Quotes About Language

One of my lifelong hobbies has been to collect 'aptronyms' - the newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams's term for people whose names were curiously appropriate to, or provided ironic comment on, their occupations.

I don't want to use the term 'plus-size,' because, to me, what the hell is that? It just doesn't have a positive connotation to it. I tend to not use it.

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term 'realism' would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

I think it is very sad that 'sitcom' has become a pejorative term.

The most meaningless term in the English language is 'I take full responsibility.' When a politician utters those words it means absolutely nothing.

Stop using the word 'bromance.' Can we please kill that stupid term? We're just friends. It's called friendship!

I'm not even sure I want to use the term 'coming out.'

Congresswomen are congresswomen - you are, sorry. And for women who want to be congressmen, there's a screw loose in their head. I'm proud of being a woman. I think 'congresswoman' is the appropriate term, and 'Madame chair' is just fine with me.

There is a term called political correctness, and I consider it to be a euphemism for political cowardice.

When the term 'machine gun' enters common parlance, the word 'machine' becomes much more sinister.

I have a distinct memory, dating back to 1989 or so, of sitting around with my college dorm mates talking about a new term that was popping up everywhere: 'political correctness.'

I don't like the term 'mental illness.' I'd rather just say 'mad.' Just like I always say 'loony bin,' not 'mental hospital.'

My issue with all sort of social justice stuff and leftie stuff, and I would put myself on a social justice leftie side, is some of the terminology is jargon.

We're so used to using military terminology in civilian speech that we forget those terms might mean something very specific.

Neither as a writer nor, moreover, as a leader of a nation should you use terminology that obscures the reality of human evil.

There is a basic language of music that I think is important for communicating with other musicians - just the kind of terminology that might make it easier to describe your ideas to the other guys in your band.

Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day.

Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of 'spirituality' or 'mysticism' to be synonymous with mental illness, conscious fraud, or self-deception. I have argued elsewhere that this is a problem - because millions of people have had experiences for which 'spiritual' and 'mystical' seem the only terms available.

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

Journalists casually use terms like crossing the border illegally when referring to asylum seekers - when in fact there is no law that says they must use the ports of entry.

Half of us are partly German! Half our language and culture, generally, in Anglo-Saxon terms, is German.

One thing I can say about the French language is that no one in the world loves their language as much as they do. It doesn't matter if you're close - it still sounds terrible to their ears.

My accent remained terrible. It was very hard for me to initiate any conversation with someone I didn't know.