Quotes About Language

I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.

What 'SNL' taught me that was useful on 'The Watch' was, only put in bad words if they can get a laugh - there was no need for swear words and beeps in places that weren't necessary. Those beeps should only be in there when they mean something and it's important to the joke.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

What I do used to be called 'diversity training,' then 'cultural competency' and now, 'anti-racism.' These terms are really useful for periods of time, but then they get coopted, and people build all this baggage around them, and you have to come up with new terms, or else people won't engage.

I like 'nerves'! I like the word 'migraineur'. I like the word 'madness'. These are OK words. The 19th century had a very handy term: 'neurasthenic'. I think that's a very useful word. We all know what that means: it means extra-sensitive.

Travel provided many interesting experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of characters of the written Chinese language.

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

I suppose if I went to Turkey - I mean, I can't imagine going that far away, but if I did go to Turkey, yes, I would probably try to know 'please' and 'sorry' and 'thank you', and 'a beer please', and all the useful words.

What's so useful about the British culture of politeness is the level of passive aggression is really fun to write.

You'd expect, as good Darwinian creatures, we would evolve to be fascinated with how the world really is, and we would use language to convey real-world information, we'd be obsessed with knowing the way things are, and we would entirely reject stories that aren't true. They're useless. But that's not the way we work.

Studying English was useless, completely useless. It took me years to recover from that. Every time I tried to write, it sounded like a bad university essay.

I think smartphones need to send an electrical shock to a user when they get their your/you're mixed up.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

A new laboratory technique, positron emission tomography, uses radioactively labeled oxygen or glucose that essentially lights up specific and different areas of the brain being activated when a person speaks words or sees words or hears words, revealing the organic location for areas of behavioral malfunction.

I'm not actually perishing, but I do feel like I die a little every time someone uses 'literally' to mean 'really.'

Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression - these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.

'I' is the word everyone uses to refer to themselves. On the one hand, it points to a specific person, but it's also this blank space that you can insert yourself into; it's a chute into empathy.

It's ridiculous how the United States practically every week sanctions Cuba and then uses manipulative language to say this is 'helping' the Cuban people.

Science always uses metaphor.

A few words of Hindi appear here or there, but it's all Urdu. I feel that if the popular culture, which is what Hindi films are, uses Urdu, it's not going to diminish.