Context: Welcome to the field of Southeast Asian linguistics! This welcome comes with a warning: Southeast Asia is the Bosnia of historical linguistics, with a lovely landscape strewn with land mines! … 'Look-alikes' (look less and less alike the more we know about them) abound, as in Malay bĕras and Wr. Tibetan 'bras for 'rice', as do also unlikely-appearing cognate sets such as Thai pu 'grandfather' and Japanese o:i 'nephew'.
“Bilingual humor may be viewed as a relatively benign response to the frustrations inherent in living in such a linguistically and racially heterogeneous region as the hills and valleys of backwoods Southeast Asia.”
"Lahu bilingual humor" (1969) (p.172)
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James Matisoff 3
linguist 1937Related quotes

Report on the Gulf of Tonkin Incident https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dx8-ffiYyzA (4 August 1964)
1960s

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2010s
“The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.”
Source: Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage

“The gods of the valley are not the gods of the hills, and you shall understand it.”
Reply to the King's attorney-general (June 1770), in a New York court case decided against him, prior to his armed resistance to claims of New York authority over Vermont; quoted in Curiosities of Human Nature (1844) by Samuel Griswold Goodrich, p. 145, and in "Ethan Allen & the Green Mountain Boys" in Harper's New Monthly Magazine No. 102 (November 1858) http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/revwar/NH/ethanallen.html
The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (2003)
Who is Loyal to America? (1947)
Context: Independence was an act of revolution; republicanism was something new under the sun; the federal system was a vast experimental laboratory. Physically Americans were pioneers; in the realm of social and economic institutions, too, their tradition has been one of pioneering. From the beginning, intellectual and spiritual diversity have been as characteristic of America as racial and linguistic. The most distinctively American philosophies have been transcendentalism — which is the philosophy of the Higher Law and pragmatism — which is the philosophy of experimentation and pluralism. These two principles are the very core of Americanism: the principle of the Higher Law, or of obedience to the dictates of conscience rather than of statutes, and the principle of pragmatism, or the rejection of a single good and of the notion of a finished universe. From the beginning Americans have known that there were new worlds to conquer, new truths to be discovered. Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.
Max Fisher, "A fascinating map of the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/ (15 May 2013), The Washington Post

Preface to Poets & Poetry of Scotland Vol 1 , Blackie & Son , Edinburgh 1876