Quotes About Language

Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.

As software began to be sold to people who would never consider themselves technical, it suddenly became clear that you needed people who spoke their language.

What people are going to see on my platform is cars from a different perspective - so that I'm still speaking the same language to the general public. I don't ever want to get too technical.

My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.

It's technically extremely difficult to get down what you really mean, not what you think you mean, or what you think sounds good, but what's really there, what you really have to express, in words that somehow convey that meaning in an approximate way.

If you are brown, black, Asian, or anything other than an English-speaking, highly-trained technician, the Republican Party doesn't want you here.

I don't know if I have a technique. I'm just trying to remember the words.

I don't believe in condescending to children. I don't change any writing technique.

APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

When I write about animals, I use anthropological techniques and the language you would use for a person. You don't have to anthropomorphize animals, just acknowledge their individuality.

Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language.

When you become fluent with language, it means you can write an entry in your journal or tell a joke to someone or write a letter to a friend. And it's similar with new technologies.

Spell-check ruins my work. It fixes all my slang and dialect into standard English. So I'm caught in a tangle of technology that feels very foreign to me.

We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology.

Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.

I like the idea that I can talk to any teenage girls. You know, in a language that makes sense to them.

I did 'Christmas Carol' off and on through my teenage years, so I always had that dialect and that sound in my ear, which was so helpful. It became second nature.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

When I was a teenager, I thought how great it would be if only I could write novels in English. I had the feeling that I would be able to express my emotions so much more directly than if I wrote in Japanese.

The Roman goddess Diana, you know, is usually shown with a bow and arrow. Every first-year Latin student knows that. I still remember the first simple sentence I learned in Latin 'Diana sagittas por tas... Diana carries the arrows.' That helped get me interested in archery as a teenager and I'm still into it a lot.

I grew up in a house where there was lots of teasing and language play and laughter; it was very important. When I was a teenager, you wouldn't go to a bar and find lots of televisions everywhere. People were talking. Talk was the mental fire you would gather around in the evening. It occupied a big part of your existence.

Toni Morrison was a big influence on my work since I was a teenager, what she did with English. I joke that I think she speaks 20 Englishes simultaneously, that she knows how to do that.

I love being in a public space where teenagers are talking. And the funny thing is that it hasn't changed that much. There's certainly slang that I'm not familiar with, but among the average teen, it's still the same.

Parents ought to try to learn the language teenagers speak, and they ought to listen to teenage music.