Quotes About Language

Sometimes, when I am reading, the way a person has phrased his truth is as important to me as the truth itself.

And then for English verses, he said, they could not be certain of lasting applause, the changes of our language being so great and sudden, that the rarest poems within few years will pass for obsolete; and therefore he used to liken the writers in English verse to ladies, that have their pictures drawn with the clothes now worn, which, though at present never so rich, and never so much in fashion, within a few years hence will make them look like anticks.

Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar.

Whoever dreamed up Scrabble had an exaggerated idea of how many seven-letter words have five i's.

The trick to writing an aphorism is to place a period at the point where you're inclined to say, "in other words...."

There is a language of love, which is to say, a truth that does not tell all and a lie that does not deceive.

If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible.

She has learnt the language of love From lips that laugh in the sun, Where the skies are so clear above, Her eyes fresh blue have won. But oh be still my heart! Will she yet remember the day Her tears o'er our kiss did run, The day that she went away?

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are inferior.

Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one's hands are fast enough.

All instincts immature, All purposes unsure, That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount: Thoughts hardly to be packed Into a narrow act, Fancies that broke through language and escaped; All I could never be, All, men ignored in me, This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

What so wild as words are?

We that had loved him so, followed him, honored him,Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,Made him our pattern to live and to die!

One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it 'lying.

It is most true, stylus virum arguit, - our style betrays us.

Hence it is clear how much more cruel the pen is than the sword.

Hence it is clear how much more cruel the pen is than the sword. (Hinc Gham Sit Calmus Saevior Ense Patet)

Never and forever are usually neither

Every system is built from a domain-specific language designed by the programmers to describe that system. Functions are the verbs of that language, and classes are the nouns.

Variables in functional languages do not vary.

is not the language that makes programs appear simple. It is the programmer that make the language appear simple!

Cuteness in code often appears in the form of colloquialisms or slang. For example, don't use the name whack() to mean kill(). Don't tell little culture-dependent jokes like eatMyShorts() to mean abort(). Say what you mean. Mean what you say.

The hardest thing about choosing good names is that it requires good descriptive skills and a shared cultural background. This is a teaching issue rather than a technical, business, or management issue.