Quotes About Language

The language of excitement is at best picturesque merely. You must be calm before you can utter oracles.

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

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

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

The republic of letters.

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.

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

Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a scurrilous burlesque, written mostly by John Arbuthnot, that poked fun at Grub Street twittishness. He chose this indelicate item because it was a source of interesting words like 'chicanery', 'confidant', 'troglodyte' and 'piazza', and even the distinctly modern-sounding 'skylight'.

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 verb 'to install' is spelt thus, but 'to reinstal' with a single /. Such anomalies were his to resolve. His failure to do so has proved lasting: it is thanks to Johnson that the opposite of ''moveable' is commonly written 'immovable', and thanks to him, too, that one person can 'deign' to do what another 'disdains' to do. Of

I can remember being surprised to find that kiosk is Turkish – as may be the card game bridge – and that berserk, like geyser and narwhal, is Icelandic: it seems to derive from the name of the bearskin coats worn by the fiercest Norse warriors.

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

On his trip to the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773, he used the word 'depeditation' in reference to the actor Samuel Foote, who had suffered a broken leg. Like a Scrabble player, Boswell challenged this, and Johnson admitted he had made the word up, before adding mischievously 'that he had not made above three or four in his Dictionary'. Horace

More enduringly significant than the European influence of the Dictionary was its influence across the Atlantic. The American adoption of the Dictionary was a momentous event not just in its history, but in the history of lexicography. For Americans in the second half of the eighteenth century, Johnson was the seminal authority on language, and the subsequent development of American lexicography was coloured by his fame. America's

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 portrays the labours of the etymologist in whimsical terms: 'In search of the progenitors of our speech, we may wander from the tropick to the frozen zone, and find some in the valleys of Palestine, and some upon the rocks of Norway'. Johnson's

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.

A 'rant' consists of 'high sounding language unsupported by dignity of thought'.

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.

example, we can hear a note of doubt in his report that the word 'porcelain' is 'said to be derived from pour cent années; because it was believed by Europeans, that the materials of porcelain was matured under ground one hundred years'. In fact it comes from the Italian word porcellana, meaning 'cowrie shell'—a diminutive derived from the Latin porcus ('pig'), as the cowrie has commonly

Johnson the poet recognizes that there are times when a little scientific precision may be sacrificed in the interests of a memorable formula. Thus 'to hiccough' is 'to sob with convulsion of the stomach', while an 'embryo' is 'the offspring yet unfinished in the womb'. 'Thumb' is defined simply as 'the short strong finger answering to the other four'. A 'puppet' is 'a wooden tragedian'.

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