Quotes About Language

Here's the test—if you can't take your church culture and language and drop it in the middle of a bar or a bus, and have it make winsome sense to the people there, then it's not from Jesus. Because that is exactly what he could do. That's what made him the real deal.

When written in Chinese, the word crisis is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.

The mistake, Wittgenstein argued, is in thinking philosophy can answer these questions. It comes partly from a flawed view of language that insists that if a word has meaning, there must be a thing attached to that meaning. The philosopher asks, 'What is reality?', 'What is justice?' or 'What is the mind?' and then goes looking with logic for the identity of that thing – and of course can't find it, because they are just words.

You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts.

You know what you do? You know how rain takes the colour out of everything? That's what you do to the English language. You blur it every time you open your mouth.

A word (...) is never the destination, merely a signpost in its general direction; and whatever (...) body that destination finally acquires owes quite as much to the reader as to the writer.

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

German is to death what Latin is to ritual religion – entirely appropriate.

Never take another human being literally. He added. Even when they are so ignorant that they don't know what 'literally' means.

He said, it's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's

and then politely asked me who I was, and fulsomely, where I had learnt such excellent French. We exchanged a few sentences. He himself was here for only a day or two. He wasn't French, he said, but Belgian. He found Phraxos 'pittoresque, mais moins belle que Délos'.

We are not even living in the past here. We are in the pluperfect

Limba german? se potrive?te cu moartea a?a cum limba latin? se potrive?te cu ritualul religios.

hay tiempos que el lenguaje humano aún debe inventar.

To fully express their feelings, women assume poetic license and use various superlatives, metaphors, and generalizations. Men mistakenly take these expressions literally. Because they misunderstand the intended meaning, they commonly react in an unsupportive manner.

Theo explained, in what he thought was perfect Spanish, that Julio needed extra help with his algebra. Evidently, she did not understand perfect Spanish because she asked Julio what Theo was talking about.

Native American" is a politically correct creation of clueless white people who feel better using it, when in reality the Native Americans refer to themselves as Indians and snicker at those of us who don't

A "snap" is certainly not a medical term. Experts use fancier language to describe the instant when a troubled person steps over the edge. Nonetheless, a snap is a real moment. It can happen in a split second, the result of a terribly traumatic event. Or it can be the final straw, the sad culmination of pressure that builds and builds until the mind and body must find a release.

The children learned English, taught it to their parents, and rarely spoke the mother tongues at home.

She wrote well, in the standard, scholarly legal fashion of long sentences filled with large words. But she was clear. She avoided the double-talk and legal lingo most students strive so desperately for. She would never make it as an attorney employed by the United States Government.

Native American" is a politically correct creation of clueless white people who feel better using it, when in reality the Native Americans refer to themselves as Indians and snicker at those of us who don't, but I digress).

Many highlanders spoke Gaelic rather than Lowland Scots, exacerbating cultural differences.

The language of the lowlanders was in fact much closer to northern English

language so lucid and graceful that it sparkled