Quotes About Vocabulary

There is in fact no Greek equivalent to our barren term 'sex.' This English word in its present usage emerged only in the nineteenth century, out of clinical discourse. Greeks spoke of what we now call 'sex' by referring to gods - Eros and Aphrodite.

That which is now called learning, was not learning originally. Learning does not consist, as the schools now make it consist, in the knowledge of languages, but in the knowledge of things to which language gives names.

Scared of words? I don't see why anybody ought to fear words. Words are tools; you have to know how to use them to get done the job you want to get done. Can't do the work if you're scared of the work.

Guys say 'like' all the time, and no one notices it.

If we want to change the nuance of a particular word we have to change that ourselves.

Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at. [p.93]

And that's why people no longer care which words they use as long as they use lots of them.

You see," continued the minister, bowing thankfully to the duke, "Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They're grown right here in our orchards.

You think—I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it We're destroying words—scores of them hundreds of them every day. It's a beautiful thing the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms there are also the antonyms.

My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn't a dentist. It produces false impression

I accidentally knew all the words.

We had to learn their vocabularies in order to be able to run their problems. I could switch my vocabulary and speak highly technical for the programmers, and then tell the same things to the managers a few hours later but with a totally different vocabulary." Innovation requires articulation.

Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts: 1)Artificial censorship 2)Limitations of social contact 3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs. 4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages 5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world 6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives

The worst part of it is you don't know if he's barking at an owl, the moon or a burglar!" "That's one of the drawbacks of a limited vocabulary!

I'm learning English at the moment. I can say 'Big Ben', 'Hello Rodney', 'Tower Bridge' and 'Loo'.

Sir, I can put a sentence together in English. But all my effort goes into remembering the right words.

Someone told me I need to stop dropping F-bombs. What the [f*@%] is an F-bomb?

Words — so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them!

Latin texts and "tried on" various nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, inventing new ones along the way; in the process he would have acquired his vocabulary of some 25,000 words, more than twice the size of the one possessed by John Milton.

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.

In the English language, the word "sadism" only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn't until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) In that sense, "sadism" is like "serial killer": a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

We ourselves have so long ceased to use it [the Christian worldview] except for the discussion of the moral, the liturgical, or the spiritual, that it is rusty and out of date. We have no Christian vocabulary to match the complexities of contemporary political, social, and industrial life. We have long ceased to bring Christian judgement to bear upon the secular public world.

Xenial' is a word which refers to the giving of gifts to strangers. . . . I know that having a good vocabulary doesn't guarantee that I'm a good person. . . . But it does mean I've read a great deal. And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil.

I know that having a good vocabulary doesn't guarantee that I'm a good person, but it does mean I've read a great deal. And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil.