Quotes About Language

I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

True words are not pleasing. Pleasing words are not true.

El insulto mental sólo admite el tuteo.

Lo raro es que las palabras no tengan más consecuencias nefastas de las que normalmente tienen. O tal vez no lo sabemos suficientemente, creemos que no tienen tantas y todo es un desastre perpetuo debido a lo que decimos.

He had a penchant for idioms, sayings, proverbs and the like; some of which he invented or used in a way that was incomprehensible to me

las palabras son casi siempre retóricas o excesivas o metafóricas y por lo tanto inexactas

La lengua en la oreja es también el beso que más convence', pensé, 'la lengua que indaga y desarma, la que susurra y besa, la que casi obliga.')

las palabras nunca son fruto del azar. Que todas tienen un pasado, una especie de genética que las delata. —Eso es lo que estudia la etimología...

instead of saying "fifty-five and older," say "fifty-five and better.

Useful Figure The litotes ("didn't appreciate") understates a point ironically. It has fallen out of favor in our hyperbolic times, but makes for a more sophisticated kind of speech.

even launched a website, Figarospeech.com

Yo me enamoré de las figuras e incluso lancé una página web, Figarospeech.com, dedicada a ellas. Las figuras añaden lustre a un memorando o a un artículo, y en

I looked up the word politics in the dictionary. It's actually a combination of two words: poli, which means many, and tics, which means bloodsuckers.

Poetry is a language adequate to one's experience.

Robert Frost suggested (with his usual sly wit) that a person uneducated in the operations of metaphor was not safe in the world, should not even be let out of doors.

Instead of pressuring the Japanese into lowering trade barriers or taking a greater share of the responsibility for their own defense, we should be urging them to bring their verbs from the ends of their sentences into second place, right after their subjects, where they belong.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

Language change is not a disease, any more than adolescence, or autumn are illnesses.

It's hard to see what the problem is. Language speakers and writers have always been inventive, and texting is just one further example of human creativity. As David Crystal has expressed it: 'it..is the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative... In texting, we are seeing, in a small way, language in evolution...

We have found other terms far less vague than the old ones to designate the same complaints. It's a great advance linguistically.

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

I feed on good soup, not beautiful language.

The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.