/article/view/2943/8774, 1824-7601] (in Italian)

“These two processes—linguistic philology and genetic phylogeny—are converging upon a common theme: the history of human migrations.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 13 “Pre-History” (p. 185)

“We can also say that language is a domain of recursive linguistic co-ordinations of actions, or a domain of second-order linguistic co-ordinations of actions. We human beings also co-ordinate our actions with each other in first-order linguistic domains, and we do so frequently with non-human animals.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Reality; The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument (1988), p. 48 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989) " Life, the Multiverse and Everything; an Introduction to the Ideas of. Humberto Maturana http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm".

“This movement between alternative linguistic modes conceived as alternative descriptive protocols is, I would argue, a distinguishing feature of all the great classics of the ‘literature of fact.”

Hayden White (1928–2018) American historian

"The fictions of factual representation"

“Metaphor… is, as a common feature of linguistic practice, an incidental expediency, a homely administering of first-aid by mother-wit to jams or halts in expression suddenly confronting speakers, with no respectable linguistic solution immediately in sight.”

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Laura Riding Jackson42

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