Dead Language

Famous quotes containing the words dead and/or language:

    Swimmer of noonday, lean for the perfect dive
    To the dead Mother’s face, whose subtile down
    You had not seen take amber light alive.
    Allen Tate (1899–1979)

    The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.
    Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)