Quotes About Vocabulary

In Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become? Michael Schrage writes: Successful innovators don't ask customers and clients to do something different; they ask them to become someone different. . . . Successful innovators ask users to embrace—or at least tolerate—new values, new skills, new behaviors, new vocabulary, new ideas, new expectations, and new aspirations. They transform their customers.

There are no such things as synonyms! he practically shouted. Deluge is not the same as flood.

There are no such things as synonyms!" he practically shouted.

Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all

Incidentally, he might have added, are you aware that there's no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.

we have smuggled in a misleadingly 'ethical' vocabulary to bolster our economic arguments

Padre always told me me language was sulphurous.

I would like a dictionary though. A dictionary contains all the books ever written and all the books that will ever be written. That's something isn't it? The words aren't in the right order, of course, but it's still something.

Also, the realization that fumes from the nitrate of mercury used in the felt-making process affected the nerves of hatmakers and caused their speech to blur and nerves to twitch — hence the term "mad as a hatter" — also helped the public to lose interest.

Speaking slang only makes a man sound ignorant. If you can't think of more appropriate words to express yourself, then open a dictionary and study.

There is massive evidence that self-selected reading, or reading what you want to read, is responsible for most of our literacy development. Readers have better reading ability, know more vocabulary, write better, spell better, and have better control of complex grammatical constructions. In fact, it is impossible to develop high levels of literacy without being a dedicated reader, and dedicated readers rarely have serious problems in reading and writing.

You like words and I know words

Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.

In reality, Hemingway didn't appeal to plumbers or roofers who read books; he was a rich man's writer, with the vocabulary and hunting instinct of the blue-collar workingman. But Hemingway had the unfailing genius of an inventor, and each book he wrote was new, sparkling new, something that hadn't been seen in American prose, something that merged common speech with uncommon clarity, something that verged on poetry. 

Many terms which have now dropped out of favour will be revived, and those that are at present respectable, will drop out, if useage so choose with whom resides the decision and the judgment and the code of speech.

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

You have to fall in love with hanging around words.

There must be bands of enthusiasts for everything on earth-fanatics who shared a vocabulary, a batch of technical skills and equipment, and, perhaps, a vision of some single slice of the beauty and mystery of things, of their complexity, fascination, and unexpectedness.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

How does hanky-panky translate to sex? Who comes up with words like that? Probably people who don't have sex

I have no words. Sixteen languages, but no words. -Vishous

Shit of ten horses," his twin said in the Old Language. "The new aftershave of the lessers," Phury muttered, rubbing his eyes.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

There are three types of words: words we all know, words we should know, and words nobody knows. Don't use the third category.