Quotes About Vocabulary

Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any swear words.

escrever é um bocado fazer respiração boca-a-boca ao dicionário de Moraes, à gramática da 4ª classe e aos restantes jazigos de palavras defuntas

So many words! It would take seven lifetimes to learn them all.

Sometimes I understood what a word meant from reading but had never met it in life.

The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.

If you compulsively pun you are called a paronomasiac.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean]...

That in effect was love. It struck him as astonishing. The word was so little in his vocabulary...

He was a big talker, someone who liked words for words' sake, the sound of them, the way you can pile them up in your mouth and make a poem if you speill them out the right way. p92

All the elements of good writing depend on the writer's skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.

a dominant class enforces rules about what is and is not acceptable. It defines good art, good food, good books—and creates an exclusionary vocabulary for describing them

Bourdieu argued that a dominant class enforces rules about what is and is not acceptable. It defines good art, good food, good books—and creates an exclusionary vocabulary for describing them. "Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier," he famously wrote.

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?

The only thing you have to know are your words.

No one realized that I needed eyeglasses until I was 12 years old. My parents were writers, so I was around the sounds of words and developed a vocabulary with my sense of hearing. I play guitar by ear.

Les hobos évitaient, en général, d'apprendre des langues, pour ne pas se laisser piéger par tous les trucs qui vont avec le vocabulaire, lequel est toujours celui des autres, une espèce d'héritage, qui vous tombe dessus.

E la gente ride di me perché uso parole grosse. Ma se si hanno in testa idee grosse, bisogna usare parole grosse per esprimerle, non trova?

If you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven't you?

porque o adjetivo é a alma do idioma, a sua porção idealista e metafísica. O substantivo é a realidade nua e crua, é o naturalismo do vocabulário.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

As a child, when I came across a word I didn't know, I didn't stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.

The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians - because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

I love anything that is going to make language richer and stronger. But when words are used in a way that is going to weaken language, it has nothing to do with the beautiful way that they can wriggle and wiggle and develop and enrich our speech, but instead it is impoverishing, diminishing. If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free—though we may buy more of the product.