logo

Quotes About Idiom

Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another. Often what pinches and pricks, gnaws, claws, stabs, and suffocates, like a seventeenth-century witch, is the irritatingly unsolved puzzle in the next room. The
~ Stacy Schiff
Yes, but I view Frank's music as fully composed. In other words, the arrangements can work for any idiom such as a rock band or an orchestra. Frank was a brilliant arranger and could make his music work in any context. He proved that tour after tour and album after album.
~ Dweezil Zappa
theology needs to develop an idiom that seeks to "glorify God and enjoy him forever.
~ Frank D. Macchia
In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage.
~ Ian Mcewan
In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage. As with words, so with sentences.
~ Ian Mcewan
Heavy metal to me is this cartoon idiom where people have their hair stuck-up all over the place dyed blonde with black roots showing through and Spandex trousers and chains around their neck, eating raw meat on stage. It just doesn't mean anything to me.
~ Gary Moore
Cullmann interprets the binding of Satan by his quaint idiom that he is bound, but with a long rope.42 Satan is not powerless, but his power has been broken.
~ George Eldon Ladd
In short, hysteria is a type of language in which communication is effected by means of pictures (or iconic signs), instead of by means of words (or conventional signs). Hysterical language thus resembles other picture languages, such as charades. Those who want to deal with so-called hysterical patients must therefore learn not how to diagnose or treat them, but how to understand their special idiom and how to translate it into ordinary language.
~ Thomas Szasz
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
~ George Will
Such verbal litter is to language as Muzak is to music. As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
~ George F. Will, 1977
I parle Francais like a Spanish cow.
~ Israel Horovitz
One can, of course, speak several languages. There are speakers who are competent in more than one language. Some even write several languages at a time (prostheses, grafts, translation, transposition) . But do they not always do it with a view to an absolute idiom? and in the promise of a still unheard-of language? of a sole poem previously inaudible?
~ Jacques Derrida
What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.
~ Cormac McCarthy
Every existence has its idiom, every thing and idiom and tongue.
~ Walt Whitman
The expression "following suit" is a curious one, because it has nothing to do with walking behind a matching set of clothing.
~ Lemony Snicket
Modern formulations are necessary even in defense of very ancient truths. Not because of any alleged anachronism in the old ideas – the Beatitudes remain the essential statements of the Western code – but because the idiom of life is always changing
~ William F. Buckley Jr.
As late as the early '50s, jazz was still, for the most part, a genuinely popular music, a utilitarian, song-based idiom to which ordinary people could dance if they felt like it.
~ Terry Teachout
For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.
~ James Fenton
Hurston's mythic realism, lush and dense within a lyrical black idiom, seemed politically retrograde to the proponents of a social or critical realism.
~ Zora Neale Hurston
There is a very beautiful expression in the Hebrew language that's borrowed from spoken Torah... 'All is predicted, and permission is given at any point to change anything.' I think I live by this idiom in the sense that there is always a goal; there is always something to look forward to in life and my creative search, and that goal is there.
~ Neri Oxman
As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.
~ George Will
Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.
~ William A. Dembski
Do those words matter? Of course they do, because they underpin an idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the humour from what women have to say. It is an idiom that effectively repositions women back into the domestic sphere (people 'whinge' over things like the washing up); it trivialises their words, or it 're-privatises' them.
~ Mary Beard