A McLuhan sourcebook 273 Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and the body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. —1964 Our own mother tongues are things in which we participate totally. They change our perception. So that if we spoke Chinese we would have a different sense of hearing, smell, and touch. —1970 The mother tongue is propaganda. —1965 Speech is our principal means of structuring interpersonal distances. And these distances are not just physical, but emotional and cultural. We involuntarily raise our voices when speaking to those who do not understand our language.—1955 When does a mechanical code of transmission of information itself become a language? Under what conditions does a language revert to a code of transmission? With our new coding devices today [such as movies] we are setting about to establish whether these means of transmission have themselves so deeply altered human sensibilities and reshaped human institutions and attitudes as to have acquired the status of new languages.—1960 For to an infant, English is not a language but a mechanical code. To an adult beginning Russian, it, too, is first a mechanical code. It becomes a language only when it has become subliminal.—1960 Traditional vernaculars are themselves the great mass media; that is, specialized frames and vehicles of experience. Language is metaphor in the sense that it not only stores but translates experi-ence from one mode to another. —1962 Eliot’s discovery that our whole English language was shifting from iambic rising stress to trochaic falling stress goes along with an amazing set of revolutions in English language and literature and a change of human outlook and human association.—1965 For language, itself, is the collective mask of a culture, even as its resources and powers for channelling perception are the prime concern of the poet. With language, the poet assumes the corporate mask and manipulates it like a puppet.—1963 The English or any other language is itself a massive organization of traditional experience providing a complex view of the world.—1954 Human languages are the greatest of all works of art beside which the works of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare are minor variations.— 1954 Language is really a storage system for the corporate and collective experience of all mankind… Every time you play back some of that language, you release a whole charge of these ancient perceptions and memories.