They can legislate for dead languages, without finding that the languages have moved on while they were writing, and made their rules about correctness and incorrectness obsolete. All pro athletes are bilingual. They speak English and profanity. The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all. Ruth Hubbard, Women Look at Biology Without words to objectify and categorize our sensations and place them in relation to one another, we cannot evolve a tradition of what is real in the world.
Fettered words are terrible words.
The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant. Nothing can be more depressing than to expose, naked to the light of thought, the hideous growth of argot. Indeed it is like a sort of repellent animal intended to dwell in darkness which has been dragged out of its cloaca.