Quotes About Language

The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.

punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. 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.

I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.

We may curse our bad luck that it's sounds like its; who's sounds like whose; they're sounds like their (and their); there's sounds like theirs; and you're sounds like your. But if we are grown-ups who have been through full-time education, we have no excuse for muddling them up.

No one else understands us 7th sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes, we are often aggressively instructed to 'get a life' by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

What the mind focuses on, it feasts on. And if you want to know what a person's focus and feast is, all you have to do is listen to the words that come out of her mouth.

You speak As one who fed on poetry.

Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today's heritage and our new compositions to the future.

Nations that can manage to develop their language and make it accommondating while at the same time staying faithful to the roots of it are the most communicative societies that are also most dynamic in thought.

It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable.

After all why should our goal be the reinstatement of an illusory 'exact' relationship between events and words? If you probe in the ashes you will never learn anything about the fire: by the time the ashes can be handled the meaning has passed on. Every adventure is a cup so empty it can be drunk from again and again and again. Every adventure is so perfect it verges on silence.

official programming language was reminiscent of the minis. Created in the spring of 1975 by two young men who had been inspired by the Popular Electronics article—Bill Gates, now a Harvard undergrad, and his high school buddy Paul Allen, a programmer working outside Boston—Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC's BASIC for the PDP-11.

The language also owed its existence to the Harvard PDP-10, interestingly enough. Since Gates and Allen didn't have access to an Intel 8080 at the time, they used Gates's student account on the big machine to create a simulation of the microprocessor

Before 1965 was out, GE was offering just such a commercial time-sharing service based on the Dartmouth College system, which included the new interactive programming language BASIC.

McCarthy decided that it was time to take that idea and turn it into a whole new language for AI.§ He and his students soon took to calling it List Processor, or Lisp.

Lisp was John McCarthy's invention.

Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny were starting to plan a campus-wide time-sharing system for much the same reason; the effort would eventually lead them to create an interactive programming language that they would call BASIC.

M. Mitchell Waldrop

Since he'd based it on an earlier, experimental language by Thompson, code-named "B," Ritchie code-named his language "C.

the creator of Lisp,

And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung.... Not simply words... and grammar... but melody. It was hard... thus... to learn English... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song.

Learning 'yes' and 'no' gave them at least twenty minutes' worth of entertainment because mood-shading them could turn 'yes' into 'no, you bastard' and 'no' into 'maybe,' 'I'm only fake-saying no,' and variations of 'hells, no' that felt completely different from saying 'hells no' in any other language.

Perhaps his gloom was due to his profession, that he lived among fallen empires, and in reading these languages that had not been spoken by the common man in centuries, he had all about him the ruin of language, evidence of toppled suburbs, grass growing among the mosaics, and voices that had been choked with poison, iron, age, or ash.