Quotes About Vocabulary

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think.

My grandmother was an English teacher for a while. And she stressed to me the importance of reading, being able to articulate well.

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis n. [mass noun] an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.

He that reads and grows no wiser seldom suspects his own deficiency, but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

APOCOPE  (APO'COPE)   n.s.[  figure in grammar,when the last letter or syllable of a word is taken away; as, ingeni for ingenii.

C, according to English orthography, never ends a word; therefore we write stick, block, which were originally, sticke, blocke. In such words c is now mute.

Impressive vocabulary, Korbyn said. I feel as though I should take notes. I think she's making them up, Liyana said. Half of them are not anatomically possible.

And somewhere in between then and now irony slipped its way into my vocabulary. Laughter became the antidote for guilt. Sacrifice grew to be a Band-Aid for shame.

Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain's limits, not the universe's.

There was a long pause. Um, I'm afraid I don't know the word in English. The word for what? I just said I don't know it!

Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the past--it is a sign of not thinking at the present moment, not that there is anything intrinsically bad about certain words or phrases.

Words are a mirror of their times. By looking at the areas in which the vocabulary of a language is expanding fastest in a given period, we can form a fairly accurate impression of the chief preoccupations of society at that time and the points at which the boundaries of human endeavour are being advanced.

they only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn't understand tractor pulls, either.

Mystification has little to do with the vocabulary used. Mystification is the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident

Every word has a history. Every word has an image locked into its roots.

Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words.

The word gap leads to an achievement gap and has life-long consequences

Each baby wordifies its tongue firstly with the meaningless words and then initials, a word Mom.

Grammar is the grave of letters.

Why was I worried? Because if, in everyday life, I was so embarrassed, so cautious, that I scarcely breathed, the diary produced in me a craving for truth. I thought that when one writes, it makes no sense to be contained, to censor oneself, and as a result I wrote mostly—maybe only—about what I would have preferred to be silent about, resorting among other things to a vocabulary that I would never have dared to use in speaking. This

La langue n'a pas inventé de nom pour qualifier ceux qui sont privés de leurs enfants. En revanche, l'homme qui ne travaille pas est un chômeur.

To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.