Quotes About Language

This sentiment was expressed not so much in words and actions as in terrible and articulate sounds

If you let me teach you not to end a sentence with a preposition, Edgar thought, I will save your life.

I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturised by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I've tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I've become, in ways I don't understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them.

I will read," she said. "But I don't want you to choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. 'I entered her.' 'He entered me.' We're not lobbies or elevators. 'I wanted him inside me,' as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep, eat, so forth. Can we agree on that? I don't care what these people do as long as they don't enter or get entered.

Numbers behave, words do not.

The letters released something, maybe a sense that he was not alone, that the world was a place where travelers in language could know the same things.

He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.

The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the string manipulation language

A Greek will never say anything he hasn't already said a thousand times." Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one's respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.

mouth cat's-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.

He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep space. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn't see it anymore (storm-spiralled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and colour) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.

They're not calling it the feathery plume anymore," he said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment. "I already knew that." "They're calling it the black billowing cloud." "Good." "Why is that good?" "It means they're looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They're on top of the situation.

This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions.

Semantics is the study of meaning. Semantic constraints are those that rely upon the meaning of the situation to control the set of possible actions.

Strings of language extend in every direction to bind the world into a rushing, ribald whole.

Words have halos, patinas, overhangs, echoes.

The combinatory agility of words," he wrote in "Not-Knowing," "the exponential generation of meaning once they're allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven't yet encountered.

And eloquence, Henry Mackie says, is really all any of us can hope for.

Terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion.

The language in which we express our ideas has a strong influence on our thought processes.

Nearly every example of faulty reasoning that has been published is accompanied by the phrase of course or its equivalent.

Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.

I read poems for the pleasure of the mouth. My heart is in my mouth, and the sound of poetry is the way in. ~from an interview in Narrative magazine

Most of them have gotten really good at saying absolutely nothing. They've all got some kind of program, but when you listen to them, you still don't know what they're talking about.