[…] figurative uses of a word […] are part and parcel of the sphere of application of the word. For it is an important item in this process of transfer that we gradually lose our sense of the figure implied, and come to employ each sign as if it had always been the simple and downright representative of its idea.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.87

[…] the whole round of categories: position and succession, form and size, manner and degree: all, in their indefinite multitude, are divided and grouped, like the shades of color, and each group has its own sign, to guide the apprehension and help the discrimination of him who uses it.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.21

From the moment when it [‘bishop’] became an accepted sign for a certain thing, its whole career was cut loose from its primitive root; it became, what it has ever since continued to be, a conventional sign, and hence an alterable sign, for a certain conception, but a variable and developing conception. In this fundamental fact, that the uttered sign was a conventional one, bound to the conception signified by it only by a tie of mental association lay the possibility both of its change of meaning and of its change of form.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.47

If the Darwinian theory is true, and man a development out of some lower animal, it is at any rate conceded that the last and nearest transition-forms have perished, perhaps exterminated by him in the struggle for existence […] if they could be restored, we should find the transition-forms toward our speech to be, not at all a minor provision of natural articulate signs, but an inferior system of conventional signs, in tone, gesture and grimace.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.291

In the true and proper meaning of the terms […] every word handed down in every human language is an arbitrary and conventional sign […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.19

It [learning of a second language] is the memorizing of a certain body of signs for conceptions and their relations, used in a certain community, existing or extinct- signs which have no more natural and necessary connection with the conceptions they indicate than our own have, but are equally arbitrary and conventional with the latter; and of which we may make ourselves masters to a degree dependent only on our opportunities, our capacity, our industry, and the length of time devoted to the work […].
- Whitney (1875), a pag.24

Our words are too often signs for crude and hasty, for indefinite and indefinable, generalizations.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.29

The forms [...] embody and bring to distinct consciousness only a small part of the infinity of relations which subsist among the objects of thought and which the mind impliedly recognizes, even when it does not direct attention to them by expression [...] When it has attained expression, the mind which contemplates it is not dependent upon its audible sign, but may even be made carelessly secure by this, and, while realizing the idea, permit itself to drop the sign as not indispensable.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.106

To the child learning to speak, all signs are in themselves equally good for all things; he could acquire and reproduce one as well as another for a given purpose.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.18

What he [child] has especially is the core of language, as we may call it: signs for the most commonly recurring conceptions, words which every speaker uses every day.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.25

With us every noun, of whatever gender or quantity (save few exceptions [...]), takes ‘s’ as its plural sign.
- Whitney (1875), a pag.38