Quotes About Language

A severe example is the common modern American phrase "I could care less," which, it turns out, means the same thing as "I couldn't care less.

Sweetbread is not sweet and it's not bread.

In his play House master, one character complains of another that "he can translate English into a Greek not spoken in Greece, and Greek into an English not spoken anywhere").

In addition to changes in the meanings of English words, we find differences in what linguists call "register," such as how formal language differs from informal, spoken from written, casual from stiff, etc. (We

The most reliable way of determining what a word in a dead language means is to see how the word is used in context. Once

Nicht um meine Sprache zu verlernen, lerne ich andere Sprachen, sondern ich gehe bloß durch fremde Gärten, um für meine Sprache Blumen zu holen.

Abuse of words has been the great instrument of sophistry and chicanery, of party, faction, and division of society.

Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.

The sentence is the great invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn't ask for anything better. It's as near to godliness as I can get.

Lately I had been finding it hard to understand the simplest things people said to me, as if what they were speaking in were a form of language I did not recognise; I would know the words but could not assemble them into sense.

But why at least? What a business it is, the human discourse. I

that language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough.

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' -- by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.

Listen, for poets are feigned to lie, and I For you a liar am a thousand times . . . .

Si no hablo, podría desaparecer.

Heil Hitler,' zei hij, wat, voor zover hij wist, een andere manier was om te zeggen 'Tot ziens en een prettige dag verder'.

You don't want to be labelled with a conventional pronoun that has been in common usage since the English tongue was first established,' continued Beverley. 'And so, instead, you'd like to be labelled with an equally conventional pronoun that has been in common usage since the English tongue was first established. Simply the pluralized version. That's it, isn't it?

The "voice" may be described as the language of an insidious self-destructive process existing, to varying degrees, in every person. The voice represents an external point of view toward oneself initially derived from the parents' suppressed hostile feelings toward the child.

words easy to be understood often hit the mark, whereas high and learned words only pierce the air.

communication comes from the Latin word communis, meaning "common.

As playwright George Bernard Shaw observed, "The greatest problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.

Las palabras son el vehículo de las ideas y tienen el poder de cambiar el mundo.

Words are the currency of ideas and have the power to change the world.

George Bernard Shaw observó: "El mayor problema con la comunicación es la ilusión de que se llevó a cabo".