Quotes About Language

MONDEGREEN. A term for misheard song lyrics, coined by American freelance writer Sylvia Wright (1920–1961) in 1954. It derived from her long-held belief that a song contained the line, "They had slain the Earl of Moray and Lady Mondegreen." In fact, the line ended with the words, "and laid him on the green.

Right now Jabba just said "Boska," and when the boss says boska, we boska.

The relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival. At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in society....—George Steiner, After Babel

God, who made Eden, also wrecked the tower of Babel, by dividing people.

Quote may seem a bit of a foreign concept, because few other languages have anything like it. It's closely tied to one of the most distinctive features of Lisp: code and data are made out of the same data structures, and the quote operator is the way we distinguish between them.

Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.

The phrase "personal computer" is part of the language now, but when it was first used it had a deliberately audacious sound, like the phrase "personal satellite" would today.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

think language designers would do better to consider their target user to be a genius who will need to do things they never anticipated, rather than a bumbler who needs to be protected from himself. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn't intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language.

Everyday words are inherently imprecise. They work well enough in everyday life that you don't notice. Words seem to work, just as Newtonian physics seems to. But you can always make them break if you push them far enough.

You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.

It's hard to predict what life will be like in a hundred years. There are only a few things we can say with certainty. We know that everyone will drive flying cars, that zoning laws will be relaxed to allow buildings hundreds of stories tall, that it will be dark most of the time, and that women will all be trained in the martial arts. Here I want to zoom in on one detail of this picture. What kind of programming language will they use to write the software controlling those flying cars?

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

The dictionary contains no metaphors.

In India nearly everybody spoke metaphorically except the English who spoke bluntly and could make their most transparent lies look honest as a consequence; whereas any truth contained in these metaphorical rigmaroles was so deviously presented that it looked devious itself.

A man walks down the street. It's a street in a strange world. Maybe it's the third world. Maybe it's his first time around. He doesn't speak the language. He holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by the sound, sound of cattle in the marketplace, scatterlings and orphanages. He looks around, around he sees angels in the architecture spinning in infinity and he says, Amen and Hallelujah!

According to Laing, the apparently incomprehensible and self-contradictory language of the schizophrenic is often a gnomic expression of the twisted truth that the patient is unable to express.

Don't write," he said, seeing me scribbling into my notebook, taking me for a journalist. "Periodista?" Diego asked. "Pensionado," I said. Retiree.

The Chinese word for yak meant 'hairy cow'. It is a lovely long-haired animal, like a cow on its way to the opera.

I speak my language fluently, but my children aren't interested," she said

Claudia Muzzi, of Italian ancestry, had traveled in Italy and indeed spoke Italian. But her most memorable experiences had been in the United States, specifically in Georgia. She planned to write about it later in the week.

All this confession and evasion, in the relentless interrogation of language learning, sometimes led to awkwardness.