Quotes About Communication

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when someone asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer.

The language of friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence about language.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, an they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.

Never miss an opportunity to say I love you...Better still...Create them ?????

Love, understood by all, will be pouring forth its unconscious eloquence.

Aunque hable las lenguas de los hombres y de los ángeles, si no tuviera Amor, sería como el bronce que suena, o como el címbalo que tañe.

Geologists search for the meaning to be read into the piled-up strata of the earth much as a historian might turn the pages of an ancient, damaged manuscript. The astronomer seeks the answer to his questions in the depths of space. Still other men concentrate on the scriptures alone. The wise man searches all these and other sources, knowing that all are communications from the same divine source and certain that, if followed far enough, all will guide him back to the Divine Presence.

The republic of letters.

Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years.

a French lieutenant, who had been long enough out of France to forget his own language, but not long enough in England to learn ours, so that he really spoke no language at all.

I can't understand why people can't go on just being ordinary to each other even if they are in love.

Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations which go further than names however shared can go. Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone ...

The truth that could be extracted from words was such a fluctuating, relative truth

the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are 'frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes'. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another

In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military's deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a 'pre-dawn vertical insertion'.

The pidgin English exclamation chop chop replicates the Chinese kwai kwai.)

Webster was a dry, humourless man whose character we can deduce, I think, from the title of his Essay on the Necessity, Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation.

easy'. Yet sometimes an easy word is translated into a bafflingly polysyllabic alternative. 'Rust', we are assured, is 'the red desquamation of old iron' or 'the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal', while a 'scale' is 'any thing exfoliated or desquamated'. Confusingly, when we turn to the entry for 'desquamation', we are told that it is 'the act of scaling foul bones'.

he was able to laugh at his weakness for fiddly words. When he and Boswell were in the Highlands and passed through Glen Shiel, Boswell described a mountain as 'immense', but Johnson corrected him—'No; it is no more than a considerable protuberance.' NICETY     1.

The best example is boondocks. Originally in Tagalog it signified a mountain, but, when poor natives explained that they came from mountainous areas, outsiders imagined the word was a general term for any slummy or primitive place.

tennis' comes from the French tenez ('take it'). This dubious explanation turns out, on closer investigation, to be well founded, since early players—of 'real' tennis, not modern lawn tennis—apparently called out this word to alert the receiver that they were about to serve. Reading

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