Quotes About Language

lost. So the /p/ is in a way present, though not simply so. It is carried as a trace in the /b/, necessarily

Concepts need their physical sounds, their scripted marks, etc. Even if we can imagine words "inside our head", we are conjuring their signifiers, their sensory aspects.

an undecidable presence-absence at the origin of meaning.

Does this eradicate CONTEXT? For Derrida, no. There are contexts, but they have no centre and can never entirely govern meanings.

Derrida has argued that communication is always subject to iterability, citation and grafting. If so, it can't be taken as a guaranteed, masterable passage of meanings. Language, Derrida says, is a "non-masterable dissemination". If that's the case, we lose absolute assurance that we can "say what we mean" or "know what someone is thinking".

Chinese Room

Rectory always sounded to me like a place you would find a proctologist.

But hold on: Didn't I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source, Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.

I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself.

So I wanted to make you a nice French meal," she said. "Coq au vin." She said it with her best Bad French accent, caca van, and a very small lightbulb came on in my head. "Caca van?" I said, and I looked at Astor. She nodded. "Poop van," she said.

Is that what you call it now?" she said, and although her words might as well have been in Estonian, for all the sense they made, her tone was very clear, and it did not hold even the memory of anything pleasant. I

Sí?"she said shyly, and I marveled once again at the power of my totally smarmy synthetic charm. And in two languages, too.

Hey," Robert said. "Aren't you supposed to say 'what up' or something?" Renny stared at Robert with his head tilted, one eyebrow raised and one lowered. "You gonna teach me how to talk black, Robert?" he said. "Damn, that's great; I been wanting to learn that.

For some quixotic reason, Deborah had studied French in high school, and for a few seconds she apparently thought it was going to help her understand the man. She watched him as he raced through several paragraphs, and then finally shook her head. "Je nais comprend—Goddamn it, I can't remember how to say it. Dexter, get somebody up here to translate." The

Rectory always sounded to me like a place where you would find a proctologist.

Imagine that the correct words had been chosen by those people who are in charge of our lives. A few well-though-out words and things might have been different. Unfortunately, they have chosen all the wrong words.

Words are the most important thing we have. A few words, one word, can change history.

eager' and 'anxious' aren't the same, or how 'disinterested' doesn't mean 'uninterested.

Dellray had advanced degrees—including psychology and philosophy (yes, one could philosophize as a hobby)—but he somehow fell naturally into a street patois of his own making, not gang-talk, not African American Vernacular English. It was, like his clothing and his penchant for reading Heidegger and Kant to his children, pure Dellray.

Rhyme said, "'Game' is a noun. I don't accept it as a verb. But I will concede that many people use it. The Jargonites, I call them.

You're so bossy." "Why is a woman always described as bossy, when if a man did the same thing he'd be thought of as decisive, commanding and displaying qualities of leadership?

the English and the Americans were divided by a common language.

Why is a woman always described as bossy, when if a man did the same thing he'd be thought of as decisive, commanding, and displaying qualities of leadership?

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," which, Mr. Holcombe pointed out, contained every letter in the alphabet. I checked, and he turned out to be right.