Quotes About Communication

How can this be? How could we have been just sitting there, happily eating our lunch, and then Jess announces that she's gay? Like who does that anyway? And how is it possible that I never even saw this coming? I mean if you best friend has no clue that you're gay, then who does?

We have been given two ears but a single mouth, in order that we may hear more and speak less.

Once again we see not only additions to the English word-hoard but new ideas being introduced or current ideas being given a name – 'humanity', 'pollute', which then, as words often do, took on a larger and more complex life. New words are new worlds. You call them up and if they are strong enough, they keep in step with change and along the way describe more and more, provide new insights, evolve on the tongue and on the page.

In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly: The vulgar Americans speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English.

He wanted to remove silent letters and reform the whole business. He sent his scheme to his friend May Stevenson in a letter beginning: 'Diir Frind' but May replied that she could 'si meni inkanviiniensis az vel az difikylties'. That stopped it.

Fart: to break wind behind. As when we gun discharge Although the bore be ne'er so large Before the flame the muzzle burst Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first and then he spoke.

We are, each one of us, all talking advertisements for our history. Accent is the snake and the ladder in the upstairs downstairs of social ambition. Accent is the con man's first resource.

There were over five hundred ways of spelling the word 'through' and over sixty of the pronoun 'she', which is quite hard to imagine.

As when we gun discharge Although the bore be ne'er so large Before the flame the muzzle burst Just at the breech it flashes first; So from my lord his passion broke, He farted first and then he spoke. [Swift]

Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.

English, like water, will find its own level. The language itself through usage and natural selection will see that what is survivable will survive.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim! So our English, I think you'll all agree Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

A written language brings precision, forces ideas into steady shapes, secures against loss. Once the words are on the page they are there to be challenged and embellished by those who come across them later.

English was the language of protest and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the highest in the land. And the highest of the land used it in 1381, to chop down the revolt of thousands of English speakers.

to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life.

English was emerging from the tribal Babel as a resourceful tongue, but it had no great written language and without that it would be for ever condemned to the limbo of vernaculars all over the world whose attempt to live on by sound alone has often doomed them to insularity, then to irrelevance, finally to oblivion. Occasionally there is desperate resuscitation from a few survivors who know that to lose any language is to lose a unique way of knowing life. Only writing preserves a language.

Word endings fell away. Prepositions came in which took the language away from the Germanic and made it more English. Instead of adding a lump on the end of words, you could use 'to' or 'with'. 'I gave the dog to my daughter.' 'I cut the meat with my knife.' The order of words became important and prepositions became more common as signposts around sentences.

The character of a man is known from his conversations.

Truth uttered before its time is always dangerous.

This whole theater of great tit socio-sexual opportunities, threats, decisions, and interactions is played out during the dawn chorus, when territorial males are flitting about nervously, loudly broadcasting their "dee-du" calls, and meanwhile keeping an eye on their own females and on rival males, as well as ogling female neighbors.

Escribir bien cuesta. Por escribir bien entiendo decir con la máxima simplicidad las cosas esenciales.

It isn't wise to be rude to one's mother. She knows everything about your childhood that is potentially embarassing.

It's only gossip if you repeat it. Until then, it's gathering information.