Quotes About Language

Despite my lovely diction I am going to die.

Ordinary words simply preserve ideas. Still, you have to be careful. Words can lie, or be misunderstood. Words don't have magic, but they have power.

prose histories in the Castilian tongue began to appear.

Our earliest considerable specimens of the growth of modern languages come from the time of his grandsons, two of whom when combining against a third exchanged oaths of fidelity in languages which each other's troops could understand and which show us early stages in the development of the French and German languages.

In Spain, for instance, where the Visigoths ruled for more than two hundred years, there is not a single building left to illustrate their architecture, just as scarcely a word in the Spanish language can be traced back to their tongue.

For example, the resemblance between the word for "bride" and the verb meaning "to steal away" in Indo-Germanic languages is taken as evidence of marriage by capture in early times

Thierry had no idea why they were called French doors. His native countrymen weren't stupid enough to put them in their homes.

Yours is... il sent comme lavande." Is that French for 'You stink'?" It means 'lavender'." Huh." She sniffed at her wrist. "I thought I smelled more like a grape Popsicle.

Like the bodies of dancers or athletes, the minds of readers are genuinely happy and self-possessed only when cavorting around, doing their stretches and leaps and jumps to the tune of words.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn't give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more than anything else, readers are thrill-seekers, though I don't read thrillers, not the kind sold under that label, anyway. They don't thrill; only language thrills.

Few subjects are inherently dull: language is where dullness or liveliness resides.

But living amid so many words, I overestimated their power and breadth. The world does not turn on words alone; it only seems to if the eye and mind are saturated with them.

We do not select the stories we write, we do not pick the voices. They take us by surprise and we surrender to them. They write us, they write in us, all over us, through us. They occupy us. We are, in a sense, puppets--to language, with language.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.

Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word "Book's" with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and those who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

If you still persist in writing, "Good food at it's best", you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?

We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.