Quotes About Language

Even in the north, business people and professionals tended to speak French and to look down on the impoverished Flemish-speaking farmworkers and factory laborers.

The story's what matters; spelling's overrated.

Jokes were a good way to talk about something while acting like you weren't really talking about it.

The flattening of language is a flattening of meaning. Language which is not taut with a sense of its own significance, which is apologetic in its desire to be acceptable to a modern consciousness, language in other words which submits to its audience, rather than instructing, informing, moving, challenging and even entertaining them, is no longer a language which can carry the freight the Bible requires. It has, in short, lost all authority.

And there are some parts of the King James Bible, particularly in the dense and difficult passages of Paul's Epistles, that are now, and to some extent were then, virtually unintelligible. A famous example is 2 Corinthians 6:11–13: O yee Corinthians, our mouth is open vnto you, our heart is enlarged. Yee are not straitened in vs, but yee are straitened in your owne bowels. Nowe for a recompense in the same, (I speake as vnto my children) be ye also inlarged.

It is to do with John Overall's lust. The poor man, who was forty-four in 1604, found it easier, he told his friends, to preach in Latin, which he had studied so hard and so long, and that he found it 'troublesome to speak English as a continued oration'. Despite (or perhaps because of?) that rather unworldly removal from everyday discourse, the dean fell in love with and married the sexiest girl in London. Anne Orwell was irresistible:

Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right ? Didn't write any decent characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine.

MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW

Mark Twain said the difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between lightning and the lightning bug, and people think he was good, right? Didn't write any decent girl characters, as far as I can tell, but otherwise fine. The

My birth certificate says "Gratuity Tucci," but Mom's called me Turtlebear ever since she learned that "gratuity" didn't mean what she thought it did. My friends call me Tip. I

Walks all ass straw.' 'I beg your pardon?' 'The car. A classic. Ass-straw translates as star, I believe.

Whatever language Death speaks is not ours; and most of us spend no time acquiring the complex grammar, in which every verb is irregular and only the past tense obtains, until it is too late

The attitude behind your words is as important as the words themselves.

Olann an cat cluin bainne leis.

Bad prose is the bugbear of genre fiction.

A man who can seduce with a turn of phrase will not disappoint in the bedroom.

Words are doctors for the diseased temper.

I haven't come to you only to take , I haven't come to you empty handed : I bring you poetry as great as yours but in anther tongue , I bring you black eyes and golden skin and curly hair , I bring you Islam and Luxor and Alexandria and Lutes and tambourines and date-palms and silk rugs and sunshine and incense and voluptuous ways

Sometimes,because we use the same words,we assume we mean the same thing

I don't know, I can't quite get it. Don't try. It's just words. Just words? Just words! We love them so much, you and me. But in the end, they fail us. Because there are truths beyond words.

I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.

With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works.

She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind.