Quotes About Vocabulary

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

I have a particular affliction. I am unable to say a word I can't spell.

A man without words is a man without thought.

I would bet that the average teenager in this country has not used the word 'wisdom' in the past year

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

The most important tool you have on a resume is language.

All the English speakers, or almost all, have difficulties with the gender of words.

One of the drawbacks of English is you can't spell things by hearing them.

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words.

I still can't spell anything, but I can bust out two-dollar words.

The London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles.

Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.

Other people - store clerks, burger flippers, software engineers, the whole vocabulary of meaningless jobs that make up Life in America - other people just rely on plain old competition. Better flip your burgers or debug your subroutines faster than your high school classmate two blocks down the strip is flipping or debugging, because we're in competition with those guys, and people notice these things. What a fucking rat race that is.

In all countries there was a torrent of what Paul Fussell has called 'high diction': a friend became a 'comrade', a horse became a 'steed', the enemy became the 'foe'.

I spend a lot of my time just looking at words and grammar and writing things down that I don't know.

Latin, Greek, and English, plus a smattering of Italian and fucking French." "Fucking French, you say? Well . . ." "Oui," said I, in perfect fucking French.

Ooo ahe-e, I aya oa a, she said in yawnspeak, a language - not unlike Hawaiian - known for its paucity of consonants.

In my time we had very few words, perhaps a hundred that we used all the time, and thirty of them were synonyms for guilt.

Just as we help our children expand their vocabularies by reading to them and engaging them in conversations, we expand our vocabularies of prayer by making other people's prayers our own. Hymnals, denominational prayer books, and books of prayers from Christian people in all cultures and time periods can enrich our own prayer lives as we hear new ways of expressing old needs or experience a fresh perspective of how to pray for a situation.

the term "merger" should be eliminated from the business vocabulary. There is no such thing. There are only acquisitions.

dirty-word Scrabble

When reading a book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood.

He flipped through the biggest book imaginable, the dictionary, a book that contained and explained every word in the language, he said. The print was so small it looked like print for a mouse to read.

Word retrieval emergency