Quotes About Language

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

Clichés earned their status as clichés because they're so obviously true

It's so nice to be able to end a sentence with a preposition when it's easier.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.

I think the language needs to find new ways to pull the reader. And my personal belief is a lot of it has to do with voice, and a feeling of intimacy between the writer and the reader. That sorta, given the atomization and loneliness of contemporary life - that's our opening, and that's' our gift.

sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.

Word inflation . . . Bigger and better. Good greater greatest totally great. Hyperbolic and hyperbolicker. Like grade-inflation.

an indicative transposition like 'I'm here But For the Grace of God' is, she says, literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it's meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange at the thought that Substances have brought her to the sort of pass where this is the sort of language she has to have Blind Faith in.

Talk about solid turds all you want. The molecular integrity of shit is small potatoes.

It's not that words or human language stop having any meaning or relevance after you die, by the way.

Look down your shirt and spell attic.

Irony tyrannizes us. All US irony is based on an implicit 'I don't really mean what I'm saying.

actually just has a born tech-science wienie's congenital impatience with the referential murkiness and inelegance of verbal systems.

The only way you can communicate at a high level is to be conscious of everything you write — every comma, every pronoun, every word, and all their implications.

Ibid. on using the verb to be in this culturally envenomed way, too, as in 'I'll Be There For You,' which has become the sort of empty spun-sugar shibboleth that communicates nothing except a certain unreflective sappiness in the speaker.

Re which, again, please keep in mind that a language is both a map of the world and its own world, with its own shadowlands and crevasses-places where statements that seem to obey all the language's rules are nevertheless impossible to deal with.

To presume that dictionary-making can somehow avoid or transcend ideology is simply to subscribe to a particular ideology, one that might aptly be called Unbelievably Naive Positivism.

It's the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.

It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.

It was the Greeks who turned math into an abstract system, a special symbolic language that allows people not just to describe the concrete world but to account for its deepest patterns and laws.

She kept . . . using the, well, the quote L-word itself several times without irony or any evident awareness that the word has through tactical over-deployment become trite and requires invisible quotes around it now at the very least.

She used party as a verb several times.

By simple definition. Every telling creates and limits and defines.