Quotes About Vocabulary

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different.

the general fund of vocabulary, nay, of discourse itself, so calamitous that the failure of the banks in 1929 seems paltry by comparison; so that we find verbal paupers all around us, tattered, emaciated, and reduced to the stark penury of such verbal resources as "It's like wow" or using "interface" or "office" as verbs.

The English language is damned difficult, but it's also damned rich, and so clear and bright that you can search out the darkest places with it.

En el lenguaje humano, la sanidad de Pablo fue un milagro, pero la palabra milagro no se se encuentra en el vocabulario de Dios, porque todas estas sanidades son parte de Su misma Naturaleza.

categories are more difficult to learn than others. Nouns seem to be the easiest; adverbs—the most difficult; verbs and adjectives—somewhere in between" (p. 298).

Knowing a word can also mean that the learner knows the frequency of occurrence of that word. Though this aspect of a word may seem almost trivial, the frequency of a word is often cited as a major factor in a given word's difficulty. In fact, Haynes (1993) claims that word frequency is probably the major component in word difficulty.

Perhaps the single most important aspect of knowing a word for nonnative learners—besides or in addition to the obviously requisite synonym or denotation meaning—is the

collocation(s) of a new vocabulary item. The meaning of collocation is apparent in its constituent parts: co (together) + location (place). A collocation is a word or phrase that naturally and frequently occurs before, after, or very near the target vocabulary item.

In Tinkham (1993), two experiments compared the learning rates of the same ESL learners who were learning semantically related and then semantically unrelated target vocabulary items. Results of this study showed that the learners were able to learn the semantically unrelated target items much more quickly than they could do with the semantically related items.

vocabulary is actually more important than grammar.

Vocabulary knowledge is critical to any communication. Wilkins (1972) summarizes the situation best: "While without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed" (p. 111).

This emphasis on grammar is surprising in current pedagogy that focuses on comprehensible input and communicative activities because people can generally communicate their meaning with less than perfect grammar whereas incorrect use of vocabulary can substantially impede communication.

Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the first word you thought of.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

The way I see it is, I am a boon to the English language.

Joe had always considered individual words as finite units of currency, and he believed in savings.

Inuit people had scores of words to describe snow, and that had always impressed

Once we view these personal technology processes through the perspective of diminishing returns, we'll gain the precise vocabulary we need to understand the validity of the second principle of minimalism, which states that optimizing how we use technology is just as important as how we choose what technologies to use in the first place.

One goal is that our tooling reinforces that Development and Operations not only have shared goals but have a common backlog of work, ideally stored in a common work system and using a shared vocabulary, so that work can be prioritized globally.

The word risk is a negative one in their vocabulary—it does not connote opportunity or excitement but rather the chance to waste money and time.

English is the easiest language to speak badly.

Still, everyone appeared to be extremely nice, except that that Dr Greenfield man was a trifle rebarbative. (This was a word which Toby had recently learnt at school and could not now conceive of doing without.)