Linguistic experience, both as expressed in standardized, written form and as tested in daily usage, indicates overwhelmingly that there is not, as a rule, the slightest difficulty in bringing the word to consciousness as a psychological reality.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.34

Language [...] betrays [...] a stubborn tendency to look away from the immediately suggested function, trusting to the imagination and to usage to fill in the transitions of thought and the details of application that distinguish one concrete concept ('to farm') from another 'derived' one ('farmer').
- Sapir (1921), a pag.83

What keeps the individual's variations from rising to dialectic importance [...] is chiefly that they are silently 'corrected' or canceled by the consensus of usage.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.149

If all the speakers of a given dialect were arranged in order in accordance with the degree of their conformity to average usage [...] they would constitute a very finely intergrading series clustered about a well-defined center or norm.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.148

As we look about us and observe current usage, it is not likely to occur to us that our language has a 'slope,' that the changes of the next few centuries are in a sense prefigured in certain obscure tendencies of the present and that these changes [...]
- Sapir (1921), a pag.155

Another instance of the sacrifice of highly useful forms to this impatience of nuancing is the group 'whence', 'whither', 'hence', 'hither', 'thence', 'thither'. They could not persist in live usage because they impinged too solidly upon the circles of meaning represented by the words 'where', 'here' and 'there'.
- Sapir (1921), a pag.170