Quotes About Vocabulary

Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.

Filthy language is used by people who don't have the maturity or intelligence to express themselves with better words.

A great many people think that polysyllables are a sign of intelligence and refinement so they think they will impress others with their command of obscure words.

las palabras nunca son fruto del azar. Que todas tienen un pasado, una especie de genética que las delata. —Eso es lo que estudia la etimología...

Ancient Spanish ranching techniques were adopted—and adapted—all over the American continent and took slightly different forms, spawning different vocabulary, from place to place. Argentines call cowboys gauchos; Peruvians, chaláns; Ecuadorians, chagras; Venezuelans and Colombians, llaneros; and Chileans, huasos.

The Gaulish language ended up contributing very little to the vocabulary of modern French. Only about a hundred Gaulish words survived the centuries, mostly rural and agricultural terms such as bouleau (birch), sapin (fir), lotte (monkfish), mouton (sheep), charrue (plow), sillon (furrow), lande (moor) and boue (mud)—that's eight percent of the total. However, Gaulish is still relatively well-known, partly because it left many place and family names in northern France.

Si ricordò di alcune riflessioni che aveva annotato di recente sul suo quadernetto. A proposito della povertà di vocabolario riguardante il mare. Solo i greci avevano tante parole per definirlo. Hals, il sale, il mare in quanto materia. Pelagos, la distesa d'acqua, il mare come visione, spettacolo. Pontos, il mare spazio e via di comunicazione. Thalassa, il mare in quanto evento. Kolpos, lo spazio marittimo che abbraccia la riva, il golfo o la baia...

les moules — comment dit-on—?

Diction is not memorizing vocabulary, not memorizing word lists, not overusing the thesaurus, not replacing all the short words with long ones.

The only wealth I'm interested in is a wealth of words.

Dogs being great linguists, she quickly picked up English, far more quickly than I picked up German, so we understood each other very well, and couche, schönmachen, and pfui continued for a long time to be my whole vocabulary. Fortunately

Nan worked very hard. We didn't speak, but her breaths are a vocabulary. When she's concentrating, her tongue moves across her bottom lip as if polishing it. The air in the back of her throat laps, tide-like.

Clara Winter," he said. "You are a word person and don't ever forget it." He was right. He knew. He could tell. It's something that can be sensed. There's a difference between word-people and non-word-people.

It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn't even have words like click and jump and page.

I write in quite a simple way because that's just the way I write. The vocab I use is quite wee. That's just the way I talk.

Scrabble has always been immensely popular, so it's easy to see why online Scrabble is just as lauded.

All language is a popularity contest.

English accepts more curses than any other language, and I soon learned to curse with the commoners.

I'm trying to cut down my cursing.

I hardly use cuss words.

The limits of my language," wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, "are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for." Without the word we are imprisoned; possessing the word, we are set free.

To provide a foundation in the use of ASL with its unique vocabulary and syntax rules; English as a second language (ESL) instruction

You employ large phrases.

Interesting philosophy is rarely an examination of the pros and cons of a thesis. Usually it is, implicitly or explicitly, a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which was become a nuisance and a half-formed new vocabulary which vaguely promises great things.