Geoffrey Nunberg Quotations

Cell phone makes those boundaries between public and private very porous. In the past, if you're having a spat with a significant other in a public place, one of you will argue and say, 'Not here' because it's intrusive. But now, with cell phones, there's no 'Not here' anymore.

Language doesn't so much cause divisions as it symbolizes them. I don't think using 'evacuee' or 'refugee' will change people's minds, but it will signal differences about how we think about class that has always been there.

These technologies are interesting in the same way that a shoe can also be a hammer. There are incidental uses for cell phones that often can be something that changes it altogether.

The choice of words is important when things like this happen,

When the world changes, correlation goes away… Causals are what endure.

The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century.

There are only two reasons for buying a book, after all. Either we intend to read it, in which case most of us find a printed version preferable, or we don't intend to read it, in which case a printed version is absolutely essential.

Few people become assholes reluctantly.

When it comes to being slaves to fashion, American managers make adolescent girls look like rugged individualists.