Quotes About Language

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I can't read lips.

I don't get it. For the first few years of your life, all grown-ups do is teach you how to talk. And then, for the rest of your life, all they do is tell you to stop talking. What's up with that?

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

It was called 'la Petite Roche,' which means 'the little rock' in French.

How to Spell Read

Most important, a boy needs male modeling of a rich emotional life. He needs to learn emotional literacy as much from his father and other men as from his mother and other women, because he must create a life and language for himself that speak with male identity. A boy must see and believe that emotions belong in the life of a man.

If you ask a boy, 'How did that make you feel?' he very often won't know how to respond. He'll talk instead about what he did or plans to do about the problem. Some boys don't even have the words for their feelings--sad or angry or ashamed--for instance. A large part of our work with boys and men is to help them understand their emotional life and develop an emotional vocabulary.

Talk to boys in their language—in a way that honors their pride and their masculinity. Be direct with them; use them as consultants and problem solvers.

I came to Canada as a teenager with no money, no contacts, and no knowledge of English.

Civilians is one term journalists use to describe non-journalists. Another is laypeople. Or normals.

Arriving here feels like landing on some remote island where a bunch of people have been living for years, in isolation, making up their own rules and rituals and religion and language—even, to some extent, inventing their own reality. This happens at all organizations, but for some reason tech start-ups seem

Online marketers have invented euphemisms to make the work they do sound less awful. For example, we're told that our email campaigns do not involve badgering people, or pestering them - rather, we're "nurturing" them. "Lead nurturing is a big thing in the world of online marketing.

Increase the pain input, increase the swearing output. Makes sense.

You have a person in a very tiny cell banging himself from one wall to the other and not being able to find any way out of it. What that person can do is talk. Is create a whole balloon of language which would carry him through the ceiling to somewhere else. This is the art. This is what a story is.

Where to begin? I don't even know how to ask. Too many tongues are mixed in my mouth. But at the crossing of these winds, very diligent, I immerse myself in the laws of heavenly grammar: I am learning the declensions and ascensions of silence. ... If it has been ordained that I pull out of here, I'll try to descend rung by rung, I hold onto each one, carefully – but there is no end to the ladder, and already no time. All I can still do is fall into the world

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

I'm thinking of killing everyone whose name is a palindrome

What's German for "Holy shit, a big dog in a T-shirt and panties just stole my bag!"? If I kept this up, I might have to learn.

I attended Catholic schools at a time when Latin was still a living ritual language.

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.