Quotes About Language

We don't learn to talk, as most think. We start to talk when our brain is good and ready to say something.

I remember having to do a monthly progress report when I worked under Andy. I used the word 'corroborate' and he sent me a note, saying there's no such word. 'You mean "collaborate," ' he wrote. I responded with my own note and told him, ' "Corroborate" is a legitimate word.' "He sent back one final note that said, ' "Bastard" is a legitimate word, too.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use. —Alfred Korzybski

But do I need to say anything?" Sophie asked. "Do I need to learn any words?" "Like what?" Saint-Germain said. "Well, when you lit up the Eiffel tower, you said something that sounded like eggness." "Ignis," the count said. "Latin for fire. No, you don't need to say anything." "Then why did you do it, then?" Sophie asked. Saint-Germain grinned. "I just thought it sounded cool.

Well, when you lit up the Eiffel Tower, you said something that sounded like eggness." "Ignis," the count said. "Latin for fire. No, you don't need to say anything." "Why did you do it, then?" Saint-Germain grinned. "I just thought it sounded cool.

He led Dee to a concealed door directly under the broad staircase and opened it with a password in the language that the boy king Tutankhamen would have spoken.

Perhaps it was only that when you try to put it into words you cannot express it truly, it never sounds as you dream it.

Grammatical correctness, after all, has a powerful symbolic value: getting your language right implies that you can obey rules and respect authority.

We're mentioned in the first English translation of the Bible, Lamentations 4:3, circa a.d. 1382, as 'The cruel beestis cleped (or called) lamya . . .' Oddly enough, in the King James version someone has changed all of the references to the lamya to 'sea monsters.

Only of course they bleeped out the good part because it's daytime TV, and we all know that no one in America swears.

Poetry is fascinating. As soon as it begins the poetry has changed the thing into something extra, and somehow prose can go over into poetry.

Word learning is thus not about putting labels on things but rather is about acquiring conventional means for coming to share attention with others in a variety of complex social contexts.

The medium through which this most often happens is cooperative, including linguistic, communication. Cooperative and linguistic communication are thus of crucial importance in children's developing skills for jointly attending with others to external situations and to one another's ideas—and for mentally coordinating within those shared realities. But cooperative and linguistic communication are interesting and important in their own right as well.

If the first chapter seems to talk more about the Bible and Talmud than bupkes and tukhes, it's because the Bible and Talmud are to Yiddish what plantations are to the blues. The only difference is that blues left the plantations behind, while Yiddish—try as it still sometimes does—never escaped from the Talmud. A

To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, "such a cunt.

Melania sometimes spoke Slovenian with Barron, particularly when her parents were around—and they were frequently around—infuriating Trump and causing him to bolt from any room they were in.

Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as "Mr. X-i"; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him "she.")

Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. "When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you've left the Cartesian universe.

Bannon's strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.

some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned out not at all to be necessary, the wonder that this random approach seemed to command, and his own replenishing supply of free association—all this suggested that he was limited only by everyone else's schedule and attention span.

Everyone knows the feeling of excitement on discovering a book that unlocks the imagination; it enables us to inhabit another world - of heightened language, thought and ideas. Great literature holds the seed of a kind of liberation that remains with us throughout life

Tonally, the jagged syntax of 'Inch-thick', the Ovidian lyricism of 'O Proserpina' and Autolycus's bawdy swagger show Shakespeare at his widest-ranging. This is total mastery. Nobody had taken the English language further, and nobody has done so since.

Novel is a particular form of narrative./ And narrative is a phenomenon which extends considerably beyond the scope of literature; it is one of the essential constituents of our understanding of reality. From the time we begin to understand language until our death, we are perpetually surrounded by narratives, first of all in our family, then at school, then through our encounters with people and reading. - The Novel as Research. (1968)

Toute expérience poétique engage au moins trois termes : un sujet, un monde, un langage».