The Language Magazine – Richard Lederer
” Incredible as it may seem at first thought, practically every sentence that you speak and write during your lifetime has never been spoken or written before in human history. Except for stock phrases and conventional remarks, such as “Thanks a lot,” “How’s it going?,” and “Have a nice day,” almost all of your speech and writing consists of sentences that you have made up. You are a language inventor. Consider, for example, an experiment conducted by Richard Ohmann, a professor at Wesleyan University, who placed before 25 people a simple cartoon and asked them to describe in a sentence the situation the drawing portrayed. Not surprisingly, the 25 descriptions that Professor Ohmann received were all different from each other:” (more)