Quotes About Vocabulary

Buckin' is one ay Na Na's favourite words likesay, along wi 'pish'. Naebody says 'pish' like Na Na. She sortay drags oot the sssshhh, it's likesay, ye kin see the steam rising oaf the yellay jet as it hits the white porcelain, ken?

With guitar, I'd always mixed more sounds that occur in hip-hop, or occur on Crystal Method records, or occur at the zoo - so I've never been sort of tethered or have limited myself to the traditional rock n' roll vocabulary.

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language, not set its style.

The first book of the nation is the dictionary of its language.

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

I hear what they're saying. I ask my English tutor, 'What is this word 'tinkerer?''

Profanity is the parlance of the fool. Why curse when there is such a magnificent language with which to discourse?

Obama, of course, is an outstanding orator—but even outstanding orators (unlike nineteenth-century presidents) feel obliged to dumb their words down a bit for the American public. President Donald Trump, however, is proud of his limited tweetish vocabulary. "I know words," he declared at a campaign appearance in Hilton Head, South Carolina. "I have the best words. But there is no better word than stupid. Right?

I'd never been fond of gratuitous cursing. I figured it was lazy, a communication habit of people who couldn't be bothered finding the correct word.

Having words opened up a world of possibilities for Martha.

Only when you know the nuances of a language can you sing a song well.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.

Wise son of a bitch, you're one of those sons of bitches with a vocabulary and you like to lay it around!

My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem.

What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don't know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up. For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

Charles Harrington Elster

Language does control how you think, and if you don't have a word for it, you won't think of it.

In the vocabulary of certain radical theorists contradictions are given the status of some deadly disease to which their opponents alone can succumb. But contradictions are the very stuff of life. If there had been a little dash of contradiction among the Gadarene swine some of them might have been saved from drowning.

What is at work in this report is the reduction of language to code. Cliches, coined by the state, become the only acceptable vocabulary. Everyone knows what to say and how to respond. It is scripted. Vocabulary shrinks so that the tyranny of nationalist rhetoric leaves people sputtering state-sanctioned slogans.

Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war. The fighting may have stopped in Bosnia or Cyprus but this does not mean the war is over. The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly.

Few activities are as delightful as learning new vocabulary.