Quotes About Language

Keel on kompromiss, et kirjeldada piiratud arvu märkidega lõputult muutlikku maailma.

Often, we use words in a damaging way not because we are bad people but simply because we are not paying attention. No one ever taught us how powerful words really are.

What made a country? Borders, language, and culture. The Americans were doing away with all three. It would lead to their downfall,

The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart" How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

Voynich Manuscript

Love is the most abused word in history. It is, simply, caring more for others than you do for yourself.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

A reporter covering the event—mostly out of bemusement—went on to identify the lexicographer and language columnist Ben Zimmer, editor of the pathbreaking Visual Thesaurus, as "a major geek." In some circles that might have led to a libel suit, but most of the DSNA participants embraced the nerdiness of the event, even performing dictionary-related songs at the conference-ending banquet. Peter

I had never realized that so much communication was non-verbal. That language was a kind of refinement of information passed by other means. We discovered that, with the most limited vocabulary, a half dozen words, you could still cover a lot of ground. And eventually, Belle came back.

my mother never saw the irony of calling me a "son of a bitch

My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.

I look for poetry in English because it's the only language I read.

Children seem naturally drawn to poetry - it's some combination of the rhyme, rhythm, and the words themselves.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

Poetry seems to sink into us the way prose doesn't. I can still quote verses I learned when I was very young, but I have trouble remembering one line of a novel I just finished reading.

New Testament scholar Richard Hays notes that there is not "an exact equivalent for 'homosexual' in either Greek or Hebrew."22 The Bible, in its original Hebrew and Greek, has no concept like our present understanding of a person with a homosexual orientation. Indeed, the concept of an ongoing sexual attraction to people of one's own sex did not exist in European or American language until the late nineteenth century.23

The English department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us.

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to.

Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. — from "Thing Language

What are your fees?" inquired Guyal cautiously. "I respond to three questions," stated the augur. "For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.

I understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory.

Men speak in absolutes, women in uncertainties, and this often strikes us as a weakness in women, but it's knowledge: a knowledge that we cannot know, not ever.