Aging & Wisdom Quote by Gilbert Highet

Highet’s metaphor does quiet polemical work: it turns language from a rulebook into an organism, and in doing so it undermines the instinct to treat “correctness” as a fixed moral standard. Calling language “a living thing” is less poetic garnish than a claim about authority. If language lives, then no single academy, teacher, or nostalgic generation can fully police it; at best they can describe its current physiology.

The image of parts “drop[ping] off” has a bracing unsentimentality. Forgetting isn’t framed as cultural decay but as biological necessity. That matters in the mid-20th-century context Highet wrote from, when mass education, broadcasting, and rising American cultural influence were accelerating linguistic churn and triggering anxieties about “standards.” He answers that anxiety by naturalizing change: what feels like loss is also pruning.

Then he pivots to growth: “bud,” “leaves,” “branches,” “proliferating.” The diction celebrates excess. New slang, imported words, technical jargon, and shifting grammar aren’t weeds; they’re new limbs seeking light. The subtext is democratic, even if Highet himself came from a classically educated, gatekept world: ordinary speakers, not just literary elites, are the gardeners-by-accident shaping what survives.

The line “We can feel it changing” is the slyest move. It acknowledges the bodily irritation people have when language shifts under them, then recruits that discomfort as evidence of vitality. A dead language doesn’t annoy you. A living one keeps touching your ear differently, insisting that culture is still in motion.