A Quote by Octavio Paz
When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings
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Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.
Although our grammar schools are teaching a whole generation computer language to adjust to the technological needs of a Stage II [post survival-focused] society, we have neglected to teach this generation relationship language and conflict resolution skills to address the social and psychological needs of a Stage II society. And when it is taught, in countries like Germany, although called social competence it focuses on workplace teamwork - still on survival, breadwinner oriented work goals.
By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.
No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.
Capitalism as a social order and as a creed is the expression of the belief in economic progress as leading toward the freedom and equality of the individual in a free and open society. Marxism expects this society to result from the abolition of private profit. Capitalism expects the free and equal society to result from the enthronement of private profit as supreme ruler of social behavior.
Lying is the misuse of language. We know that. We need to remember that it works the other way round too. Even with the best intentions, language misused, language used stupidly, carelessly, brutally, language used wrongly, breeds lies, half-truths, confusion. In that sense you can say that grammar is morality. And it is in that sense that I say a writer's first duty is to use language well.
When you speak a foreign language, you become someone else. If you aren't used to speaking a language, and you start speaking it again, for the first few sentences you'll find yourself in very strange shape, because you're still the person who was speaking the first language. But if you keep speaking that language, you will become the person who corresponds to it.
The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.
In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language.
A satyagrahi is sometimes bound to use language which is capable of two meanings, provided both the meanings are obvious and necessary and there is no intention to deceive anyone.
In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell.
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.
Language is a unifying instrument which binds people together. When people speak one language they become as one, they become a society.
Raising children is, in a sense, the reason the society exists in the first place. It's the most important thing that happens, and it's the culmination of all the tools and language and social structure that has evolved.
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