Quotes About Vocabulary

Foot-and-a-half-long words.

We have no way of knowing what words you are going to misuse, so we cannot offer you a list. What we can offer, though, is a test that you yourself can apply to any word, whenever you are in doubt. A Test: Do I Know This Word? Ask yourself: 'Do I know this word?' If the answer is no, then you do not know it.

When the reader has stopped to wonder at your delamificatious vocabulary, or, worse, when the reader has stopped because the word you've used has no more meaning to him than a random ptliijnbvc of letters, the reader is not involved in your story. ... Generally, saying 'edifice' instead of 'building' doesn't tell your reader anything about the building; it tells the reader that you know that word edifice.

Most of the people you see going to work today are LARPing (live-action role playing) an incredibly boring RPG (role-playing game) called "professionalism" that requires them to alter their vocabulary, posture, eating habits, facial expressions--every detail all the way down to what they allow themselves to find funny.

Dog's ears went up at the word "ham": they say dogs have a vocabulary of about twenty words, and I was pretty sure that seventeen of Dog's were ham.

I collect words and lock them away, stored like a hoard of gems.

choosing words is harder than I thought.

The only thing Beatrix knows about being circumspect is how to spell it.

It is in the measure that special methods acknowledge their common core in transcendental method, that norms common to all the sciences will be acknowledged, that a secure basis will be attained for tackling interdisciplinary problems, and that the sciences will be mobilized within a higher unity of vocabulary, thought and orientation, in which they will be able to make their quite significant contribution to the solution of fundamental problems.

I'll always be a word man, better than a bird man

Vocabulary and coherent sentences can't be downloaded onto paper unless they've first been uploaded to the head by reading

The only place where success comes before work is a dictionary.

She cursed me at such length and with such inventiveness I had to check both my watch and my dictionary.

Education teaches a man how to speak, now how long or how often.

E. E. Bauermeister, supervisor of education and correctional counselor at California Institution for Men, Chino, California, who told the authors: "I always tell the men in our self-adjustment class that too often what we read and profess becomes a part of our libraries and our vocabularies, instead of becoming a part of our lives.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.

Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.

I'm a computer freak. I'm on the Internet every night. Sometimes I play dungeons and dragons with 15-year-old boys who think I'm a 15-year-old boy with a weird vocabulary.

He pronounces "death" like "debt.

The resurrection and its victory over death brought a decisive new word to the vocabulary of pain and suffering: temporary. Jesus Christ holds out the startling promise of an afterlife without pain. Whatever anguish we feel now will not last.

Jules Winnfield: ENGLISH, MOTHER FUCKER! DO YOU SPEAK IT!? Samuel L. Jackson

Ouch. Cursing—not so dashing.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?