Quotes About Vocabulary

Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!

I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and, what's more, I don't believe you do either!

When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.

Aprender una lengua extraña: asimilas nociones de gramática, vocabulario básico y un acento espantoso que apenas sirve para que te entiendan. Te esfuerzas durante años y de repente, sin saber por qué, todo fluye, captas cómo funciona...

To change a vocabulary is easy; to change external circumstances or our own ingrained habits is hard and tiresome.

Whisky nosers, as they called themselves, eschewed what they saw as the pretentiousness of wine vocabulary. While oenophiles resorted to recondite adjectives, whisky nosers spoke the language of everyday life, detecting hints of stale seaweed, or even diesel fuel.

There are many words for push, take, shove, carry, load, and no words for love, or happiness, or the sounds which birds make in the morning.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book? asked Mrs. Dodypol. It depends, says I, how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

It is only with isvoshtchiki—the drivers of the little open droshkis which fulfil the function of cabs—that he is obliged to use the native tongue, and with them a very limited vocabulary suffices. The ordinal numerals and four short, easily-acquired expressions—poshol (go on), na pravo (to the right), na lyevo (to the left), and stoi (stop)—are all that is required.

I know words. I have the best words.

Don't get me wrong," continued Jenna, "I have nothing against people with good working vocabularies. I'd like to think I have one. And sometimes a less common word needs to be used to convey a nuance, or achieve a necessary level of precision. But if something can be said simply, it should be. Using big words isn't impressive. Getting points across simply, succinctly, but with great clarity is.

You know, would simply use the word use, rather than utilize the word utilize.

The Anglo-Saxons had a great word for the right word, the word that you need right now, when another one simply would not do. That word is wordriht.

The brain is more like a muscle and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot, then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase. Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.

By playing these games about "arbitrary" gender roles, we have not succeeded in outlawing masculinity, but we have robbed it of much of its vocabulary. There are not very many acceptable ways to speak "masculine" anymore. We are all in denial, and the results are not pretty.

But as Mark Twain once observed, the difference between the right word and the almost right word is as the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. So do strive for that right word!

In the same way, consider bungalow versus house versus building . . . starlet versus girl versus female . . . Colt versus revolver versus firearm . . . steak versus meat versus food.

Is there another word for synonym?

My father still reads the dictionairy every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation

Words are our life. We are human because we use language. So I think we are less human when we use less language.

There is no universal language in the jungles; each species has its own language, and though the vocabulary of some is limited, as in the case of porcupines and vultures, the language of each species is understood by all the jungle-folk.

Because people tend to regard loss, wrong, bad, and failure as the same thing, it is little wonder that loss is a dirty word in our vocabulary.

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head—by reading.