Quotes About Language

En los países en donde no hay caballos, a los burros se les llama caballos.

There is a translation of a Persian book into English, not from Persian, but from a French translation of an Urdu rendering of a classical Persian abridgment of an Arabic original.

Good. Show me a man who thinks that he knows what 'good' is, and I will probably be able to show you a horror of a person. Show me a person who really knows what 'good' is, and I will show you that he almost never uses the word.

Tacit knowledge is personal, context-specific, and therefore hard to formalize and communicate. Explicit or "codified" knowledge, on the other hand, refers to knowledge that is transmittable in formal, systematic language.

TEACHER: Kevin, how do you spell crocodile? KEVIN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L. TEACHER: No, I'm sorry, that's wrong. KEVIN: It can't be. You asked me how I spell it!

Perhaps we have been dependent too long on language and thought, and need to reawaken our inherent sense of the subtle vibration of Energy-Consciousness. All you have to do is unblock the blocked parts and awaken the sleeping parts of your being to access it.

Many of the most profound discoveries were reported to have come through intuition rather than sequential analysis processed by linguistic understanding.

It could be said that the lectures changed the way many people thought about myth, fairy story, and poetry, and even about the relationship of imagination to thought and to language. One of the brilliant but cryptic insights he expressed was: 'To ask what is the origins of stories … is to ask what is the origin of language and of the mind.

An attempt to wrest from God the prerogatives of absolute freedom and infinity leads to the inversion of Pentecost and what is in effect a new Babel. 'Postmodernism' represents that Babel perfectly, because when each speaks a language unrelated to that of the other - when language is not the basis of the communication that shapes our being - the only outcome can be fragmentation. In that sense, postmodernism is modernity come home to roost.

She'd been in America almost three years now, but she still wasn't used to it, the same language sure, but they had different words for everything; she'd learned that a scone was a biscuit, that sidewalk meant a pavement, and that autumn was fall.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

but all I see in the space between the words, / between drops of rain / is how we are both sad / in any language

A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: 'Duh.

If names are not correct, language will not be in accordance with the truth of things.

Genghis nodded drunkenly. "Writing," he replied, scornfully. "It traps words." "It makes them real, lord. It makes them last.

A silver speaks it's own language, does it not?

Translated 'Non omnia possumus omnus' as 'No possums allowed on the omnibus.

You know, without my telling you, how sometimes a word or name eludes you, and you seek it through running ghosts of shadow -- leaping at it, lying in wait for it to spring upon it, spreading faint snares for it of sense or sound: until, of a sudden, as if in a phantom forest, you hear it, see it flash among the branches, and scarcely knowing how, suddenly have it.

Walk with me world, upon my right hand walk, speak to me Babel, that I may strive to assemble of all these syllables a single word before the purpose of speech is gone.

I always said I'm just an instrument; I'm transparent, like a medium, the language passes through me. Which is a bit like saying I'm a recording device, I start and I go. I had a real connection to ongoing, language production in real time.

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind," wrote George Orwell in "Politics and the English Language." Orwell

Language offers us a surprising, savage terrain full of pockets and peaks. Shakespeare invented words like crazy. Mark Twain wrote in dialect. Muhammad Ali rapped in rhythmic sentences. Junot Diaz mixes Spanish into his sentences like rum into fruit juice. Nicki Minaj spices her lyrics with slang.