McWhorter: The Power of Babel

Summary: The Power of Babel by McWhorter (Times Books (2001)). (Stub — expand from highlights.)

Sources: quotes_batch_14.md

Quote pages: McWhorter — The Power of Babel

Last updated: 2026-05-07

Quotes

Language and Society

“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. It is a social decision to call one way of speaking ‘correct’ and another ‘broken’.” (p. 7)

Cognition

“Our brains don’t store language as a stagnant list; they treat it as a living, breathing organism that evolves with every conversation.” (p. 245)