Quotes About Language

My father-in-law, Barney Rawlings, spent a couple of months hiding out in France in 1944, frantically memorizing a few French words to pass himself off as a Frenchman, but his ordeal had not inspired in me any action until I started taking a French class.

I understand almost everything in English. I am just not 100 per cent on numbers, so when I am out I am comfortable ordering food but when I am paying, I have to make sure I am paying the right amount!

Neither Aristotelian nor Russellian rules give the exact logic of any expression of ordinary language; for ordinary language has no exact logic.

I like to think that the best poetry is or involves a contest between ordinary conversation and ritual.

To say that such-and-such a circumstance is 'Kafkaesque' is to admit to the denigration of an imagination that has burned a hole in what we take to be modernism - even in what we take to be the ordinary fabric and intent of language. Nothing is like 'The Hunger Artist.' Nothing is like 'The Metamorphosis.'

Ordinary people can be very articulate and very eloquent.

Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.

Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.

You have to understand when you're organizing with women of color, you can't use words like 'marginalized' and 'second-class citizen' loosely.

I love how British people call Asian people 'oriental' unless they're talking about Indian people, who get to be called Asian.

When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.

So for everybody who allows themselves to be separated from me because I said 'African' instead of 'Nubian' or 'Black' or 'Kemet' or 'original' or 'Israelite,' don't be so foolish. I say 'African' because the continent of Africa is the land from which we all originate. It is the word that we are most familiar with right now.

You should take notes whenever you hear interesting or original language.

You know, when it was done originally, they always had to fight to keep it going at the end of each season. Now, The Odd Couple has become part of our language and culture.

Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

A community, once it realises that its language is in danger, can get its act together and introduce measures which can genuinely revitalise. You've seen it happen in Australia with several Aboriginal languages. And it's happening in other countries, too.

English football is really different to football in other countries.

It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.

I ought to at least be able to read literature in French. I went to an enlightened grade school that started us on French in fifth grade, which meant that by the time I graduated high school I had been at it for eight years.

I think that young Australians ought to be taking language education much more seriously. I mean, you know, every day I'm meeting people with expertise, ability and talent in fields where I want to learn so much more; science, for example.

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.