Quotes About Language

I knew I would never be able to explain myself in the language of faith, a tongue I was still fumbling with.

I was looking for a book. A very particular book in a vast and wonderful library. I found what I was looking for. It hadn't been opened for quite a long time judging by the dust that coated the upper edge and by the way the paper had yellowed on all sides creeping toward the gutter. When I opened it, some loose pages different from those in the book fell onto the floor. I picked them up and noticed that they were covered with a text in a language I did not understand.

Walliamsictionary.

Made-up word ALERT *Made-up word ALERT *Made-up word ALERT

Give us it you little ****," said the other one. I have to confess, reader, that the **** bit was a swear word. Other swear words include ****, ******** and of course the incredibly rude ************************. If you don't know any swear words it's best to ask a parent or teacher or other responsible adult to make a list for you.

All of those words are so rude I wouldn't dream of putting them in this book.

Made-up word ALERT

Volunteers transcribed sixty thousand words—the length of a short book—from old manuscripts to create what in machine learning language is called ground truth:

Poetry: Language against which we have no defences.

The said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.

If silence equals death, he taught us, then art equals language equals life.

If silence equals death, then art equals language equals life." —David Wojnarowicz

The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century.

You want sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.

I tried to say something cool, wound up stammering something like, "WANNA YOU WANNA WEENIE ME?" The end kind of trailed off in a shrill, choking warble.

Six centuries ago, the pre-Colombian natives who settled here named this region with a word that in their language translates to, 'The Mouth of the Shadow.' Later, the Iroquois who showed up and inexplicably slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those first tribes renamed it a word that literally translates to, 'Seriously, Fuck this Place.

You know the Tower of Babel, right? You went to Sunday School?" "Yeah, sure. In ancient times everybody on earth spoke the same language, then they decided to build a tower that would reach all the way up to heaven. Then God cursed everybody on the job site to each speak a different language to mess them up.

Have you never noticed that, after hearing a new word for the first time in your life, you'll hear it again within twenty-four hours?

MCWONGALD'S—SHIT LUNCH TURDWOMAN

John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure.

The social and technological process by which we establish facts becomes invisible to us because we naturalize it. Language-dependent and institutional facts come to seem like brute facts to us: this is true for social institutions, like money, but even more so for claims about the natural world which are, in truth, theory dependent: we have naturalized the idea that the heights of mountains should be measured from sea level, an idea that would have made no sense in the Middle Ages.

That which is made with words, with words can be unmade.

Simply put, democracy is viewed exclusively as a set of principles of government that, like the grammar of a language, can be delineated, taught, and applied so that when uttered, it will sound the same regardless of habits of reading or listening. This trend towards a grammatical and linguistic common sense also finds expression in theoretical de- bates about normativity and deontology in contemporary liberalism.

Surrealism sought to maintain its autonomy and the right to continue its own particular investigations into ways of changing consciousness, the role of the unconscious within the social body, and the current state of language both visual and verbal.