Quotes About Language

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

And maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.

Both of our memories were deteriorating, and in recent years the effort required to recall a name or incident felt almost wearyingly physical, like clearing out an attic. Proper nouns were particularly elusive. Adverbs and adjectives would go next, until we were left with pronouns and imperative verbs. Eat! Walk! Sleep now!

From David Niven's autobiography, Bring on the Empty Horses. Director Mike Curtiz to David Niven & Errol Flynn: "You lousy bums, you and your stinking language, you think I know fuck nothing, well let me tell you— I know FUCK ALL!

My brother Francis wrote a letter in Greek to the headmasters of private schools, selling cooking stoves. When some wrote back that they could not read Greek, he sent them another letter – in Latin. This produced orders.

I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.

New vocabularies can make old beliefs possible.

Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.

Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others.

Jargon allows us to camouflage intellectual poverty with verbal extravagance.

All public life sustains itself through metaphor.

metaphor' itself is not a static, ahistorical term; it is not as though there is a pervasive, universal concept of metaphor which can be applied, like a template, to all ages and cultures.

metaphor is never static, and rarely innocent.

the struggle to form the new is inevitably already shaped by the metaphors by which we have come to live.

only too frequently, our metaphors are not our own.

Certainly metaphor is in some sense the opposite of concrete thing.

metaphors themselves are time-bound and ideologically motivated.

The metaphor can be considered in some sense and under some circumstances to be a kind of sleight of hand by means of which meanings can be surreptitiously smuggled into an apparently innocent discourse.

A metaphor then, we might reasonably surmise, is not necessarily a matter of simple one-to-one equivalences ('this stands for that'), but neither is it a process of ornamentation of something that could have been more clearly said in another, simpler way; rather, in this case at least […] it is the very substance of the discourse.

A common error about metaphor is to suppose that it can be in some sense 'unpacked'. When that unpacking takes place, what is left is rarely of any value; it seems a paltry and colourless thing when compared to the metaphor itself.

Does metaphor mean something more than, or different form, or in some sense beneath, what it appears to say; or is the meaning of a metaphor precisely what it does say.

Mathematics to me is like a language I don't speak though I admire its literature in translation.

Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words.