Quotes About Language

Words, he said, is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

Meanings is not important, said the BFG. I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right.

Words', he said, 'is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life. So you must simply try to be patient and stop squibbling. As I am telling you before, I know exactly what words I am wanting to say, but somehow or other they is always getting squiff-squiddled around.

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

Let's learn to make a speech a day Upon the T.V. screen, In which you never never say Exactly what you mean.

KIRASUKU MALIBUKU WEEBEE WIZE UN YUBEE KUKU! ¡ALIPENDA KAKAMENDA PANTZ FORLDUN IFNO SUSPENDA! ¡FUNIKIKA KANDERIKA WEEBEE STRONGA YUBEE WEEKA! ¡POPOKOTA BORUMOKA VERI RISKI YU PROVOKA! ¡KATIKATI MOONS UN STARS FANFANISHA VENUS MARTE! El

I cannot be helping it if I sometimes is saying things a little squiggly. I

A FAMOUS SWORD SWALLOWER FROM AFGHANISTAN WHO IS NOW TEACHING ME TO EAT MY WORDS (WHAT YOU DO IS YOU TAKE THE S OFF THE BEGINNING OF THE SWORD AND PUT IT ON THE END BEFORE YOU SWALLOW IT).

It's very difficult to phone people in China, Mr President,' said the Postmaster General. 'The country's so full of Wings and Wongs, every time you wing you get the wong number.

crockadowndillies.

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.

The Psalms show us what healthy spiritual life looks like. You name everything that's happening inside of you. You give it language and expression, You articulate exactly what the desolation feels like. If you don't drag it up and give it words, then it's buried down in your being somewhere. And it will come out in other ways. Unhealthy, destructive ways. You'll keep it bottled up. And you'll be miserable.

Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.

So when we talk about God we're using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.

it's through Moses that God makes four promises to these slaves. I will take you out. I will rescue you. I will redeem you. I will take you to me. There's a reason why these four promises are so significant – they're the promises a Jewish groom makes to a Jewish bride. This is wedding language.

So if that's it, if that's the point of it all, if that's the ticket, the center, the one unavoidable reality, the heart of the Christian faith, why is it that no one used the phrase until the last hundred years or so?

The fisherman of the Colombian coast must be learned doctors of ethics and morality, for they invented the word sentipensante, or 'feeling-thinking' to define language that speaks the truth. Eduardo Galeano

I didn't think of myself as American or German, but as a little of both. I didn't speak only German or only English, but used whatever words worked best for the situation.

Why is S-A-S pronounced S-A-W? It should be Ar-Kansas. Did Kansas object?

They were interchangeable tools, and the catchy phrases continued without abatement.

It's up to the artist to use language that can be understood, not hide it in some private code. Most of these jokers don't even want to use language you and I know or can learn . . . they would rather sneer at us and be smug, because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If indeed they are driving at anything--obscurity is usually the refuge of incompetence.

Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern.