Quotes About Language

Can we accept that language is sacred and scared and it's scarred as well, because that's how we all are?

Relationships are made of talk - and talk is for girls and women.

If I wrote, 'After delivering the acceptance speech, the candidate fainted,' you would know I was talking about a woman. Men do not faint; they pass out.

One reason it's so difficult to decide what to say became immediately clear: comments and questions that some appreciated were not appreciated by others.

The danger of misinterpretation is greatest, of course, among speakers who actually speak different native tongues, or come from different cultural backgrounds, because cultural difference necessarily implies different assumptions about natural and obvious ways to be polite.

Linguist Robin Lakoff devised another set of rules that describe the motivations behind politeness—that is, how we adjust what we say to take into account its effects on others. Here they are as Lakoff presents them: 1. Don't impose; keep your distance. 2. Give options; let the other person have a say. 3. Be friendly; maintain camaraderie.

Thus conversational signals can get crossed when well-intentioned speakers have different habits and expectations about using pacing and pausing, loudness, and pitch to show their intentions through talk—

The belief that sitting down and talking will ensure mutual understanding and solve problems is based on the assumption that we can say what we mean, and that what we say will be understood as we mean it. This is unlikely to happen if conversational styles differ.

We rarely know the full power of words, in print or spoken.

words are what give us power, that without words we are nothing, we do not exist.

Ideas are so transcendent and alive compared to language that thousands of variations of each may be written without fully capturing any.

Reality cannot be captured by language—not even the language of mathematics—since all language, by its very nature, is man-made, self-referent ambiguity.

Sometimes the word 'gratitude' feels too thin to explain things.

Some languages, unlike the Indo-European ones, do not separate subject and verb so that an action is never seen as distinct from the actor.

And stop talking in that puffed-up way they taught you. Words aren't brains, you know.

God is real by any name you chose, or none at all.

You cannot be human without the ability to make symbols and recognize what they mean. A red stop sign is a symbol that tells cars to halt at an intersection. Red has zero connection to stop until human beings assign it that meaning.

The mind, spirit, and soul are all nonphysical realities and are not easily differentiated with language derived from sensory experience.

Words are not brains, you know.

As Raymond Aron, that rarest of things, a modern French liberal, noted, in Clive James's translation, "the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity's imperfection; he resigns himself to a régime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the result of conscious choice."10 You could call it the invisible hand, noting that it is true also of other systems, such as language.

Different languages, the same thoughts; servant to thoughts and their masters.

Great poets are great copy editors.

How many unuttered words died in the heads of those for whom a word was too expensive.