Quotes About Language

The term numinous is like the terms substance, meaning, being, and a host of other terms; in the final analysis we can only define them in terms of themselves.

Dream language is a love language. Our dreams are love letters sent to us from Papa God. When our guard is down and our analytical skepticism is less active, God whispers in our ear.

prophecy means the expressed thoughts of God spoken in a language that no people, in their natural gifts of speech, could articulate on their own. The substance and nature of prophecy exceed the limits that the human mind is capable of thinking or imagining. Its purpose is to edify, exhort, and comfort either individuals or the corporate Body of Christ. Although prophecy comes through the mouth or pen of people, it comes from the mind of God.

If he could not find the exact words for something, it did not fully exist. And if he could say it well enough, almost anything was possible. X-88

after I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home.

The reason we is such a fun word is that half of the time it is used as a way to bring the speaker closer to others and the other half of the time to deflect responsibility away from the speaker. And

Younger people could dredge up an impressive number of dark words to express their pain. As writers got older and older, their negative emotion vocabulary diminished and their positive emotion word count skyrocketed. As

Over the years, I've noticed that most of my colleagues and friends have their own favorite but relatively obscure words that even they aren't familiar with. The

That our feelings affect the ways we think about the world is the take-home message of this chapter. Our emotions influence our thinking, which is reflected in the ways we use function words.

universes fashioned by words and concepts that work together to provide a more or less coherent frame of reference for all thought and action.5

Pee pee, poo poo. Pee? Poo. Poo, poo.

We tend to forget that words are, themselves, ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again.

Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others.

In an astonishingly short time I reached the point where the language taught itself—where I learned to speak merely by speaking. This point is the place which students taught foreign languages in our schools and colleges find great difficulty in reaching. I think the main trouble is that they learn too much of a language at a time. A French child with a vocabulary of two hundred words can express more spoken ideas than a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand.

I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.

Manufacturers use names like 'Apache' and 'Cherokee' to conjure up images of the wild freebooting warrior. (Would you fly an Aborigine into battle? Drive a Swede across the desert?) In the same vein, there are still sports teams called 'the Braves' and 'the Redskins' - roughly the equivalent, as several Native Americans have pointed out, of calling a team 'the Buck Niggers' or 'the Jewboys'.

Convention itself, like metaphor itself, is not dead; but it is always dying.

But what is the point of tiring oneself over words that are being used from two quite different points of view? One should instead rely on the meaning intended.

His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.

Particularly for English people, Shakespeare is always at the forefront of both drama and the English language. He's always been there. I can't remember starting school and not learning about him.

People think copywriters are obsessed with words. This isn't correct. The word should be 'infatuated' - it fits the context better.

An offence with words is the worst offence.Word kills