Quotes About Language

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

The word "autistic" is accurate. But so are other words that we no longer use to describe people: spinster (unmarried woman), hobo (migrant worker), cripple (person with a physical handicap), and so on. The fact that a person is unmarried or has sustained a mobility-reducing injury or birth defect certainly figures into their life experiences, but it does not define their character—unless they or we let it.

There is no egg in egg plant, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? If teachers taught, why haven't preachers praught? We have noses that run and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

A popular Internet essay notes: "There is no egg in egg plant, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? If teachers taught, why haven't preachers praught? We have noses that run and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

To program is to translate between the chaos of human life and the line-by-line world of computer language.

you can drop those 'a'ints' too. It ain't 'acting white' to speak your own language properly. People fought for you to get the best possible education. It would break your grandpa's heart to hear you talk like nothing had changed.

We think we have sound relationships,' said George, answering the doubt beyond doubt, 'and suddenly there's a word said or a thing done, so shatteringly out of key that you find yourself alone, and know you've never actually touched your partner at any point, or said a word in the same language. And it doesn't always even absolve you from loving, when it happens. That's the hell of it.

Puns are the highest form of literature.

We should not be surprised that we find meaningless noises in the foundation of many old philosophies, and that from them arise most of the old philosophical fights and arguments.

In the rough, a symbol is a sign that stands for something Before a noise, etc., may become a symbol, something must exist for the symbol to symbolize.

If we consider that all we deal with represents constantly changing sub-microscopic, interrelated processes which are not, and cannot be identical with themselves, the old dictum that everything is identical with itself becomes in [todays u...

Thus, we see that one of the obvious origins of human disagreement lies in the use of noises for words.

Whatever you say it is, it isn't.

the analogy between the noises we make when these noises do not symbolize anything which exists, and the worthless checks we write when our bank balance is zero

Say wharever you choose about the object, and wharever you might say it is not. Or, in other words: wharever you might say the object is, well it is not.

No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.

to treat a human being as an animal - as a mere space-binder - because humans have certain animal propensities, is an error of the same type and grossness as to treat a cube as a surface because it has surface properties.

Indeed neither life nor science bothers about "essences"-they leave "essences" to metaphysics, which is neither life nor science.

The difficulty is not merely that of destroying old ideas that are false; it is not merely that of replacing them with true ideas that are new; it is that of causing people habitually to associate meanings that are new and true with terms associated so long, so universally, so uniformly with meanings that are false.

Another very serious mechanism of identification is found in language. A) Thus we have only one name, say 'apple' for the: (a)un-speakable, un-eatable event or scientific process; (b) the un-speakable but eatable abstraction of low order, the object; (c) the un-speakable and un-eatable 'mental' picture, or higher order abstraction, on semantic levels; (d) and for a definition on verbal levels.

We start with the negative [non-Aristotelian] premise that words are not the un-speakable objective level, such as the actual objects outside of our skin and our personal feelings inside our skin. It follows that the only link between the objective and the verbal world is exclusively structural, necessitating the conclusion that the only content of all 'knowledge' is structural. Now structure can be considered as a complex pf relations, and ultimately as multi-dimensional order.

often studiously understated language of the U.S. Navy's

But, for the unquiet heart and brainA use in measured language lies;The sad mechanic exercise,Like dull narcotics numbing pain.

Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within.