Quotes About Language

The day when a Frenchman switches from the formality of vous to the familiarity of tu is a day to be taken seriously. It is an unmistakable signal that he has decided—after weeks or months or sometimes years—that he likes you.

Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.

The Arden Shakespeare is intended both as a student text and as a revision of traditional scholarship. If it is to be used in the first way, then the often narrow thread of text above a sediment of footnotes, something Dr Leavis so deplored, can prove debilitating. Poems, especially the classics of our language, should be read headlong. Dubieties may be looked up later.

That which we cannot speak of is the one thing about whom and to whom we must never stop speaking.

Ideally, I would create a book so interdependent and self-sustaining in its parts, so wondrously connected word by word and paragraph by paragraph, so charged with the joy of language, that it would actually float three or four inches above any table where you try to set it down.

In Classical Greek the word pathos was the same for both suffering and experience. Those Greeks knew a good joke when they heard one.

the vocabulary of love was so tired.

Because language and society are so closely linked, it is possible, in some cases, to encourage social change by directing attention towards linguistic reflections of aspects of society that one would like to see altered.

irrational attitudes and discriminatory decisions, often made by governments or other official bodies acting out of ignorance or prejudice, have led to language policies which have had detrimental effects on children's education and even on societies as a whole.

The fact is that none of us can unilaterally decide what a word means. Meanings of words are shared between people - they are a kind of social contract we all agree to - otherwise communication would not be possible.

In some ways this was Goethe's greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where "the real joints of nature" are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine "imagination, observation and thought in the act of language.

the startling line in J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, where Captain Hook is described: "The man isn't wholly evil; he has a thesaurus in his cabin.

The Yirkalla aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia hear sacred song words in the babbling of babies. To them, songs are never composed but only discovered: all songs exist already.

When I was in second grade, my teacher, Miss Maxwell, read from The Harmony Herald that one in every four children lived in China. I remember looking over the room, guessing which children they might be. I wasn't sure where China was, but suspected it was on bus route three. I recall being grateful I didn't live in China because I didn't care for Chinese food and couldn't speak the language.

Even the slang of the time – 'Isn't it killing' – had an inbuilt and not entirely unconscious irony.

For each person there is a sentence—a series of words—which has the power to destroy them.

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.

I like commas.

What you should do, she told Fat during one of his darker hours, is get into studying the characteristics of the T-34. Fat asked what that was. It turned out that Sherri had read a book on Russion armor during World War Two. The T-34 tank had been the Soviet Union's salvation and thereby the salvation of all the Allied Powers- and, by extension, Horselover Fat's, since without the T-34 he would be speaking - not english or Latin or the koine - but German.

Make it? Fred echoed. Make what? The team? The chick? Make good? Make out? Make sense? Make money? Make time? Define your turns. The Latin for 'make' is facere, which also reminds me of fuckere, which is Latin for 'to fuck', and I haven't...

36:...Something has happened to our intelligence. My reasoning is this: arrangements of part of the Brain is a language. We are parts of the Brain; therefore, we are language. Why, then, do we not know this?

Mors certa, vita incerta, as Mr. Sloat occasionally declared. Isidore, although he had heard the expression a number of times, retained only a dim notion as to its meaning. After all, if a chickenhead could fathom Latin he would cease to be a chickenhead.

Relation of word to object . . . what is a word? Arbitrary sign. But we live in words. Our reality, among words not things. No such thing as thing anyhow; a gestalt in the mind.

The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language, but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself.)