Quotes About Vocabulary

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

I collect words--they are sweets in the mouth of sound.

I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children.

At 12, still digesting every non-religious book he could get his hands on, he memorized a Latin vocabulary book.

Don't accustom yourself to use big words for little matters

Lexicographer—A writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Write like you speak with the 'rhythms of human speech,' as William Zinsser said, and in as few words as possible. Use action verbs to carry water.

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted.

I like playing around with the words; I love it when I feel like I've picked the exact right word to describe whatever it is I'm trying to describe.

Ho amato quella lingua per la sua flessibilità di corpo allenato, la ricchezza del vocabolario nel quale a ogni parola si afferma il contatto diretto e vario della realtà, l'ho amata perché quasi tutto quel che gli uomini han detto di meglio è stato detto in greco.

I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something—Being—having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether—if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence.

When I was a child, I read books. My reading was not indiscriminate. I preferred books that were old and thick and hard. I made vocabulary lists.

I'm a simple man who was brought up by a complicated man. So I have mannerisms and so on. Vocabulary. People can be misled.

A person who does not read, or reads little, or reads only trash, is a person with an impediment: he can speak much but he will say little, because his vocabulary is deficient in the means for self-expression. This is not only a verbal limitation. It represents also a limitation in intellect and imagination. It is a poverty of thought, for the simple reason that ideas, the concepts through which we grasp the secrets of our condition, do not exist apart from words.

It was astounding how a woman, when she struck marital gold, procured not just a new wardrobe and new friends but a new voice straight out of a 1930s gramophone (brittle, mono-stereo) and a vocabulary that reliably included laze, season, and terribly sorry.

But sometimes it is fun not knowing what the words mean because you can look them up in a dictionary...

Greek, a language in which everything is pronounced exactly as written

I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.

I was now a graduate of the best cooking school in the country – a valuable commodity on the open market – I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of sheer vocabulary requires before it can become a vertebrate and walk the earth.

And those hard slovos, brothers, were like the beginning of my freedom.

English is a curiously expressive language. Womb, room, tomb. It sums up living in three words.

If Shakespeare required a word and had not met it in civilised discourse, he unhesitatingly made it up.