Quotes About Vocabulary

He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word "postmodernist.

Richard Papen: As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, gutteral verbs, and the world postmodernist.

But poor Andy—even before he was skipped ahead a grade—had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like 'noxious' and 'chthonic' in casual conversation.

The Greek word for "rooster" is built from combined parts that mean "getter out of bed".

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

I had never realized that so much communication was non-verbal. That language was a kind of refinement of information passed by other means. We discovered that, with the most limited vocabulary, a half dozen words, you could still cover a lot of ground. And eventually, Belle came back.

The French call mot juste the word that exactly fits. Why is this word so hard to find? The reasons are many. First, we don't always know what we mean and are too lazy too find out.

Jack," said Charles, "he's making up words again." "Yes," Jack replied, "but he's getting better at it, don't you think?

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

In 2016, "Fascism" was searched on the Merriam-Webster dictionary website more often than any other word in English except "surreal," which experienced a sudden spike after the November presidential election.

When I first started studying Greek, one of my absolute favorite parts was realizing that so many English words had these old, secret roots. Learning Greek was like being given a super-power: linguistic x-ray vision.

Some producer actually told Franny that profanity revealed a poor vocabulary and a lack of imagination. And Frank and Lilly and Father and I all loved to shout at Franny, then, and ask her what she had said to that. 'What an anal crock of shit, you dumb asshole!' she'd told the producer. 'Up yours - and in your ear, too!

Zischeln is a useful German verb meaning "to whisper angrily.

The other Andamanese languages have no known relatives. They have five numbers: one, two, one more, some more, and all. On

I like words. And I always learn a few new ones when Father gets angry. I shouldn't neglect my education, now should I?

I'm too intellectual. I don't think that the theological vocabulary is as important as the experience.

Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary. When you start thinking of pressure, it's because you've started to think of failure.

Arabic gives English technical terms such a nadir, azimuth, and zenith.

Wow, really?" I said, before I could stop myself. "I used the wrong word, didn't I," Davidson said, looking at me. "I can never remember if 'clank' or 'threep' is the word I'm not supposed to be using today.

I think our family is like a lot of families. We had no vocabulary for mental illness

A lot of words in English confuse the idea of life and electricity, like the word livewire.

She was obliged, of course, to admit that Swann was not interested in money, but she would add sulkily: "It's not the same thing, you see, with him," and, as a matter of fact, what appealed to her imagination was not the practice of disinterestedness, but its vocabulary.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

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