Quotes About Language

In this brutal world of incessantly exploding sound effects, pubescent song lyrics and banal advertisements appealing to the lowest common denominator, the trick is to take refuge with the very small band of survivors who savor words like chocolates.

The Chinese represent crisis with two pictographs: danger and opportunity. The

This new dialect of England's ruling class differed markedly from the speech ways of American colonists, to whom it seemed contrived and pretentious.

The crisis of liberalism (and of American political reflection) is due to liberalism's success in becoming the official language for all public statement.

His body language was that of someone frozen and not yet thawed out.

Smiles are the language of love.

The poetry from the eighteenth century was prose; the prose from the seventeenth century was poetry.

Empiricism assumes that objects can be understood independendy of observing subjects. Truth is therefore assumed to lie in a world external to the observer whose job is to record and faithfully reflect the attributes of objects. This logical empiricism is a pragmatic version of that scientific method which goes under the name of 'logical positivism', and is founded in a particular and very strict view of language and meaning.

Lebanonization') become an official part of the French language, defined in the latest editions of Larousse as 'a process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities', and 'tending to replace "balkanisation"'.

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.

The two men spoke in German, although von Hessen, who had spent years living in Italy, could also speak Italian

K' is for communications.

His method resembles George Bernard Shaw's way of using the /f/ sound of GH in "tough," the /i/ sound of o in "women," and the /sh/ sound of TI in "nation" to write fish as GHOTI. The scribe also

did someone drop the f bomb

Melancholy persons are foreigners in their mother tongue. The dead language they speak foreshadows their suicide.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

If a man says 'I am lying' we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you were black in the face. Why not? It doesn't matter." For Turing, it did matter—not in some abstract or ideal sense but because he believed that hidden contradictions could result in things "going wrong.

Spécial" is one of those elusive French words that means something (or someone) is...peculiar. The use of it is one of the rare times that the French are noncommittal about their opinions.

those immovable traffic barriers, which Parisians have nicknamed bittes (pricks).

kickplate" in French? An assiette à coup?

crêpe de sarrasin. Confusingly, sometimes buckwheat (sarrasin) is called blé noir, so if you ask for a crêpe de blé noir, they'll understand perfectly what you're talking about.

So I asked the salesclerk for a jar of confiture de groseilles, which is pronounced "gro-zay." But with my less-than-stellar command of the language, I asked for "confiture de grosses selles" (which I pronounced as "gross sells"). The saleswoman's jaw nearly hit the counter: I'd ordered turd jam…make that big-turd jam.

Except a pot in French is not called a pot, but a casserole. Unless it has two handles, in which case it's a cocotte.

Don't you mean the Vierge Noire, the Black Virgin?" "Uh, yes. Isn't that what I was talking about?" "Daveed, a verge is a penis.