Quotes About Language

The language of clothing is high symbolism and we all, in moments where we need to know this, realize it.

The whole world has gone back to something we are genetically engineered to do - communicating through symbols.

We emphasize that such a form of communication is not absent in man, however evanescent a naturally given object may be for him, split as it is in its submission to symbols.

But I enjoy the opportunity to use swear symbols.

What do we know about autism in 2013? Autism symptoms generally emerge before age three and usually much earlier, often as language delays or lack of social engagement. Recent research suggests that autism can be detected during the first year of life, even before classic symptoms emerge. Indeed, the symptoms may be a late stage of autism.

Back in the early '40s, they used to call Down syndrome infants and babies 'mongoloids.' It's very hard for parents.

I think people would be suprised at how much we curse when we screw up. I'm like somebody with Tourette's Syndrome.

I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.

I like having a paperback original. And until literature catches up with the culture - the violence, language, syntax, compression, concision, complexity and diversity that the Internet offers - books still make sense.

Syntax, my lad. It has been restored to the highest place in the republic.

I want to prove you don't need to have academic syntax to be intelligent.

So many new things have been discovered in the 20th century that now, at the end of the century, we need some kind of synthesis, some musical language which will allow us just to write music.

There is nothing odder than to apply an analytical device to a synthetic phenomenon: for instance, to write in English about a Russian poet.

When you have those two languages - an analytic one like English and a synthetic, very sensual thing like Russian, you get almost a psychotic sense of humanity that permeates nearly everything. It can help you understand, and it can discourage you, because you see how little can be done.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.

Private communication systems have been around since the beginning of human culture.

A writer need not be bound by flat statement like "It was a rough sea," when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spell from her pen.

In the previous chapter we discussed how a figure of speech fails when images are too farfetched or mixed, or when one image cancels out the other. The same principle applies to physical descriptions.

What is the actual plural of "penis"?' I ask. 'Is it "penises"?' 'Or it could be "peni"?' offers Cassie. 'Like fungi.' 'I think it should be "pena",' I tell her. 'Although that does sound a bit like a type of pasta.' 'Ohh, ohh, I've got it,' cries Cassie. 'You know that "goose" becomes "geese"? What if one penis becomes many "poonis"?

Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself

Here's an alarming fact: of approximately eight hundred thousand words in the English language, we use about eight hundred on a regular basis. Those eight hundred words have fourteen thousand meanings. By division there are about seventeen meanings per word. In other words, we have a one-in-seventeen chance of being understood as we intended. Perhaps you've heard of Chisholm's Third Law—If you explain something so clearly that no one can misunderstand, someone will.

A.A. Greg argues, 'To print banquet for banket, fathom for fadom, lantern for lanthorn, murder for murther, mushroom for mushrump, orphan for orphant, perfect for parfit, portcullis for perculace, wreck for wrack, and so on, and so on, is sheer perversion.' Greg is considered by most scholars to be a majer dikhed.

The problem probably started when I refused to call the process of purchasing the device an "upgrade." When I buy a new roll of toilet paper, I do not refer to it as "upgrading" my toilet paper even if, for some uncanny reason, the new roll is slightly better than the previous one.