Quotes About Vocabulary

He was particularly prolific, as David Crystal points out, when it came to attaching un- prefixes to existing words to make new words that no one had thought of before – unmask, unhand, unlock, untie, unveil and no fewer than 309 others in a similar vein. Consider how helplessly prolix the alternatives to any of these terms are and you appreciate how much punch Shakespeare gave English.

Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless.

Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? Or how about sluibbergegullion, a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting.

Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn't it a shame to let it slip away?

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.

Sweetheart was originally sweetard

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

I'm a man of few words. If you read more, you might have a larger vocabulary.

Today for show & tell, I've brought in some flash cards I made. Each card has a letter followed by several dashes. When I show the card, you yell out the vulgar, obscene or blasphemous word they stand for! …Ready? …She's such a hypocrite about building vocabulary.

I'm only civil because I don't know any swear words.

I gotta use words to talk to you.

Sometimes she can't find the right word, but she can find a word close to what she means. Anomia, the speech therapist calls

You know what a word means when you know how to use it, not what its definition is. That is why we can understand and use all sorts of words that we struggle to define clearly if we are put on the spot and asked to do so.

Subjective conscious mind is an analog of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogs of behavior in the physical world…concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects.

Lexium (TM): Trouble with limited vocabulary? These slow-release capsules are imbued with the latest in infra-cerebral nanobots that will gradually encode your brain with hundreds of thousands of new words while reinforcing the neural pathways to facilitate retention and recall. Now available in French. Kane Faucher, Metapharm, Journal of Experimental Fiction #39

I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.

Japanese is a very difficult language.

I think we invent jargon because it saves times talking to one-another.

But there is, alas, no doubt that we are becoming a vocabulary-deprived nation—nay, planet. Words have been dropping off all through this century, but the loss increased radically in the sixties with the immorality of "limited vocabulary.

It's like learning a language you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

I like words. And I always learn a few new ones when Father gets angry. I shouldn't neglect my education, now should I?

As I mentioned in the introduction, we asked around seventy-five hundred people to identify all of the emotions that they could recognize and name when they're experiencing them. The average was three: glad, sad, and mad—or, as they were more often written, happy, sad, and pissed off. Couple this extremely limited vocabulary with the importance of emotional literacy, and you basically have a crisis. It's this crisis that I'm trying to help address in this book.

Our ability to accurately recognize and label emotions is often referred to as emotional granularity. In the words of Harvard psychologist Susan David, "Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.

Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformative.