Quotes About Language

Her cooking was terrible, her English minimal, and so their Sabbath dinner conversation was mostly her gesturing toward seconds of overdone meat and underdone potatoes while he pantomimed being full. Every so often she got up to yell at the cat in Yiddish.

Words are invisible, but if misused, can prove deadly.

harassment is actually a sexualized form of bullying. Bullies use social or physical power to intimidate and demean others. Harassers put a sleazy spin on the same dynamic, simply deploying vulgar language and unwanted advances to accomplish the same end.

The language of sex seemed to echo with Shop: as a Playboy, apparently, you got hammered or plastered, then you nailed or screwed or drilled a woman who was built, or had a rack.

Laughter is a salve. It's the best medicine around. Poet Pablo Neruda called it "the language of the soul." I know this to be a universal truth because I've seen this play out in every culture around the world. People find respite and release in laughter.

There is nothing worse than a man who can't spell — it takes all the romance out of cards and love letters and things.

Mathilde. She was French. Quite pretty. We kissed

The word "mistress" sounds like a cross between mistake and mattress.

You're like someone from a fairy story written in a language I don't even know." "The prince, I hope." "No, you're the dragon, a beautiful wicked dragon.

The right words can bind someone more effectively than chains.

I like that word," Pandora mused. "Strumpet. It sounds like a saucy musical instrument." "It

One of the more ignominious features of love was that you could only express it with cliches...it made you sound like a fraud at a time when you were blazing with sincerity.

Language is like money, without which specific relative values may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Better to die in the pursuit of civilized values, we believed, than in a flight underground. We were offering a value system couched in the language of science.

I love players like Thurston Moore. I mean, you can put notes down on a sheet of paper, and if you practice and get your chops up, you can play like an Eddie Van Halen or a Steve Vai. But nobody can do what Thurston Moore does; he's his own guy. He talks through his instrument in a language that's all his own.

I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.

To be is to be the value of a variable.

As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?

We have to stop using words like 'that time of the month' or other such variations. Say it: I have my periods. There is nothing to be shy or embarrassed about.

I would say, 'It's not very fa-her to the ca-her.' They would say, 'It's not very far to the car.' I just didn't hear it and it took me forever, but I finally did learn the variations in my tongue and how to make an American sound, and I feel confident with it now.

Chemical compounds of carbon can exist in an infinite variety of compositions, forms and sizes. The naturally occurring organic substances are the basis of all life on Earth, and their science at the molecular level defines a fundamental language of that life.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.

We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.