Quotes About Language

This new information world also provides a new set of tools and tactics that another generation of clercs can use to reach people who want simple language, powerful symbols, clear identities. There is no need, nowadays, to form a street movement in order to appeal to those of an authoritarian predisposition. You can construct one in an office

One store owner said he was going to leave a dictionary on a public bench so the vandals could at least spell the obscenities correctly. It

But words can beat down a person as surely as fists

Vlad stared at Simon. "Meg told the Elders they were . . ." "Bad puppies," Simon finished. "Yeah." A minute passed before Vlad said, "Why?" "They didn't say 'please' when they asked for cookies." "I don't know what to say." Simon scratched behind an ear that was now Wolf-shaped and furry. "That's okay. Meg said plenty for all of us.

Do you know what the Sharkgard call humans on a ship?>

Swearwords were one of the best things humans had invented...

Humans, Simon reminded himself. He adjusted the wire-rimmed glasses that he didn't need for vision but thought made him look a little gawky and more approachable. Call them humans when you're in the store. That way you're less likely to use the slur when talking to an employee.

so my cousin was called Shay D., which quickly became Shady." "Unusual name for a police officer," Monty said.

A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change. (Richard Rorty, philosopher)

Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach.

Sometimes I dream a sentence and write it down. It's usually nonsense, but sometimes it seems a key to another world.

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate...

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

Now I think it is true to say of the road, and also of God, that it does not move. At the same time, it is everywhere. It has a language, but not one I know. It has a story, but I am in it. So are you. And to realize this is a moment of some sadness. When we are denied a story, a light goes off. I am asking you to study the dark.

There is something maddeningly attractive about the untranslatable, about a word that goes silent in transit.

In ancient Greek you use the verb ????????, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapper, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape—words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world.

English is a bitch

Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.

Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in

I clutch, all language vanished from my mind. We knock each other over in a violent embrace.

The poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt. The poached egg on page 202 of the Greek lexicon in the library of the British Museum is dirt.

Like two particles in a complex sentence we sit side by side moving forward, eyes on the road. Parataxis is a charged instant of language cold on the surface, unexplained underneath.

?k voltak a tartály fenekén a legfenségesebb angolnák, és mint a dÅ'lt bet?k, felismerték egymást.