Quotes About Language

I fail remarkably. I write Eye when I mean Tooth. I write Fornicate when I mean Caress. I write Wine when I mean Blood.

The communication is in the work and words are no substitute for this.

Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." (on Lillian Hellman)

bonds of unity which could not be severed: A unity of race and language; a unity of historical development; a unity in religion; and the political unity created by the fact that all the thrones were filled by members of the same family,

constantly met in Russian

It's the reason we say "pork" and "beef" instead of "pig" and "cow." Dissection and surgical instruction, like meat-eating, require a carefully maintained set of illusions and denial.

You cannot explain, with the limitations of language and inexperience, why your body can cause such a sudden, fumbling response in someone else, nor can you put into exact words what you feel about your body, explain the thrum it feels in proximity to another warm-skinned form. What you feel is a tangle of contradictions: power, pleasure, fear, shame, exultation, some strange wish to make noise. You cannot say how those things knit themselves together somewhere in the lower abdomen and pulse.

Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading.

Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.

The end of reading development doesn't exist; the unending story of reading moves ever forward, leaving the eye, the tongue, the word, the author for a new place from which the "truth breaks forth, fresh and green," changing the brain and the reader every time.

inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education.

Increasing numbers of developmental researchers observe that when parents read stories on e-books with their children, their interactions frequently center on the more mechanical and more gamelike aspects of e-books, rather than the content and the words and ideas in the stories. Most parents are simply better at fostering language and helping to clarify concepts when they read physical books to their preschool children.

Shared attention, as Charles Taylor wrote, is the beginning of the great dance of language that joins one generation to the next, not forced attention. Knowing research about the development of literacy is a very good thing; knowing what to attend to in one's own child overrides everything I can ever say—or write—about any medium or any approach. There are so many things we all have

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic-- whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers.

I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them.

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

When we reflect that "sentence"10 means, literally, "a way of thinking" . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

This practice of overstating the case is called hyperbole. Hyperbole is usually harmless, but in some cases it has been known to precipitate unnecessary wars as well as a painful gaseous condition called stock market bubbles. For safety's sake, then, hyperbole should be used with restraint and only by those with proper literary training.

Agatha Swanburne - "Some things just sound better in French.

Sinki, blinki, stinki, Helsinki!

My for example is woofs.

No nap! Mew-eezum!

ba-ba or a noo-noo,