Quotes About Vocabulary

Mark Twain once opined in his homey way: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.

The right hemisphere was not without some language—but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo;

For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo.

Maury's mind was practical, solidly founded on history, memory, and experience. It was in no way academic or theoretical. He did not substitute vocabulary for knowledge.

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. (on Ernest Hemingway

he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts.

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often.

Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause. In

I'll leave," I retorted, finally regaining my cool, "but if the other customers are scared of anything, it's your own contumeliousness." "My what?" she asked, looking perplexed. "It's a vocabulary word," I said triumphantly. "Look it up.

While attending the carding machines," he would later recall, "I used to place the dictionary on the desk—by which I passed every two minutes in feeding the machine and removing the rolls—and in this way I would have a moment in which to look at a word and read its definition and could then fix it in my memory." As an adult, the boy who practiced with his dictionary would own a personal library of more than four thousand volumes.

It's how we communicated.' 'I like old-fashioned language.' 'With cussing,' he said. 'Fuck, yeah. Cussing makes you live longer. Did you know that? It gets shit out of your system.

She learned about Indian words that have been incorporated into American English, like moose and pecan and squash, and Penobscot words like kwai kwai, a friendly greeting, and woliwoni, thank you.

He concluded that language, specifically the act of naming something with a word, helps categorize.

How will I know I've grown up? When I've started using words I didn't really know the meaning of. I said I did that already and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn't.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

But his key label is 'cant'. He defines the word as follows: 1. A corrupt dialect used by beggars and vagabonds 2. A particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men 3. A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms 4. Barbarous jargon 5. Auction When a word is

Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns

The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.

Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion.

Language is the expression of ideas by means of speech-sounds combined into words. Words are combined into sentences, this combination answering to that of ideas into thoughts.

The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.

American Democracy did not imply any equality of wealth, but did demand a wholesome sameness of thought, dress, painting, morals, and vocabulary.

I appreciate people who try and use language in an interesting way.

I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.