Quotes About Language

Erudite, for a woman who confuses "you're" and "your" and goes in for random capitalisation.' 'We

Speak so that I can understand you.

because it was so much more comforting to believe that language alone could remake the world.

Rubenfeld spoke no Hebrew. His mind was racing to come up with something—anything—that these wild-eyed dirt farmers would understand. He threw his arms in the air and yelled the only Yiddish words he could think of. "Gefilte fish! Gefilte fish! Shabbes! Shabbes!

I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.

Anthropologists are a connecting link between poets and scientists though their field-work among primitive peoples has often made them forget the language of science.

But the human tongue is a beast that few can master. It strains constantly to break out of its cage, and if it is not tamed, it will tun wild and cause you grief.

The new is forever new, but our powers to appreciate it quickly weaken and age. The new is forever the same, but our language for understanding it changes with the shadows. The truth is forever the same, forever new.

The beauty of music has the ability to speak where words fail.

Nobody knew what that sort of blather meant in the Sixties and nobody knows now.

Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand—'How many divisions have you?

To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend… I suppose I ought to have realize it's ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ? Robert Hass, from "Meditation at Lagunitas," Praise ( ? Ecco, July 10, 1999)

Nah," I said to myslef, crumpling up the note, "Non vale il pene".

afterward. The Saxons called the stern of a boat the aft and their word ward meant "in the direction of." Thus aftward meant "toward the rear of a ship," or "behind." Over the years, the word aftward changed in spelling to afterward and came to mean "behind in time," "later on," or "later.

And so all great music, great prose, everything beautiful must depend upon the sure, free measure with which it is gardened and put into language for the people, for each lovely thing has its intrinsic value and belongs in its own position for the world to study, understand and thrive upon.

The failure of language—the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection—fed the ruling class's belief that it was endangered from below.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

The implication is that if you want to quell your inner jerk and avoid spreading (and catching) this form of asshole poisoning, use ideas and language that frame life in ways that will make you focus on cooperation.

Porcupine power was the only language he understood.

But things are not what they seem. The normal Arabic word for "philosophy" was and is falasifa and a "philosopher" is a faylasuf. Plato was a faylasuf and so were Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroes, and al-Farabi. But the word that Rosenthal has translated as "philosophy" in the passage quoted above is hikma, and hikma has a subtly different range of meaning.

People often indiscriminately use absolutes in their utterances: every, everyone, everything, all, always, never, no one, nothing. Rarely are these absolute terms justified.

My Canada includes Quebec—but its license plates no longer call it La belle province. I can't remember what they say now.

Rumor is the ancient Latin word for contagious narrative.