Quotes About Language

A lie of invention, a lie about yourself, should not be called a lie. It needs a different word.

Meadow found it riveting: what machines of comforting delusions we humans are. Our language, our words, our ever treading minds and interior thoughts, all of these to make an architecture of lies that even we almost believe. No wonder the world is such a mean place, each of us judging one another without seeing our own terrible cruelties.

Astrology is a language. If you understand this language, the sky speaks to you.

In the eight-case system there is a tendency for precision of function while in the five-case system there is more room to see an author using a particular form to convey a fuller meaning than that of one function.

Case is the inflectional variation in a noun7 that encompasses various syntactical functions or relationships to other words. Or, put more simply, case is a matter of form rather than function. Each case has one form but many functions.

My job is to architect the greenhouse. This is a useful insight into how Hsieh creates belonging because it implies a process. "I probably say the word collision a thousand times a day," Hsieh says. "I'm doing this because the point isn't just about counting them but about making a mindset shift that they're what matters. When an idea becomes part of a language, it becomes part of the default way of thinking.

Overcommunicate Expectations: The successful groups I visited did not presume that cooperation would happen on its own. Instead, they were explicit and persistent about sending big, clear signals that established those expectations, modeled cooperation, and aligned language and roles to maximize helping behavior.

When we were little kids, 'friend' wasn't a verb. You didn't 'friend' someone. You had friends. It was only a noun. It didn't multitask. It was a simpler time, Hen.

Pitches that rhyme are more sublime.

The third method of self-distancing, as Julius Caesar and Elmo teach us, is through language. Kross, Ayduk, and others have carried out some fascinating research concluding that "subtle shifts in the language people use to refer to themselves during introspection can influence their capacity to regulate how they think, feel, and behave under stress.

McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.

Written language, invented by the Greeks around 550 B.C.E., has helped reinforce left hemisphere dominance (at least in the West) and created what Harvard classicist Eric Havelock called "the alphabetic mind."7 So perhaps it's no surprise, then, that the left hemisphere has dominated the game. It's the only side that knows how to write the rules.

In most people, language originates in the left hemisphere. (This is true of about 95 percent of right-handers and 70 percent of left-handers. In the rest—about 8 percent of the population—the division of linguistic labor is more complicated.) But the right hemisphere doesn't cede full responsibility to the left. Instead, the two sides carry out complementary functions.

Oxford University Press researchers, "time" is the most common noun in the English language.5

To oversimplify just a bit, the left hemisphere handles what is said; the right hemisphere focuses on how it's said—the nonverbal, often emotional cues delivered through gaze, facial expression, and intonation.

right hemisphere is responsible for our ability to comprehend metaphors

Positive affect—language revealing that tweeters felt active, engaged, and hopeful—generally rose in the morning, plummeted in the afternoon, and climbed back up again in the early evening.

Memories fade but words hang around forever.

Stop saying no offense," I said, "when you say offensive things. It's not a free pass.

there's not enough ink and paper to say all I wanted.

Words have a force far beyond that of ink stains on pages or spoken sounds... Whether written or spoken, language found in forbidden books can warp space-time and tear the fabric of reality.

What do you mean you don't sing?! You talk!" Jim told me later, "It was as odd to them as if I told them that I couldn't walk or dance, even though I have both my legs.

Contrary to the old, simplistic notion that art and music are processed in the right hemisphere of our brains, with language and mathematics in the left, recent findings from my laboratory and those of my colleagues are showing us that music is distributed throughout the brain.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.