Quotes About Vocabulary

Christopher Hitchens was a writer and an orator with a matchless style, commanding a vocabulary and a range of literary and historical allusion far wider than anybody I know.

But to worship at the altar of "just read" fails to see reading for what it actually is: a complex and nuanced interplay of decoding, vocabulary, subject matter, and contextual knowledge. Well-intended but misguided teachers and administrators have imposed a kind of illiteracy on low-income children of color by focusing their attention relentlessly in the mirror, instead of out the window. Reading comprehension is not a skill you teach but a condition you create.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language.

Even the surfaces of individual cells have their own descriptors—mammillose for a breast-like swelling, papillose for a little bump, and pluripapillose when there are enough bumps to look like chicken pox. While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous?

NEFARIOUS means utterly, completely wicked. The character in The Wizard of Oz could have been called the Nefarious Witch of the West but authors like to use the same beginning consonant, often. Perhaps L. Frank Baum crossed out nefarious after wicked came to his mind. Thank goodness, because Nefarious would be a terrible name for a musical.

She kept lists of her favorite words.

Part of the difficulty in accepting the good news about trade is in our words. We too often talk about trade while using the vocabulary of war. In war, for one side to win, the other must lose. But commerce is not warfare. Trade is an economic alliance that benefits both countries. There are no losers, only winners; and trade helps strengthen the free world.

I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity.

Stalky,' in their school vocabulary, meant clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action; and 'stalkiness' was the one virtue Corkran toiled after.

Certainly we must be strong, but strength is, to me, not just a force, but rather a vocabulary of many means

People acquiring a second language have the best chance for success through reading.

Success and vocabulary go hand in hand. This has been proven so often that it no longer admits of argument.

besoin et nécessité sont deux synonymes entre lesquels il y a tout un monde d'intervalle.

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.

Dictionary, n. A malevolent literacy device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.

DICTIONARY, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

thoughts are the vocabulary of the brain and feelings are the vocabulary of the body,

Just a lot of 'fuck fuck fuck' over and over again? Can't you expand your range a little? Goddamn bloody arsefoam. Daddy drilling Mommy on the kitchen table. That sort of thing. Americans curse without any imagination at all.

Una buena novela para ella tenía que ser un viaje emocional y filosófico y además enseñarle vocabulario nuevo.

Every good writer has much idiom; it is the life and spirit of language.

It was the language that left us first. The Great Migration of words. When people spoke they punched each other in the mouth. There was no vocabulary for love. Women became masculine and could no longer give birth to warmth or a simple caress with their lips. Tongues were overweight from profanity and the taste of nastiness. It settled over cities like fog smothering everything in sight. My ears begged for camouflage and the chance to go to war. Everywhere was the decay of how we sound.

When there's a negative word or expression-immaculate, for example-but the positive is almost never used, and you choose to use it, you become rather amusing. Or pretentious. Or pretentiously amusing, which can sometimes be good. In any case, you are uncovering a buried word.

Human beings have one of the poorest senses of smell of all the organisms on Earth, so weak that we have only a tiny vocabulary to express it...We depend on the sophistication of trained dogs to lead us through the olfactory world, tracking individual people, detecting even the slightest trace of explosives and other dangerous chemicals.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.