Quotes About Language

I can see him now, going over the long French bills, studying each item, many of them being unintelligible to him.

Perhaps language was the key—it was hard to say. Certainly I was astonished to find how few Cypriots knew good English, and how few Englishmen the dozen words of Greek which cement friendships and lighten the burdens of everyday life.

A few years later, in Inukjuak, I learned that SFU is the Inuit texting acronym for snowmobile fucked up, and that POOS is the acronym for passed out on snowmobile.

The trouble with China is, there are too many chinks here.

Mon père ne m'a pas appris la langue des femmes de son peuple.

Deshaced ese verso, quitadle los caireles de la rima, el metro, la cadencia y hasta la idea misma. Aventad las palabras, y si queda algo todavía, eso será la poesía.

Michelle," she said. "Or Shell, sometimes, for short. Which I quite like. It's a nice diminutive. Except not with my last name. Shell Chang sounds somewhere between a Korean porn star and an oil exploration company in the South China Sea and a roll of quarters being dumped in a cash register.

communication is theoretically very difficult. They think we

All in the Cyrillic alphabet. Named for Saint Cyril, who worked on alphabets in the ninth century.

His signature was big and awkward. He was Bulgarian. I guessed he had grown up with the Cyrillic alphabet and was new to writing with Roman letters.

But French people understand that

Legal language strives for concision and avoids ambiguity wherever possible. The result is inevitably dull, but all that striving and avoiding really teaches a person how to write.

His lips moved. A single syllable, brief, inaudible, but definitely a voiced palatal glide morphing into a voiceless alveolar fricative. Therefore almost certainly: Yes.

Reacher had no patience for people who claimed that y was a vowel.

Reacher saw a vertical array of green message bubbles. Texts. Unreadable foreign words, but mostly regular letters, the same as English. Some were doubled up. Some had strange accents above or below. Umlauts and cedillas.

All love songs, no matter how eloquent or crude, ornamented or plain, in whatever language they are sung, say essentially the same thing. All love stories have but one meaning.

The assimilation of taboo images to the everyday language of doing business produces a strange effect. It domesticates the taboo while at the same time making the everyday transactional world more porous, more open to the forbidden. The wolf of unbridled appetite slips into everyday convention in the sheep's clothing of commercial language.

At first I thought common nouns were hardest hit, coffee and doorway and so on, but it soon became clear that the missing were mostly adjectives.

What mortal creations are language and memory!

He had the heartening bulk of the aging athlete defeated by pastry. He delivered all news as though it were good. Most welcome was his prediction that language would gradually return.

He was correct about the language, though. Within weeks certain prodigal words started filtering home. They came one at a time or in shy small groups. I remember when sea-kindly showed up, a sentimental favorite, followed by desiccated and massive. Brusque appeared all by itself, which seemed apt; merry and boisterous arrived together. This would be a good time to ask for your patience if I use an adjective too many now and again—even now, some years on, they're still returning.

It's not all what you say, it's how you say it.

Perhaps we half and halfs should always make a choice, one nationality instead of the other, one language instead of the other. We should nourish one identity and starve the other so that it would atrophy and drop off. Then we could relax and become like everyone else, we could snuggle up to the majority and fit in.

Take away the right to say 'fuck' and you take away the right to say 'fuck the government.