Quotes About Vocabulary

I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.

My mom made me read a ton of books, so I got good at words and understood the English language. So when I started rapping, words were something I knew. I learned how to manipulate them so that I could say whatever I wanted to say.

The biggest issue for me has been the language because I speak so much German now. I've had to focus on my English and find more words to describe what I want to say and also soften my tone. It was quite stiff from 20 years of speaking German, so when I started speaking more English, oh my god, my tongue was like: 'Argh'!

Some people are born with the first word of a language resting on their tongue though it may take some time before they can taste it.

The House Commander had a strong vocabulary, indeed. The rumor was that each commander logged every curse word in a massive book, kept under lock and key, and that adding to this book had been the sacred duty of Benoit Commanders for centuries.

If you had a better vocabulary, perhaps you wouldn't be failing English!

Eat anything before you started drinking?" Xander asked. "Fuck off." "I can tell that vodka is helping you make great decisions." Javier glared. "Fuck off." "Has your vocabulary been reduced to two words now?" "No. Please fuck off.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain

Another quick tip would be to change the word tone from a negative frame to a positive one. I

The point is that nothing could be more "instinctive" than the predisposition to learn a language. It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired. It is not learned. It is—horrid thought—genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself. The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.

But there are some rare terms that simply don't have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them.

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

Joy—damn, but that's a cheerful little word.

In the case of natural languages, the linguists Sapir and Whorf hypothesize a relationship between the expressive power of a language and the ability to think certain thoughts. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that your ability to think a thought depends on knowing words capable of expressing the thought. If you don't know the words, you can't express the thought and

The words available in a programming language for expressing your programming thoughts certainly determine how you express your thoughts and might even determine what thoughts you can express.

Language-lovers know that there is a word for every fear. Are you afraid of wine? Then you have oenophobia. Tremulous about train travel? You suffer from siderodromophobia. Having misgivings about your mother-in-law is pentheraphobia, and being petrified of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth is arachibutyrophobia. And then there's Franklin Delano Roosevelt's affliction, the fear of fear itself, or phobophobia.

As far as I'm concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

No system today can duplicate a person's ability to recognize both many words and many speakers. Perhaps the state of the art is a system called DragonDictate, which runs on a personal computer and can recognize 30,000 words.

Careful writers and discerning readers delight in the profusion of words in the English lexicon, no two of which are exact synonyms. Many words convey subtle shades of meaning

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush.

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available.

the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.