Quotes About Language

Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.

Puhpowee, she explained, translates as "the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." As a biologist, I was stunned that such a word existed. In all its technical vocabulary, Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery. You'd think that biologists, of all people, would have words for life. But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

Even the surfaces of individual cells have their own descriptors—mammillose for a breast-like swelling, papillose for a little bump, and pluripapillose when there are enough bumps to look like chicken pox. While they may initially seem like arcane technical terms, these words have life to them. What better word for a thick, round shoot, swelling with water than julaceous?

To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive. Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms. This is the language I hear in the woods; this is the language that lets us speak of what wells up all around us.

This is the grammar of animacy.

In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.

The language is the heart of our culture; it holds our thoughts, our way of seeing the world. It's too beautiful for English to explain.

Losing their names is a step in losing respect. Knowing their names is the first step in regaining our connection.

What will happen to a joke when no one can hear it anymore? How lonely those words will be, when their power is gone. Where will they go? Off to join the stories that can never be told again." So now my house is spangled with Post-it notes in another language, as if I were studying for a trip abroad. But I'm not going away, I'm coming home.

Yawe—the animate to be. I am, you are, s/he is. To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe. By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent?

It's too beautiful for English to explain

To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. Listening in wild places, we are audience to conversations in a language not our own. I think now that it was a longing to comprehend this language I hear in the woods that led me to science, to learn over the years to speak fluent botany.

incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she. Where are our words for the simple existence of another living being?

The first purpose of alcohol is to make English your second language. You may be a Nobel prize physicist, but after nine, ten Heinekens you're speaking fluent Drunken-ese. Next thing you know, you have a friend in a headlock, "I love ya, I love ya, that's the kinda love I have for you, goddamn it."

I like the word 'fuck'. The word means what it means, but it also means whatever you need it to mean.

Words are our weapons.

But I understand it better than I can speak it.

two broads who cursed worse than the men. "It's

some historians call Sicily "the world's island" because it has been conquered by so many peoples, owing to its location in the middle of the Mediterranean, valuable for trade and military reasons. Sicilians have been influenced by each culture, and the island's amazingly diverse history is reflected in its dramatic architecture, ruggedly beautiful terrain, delicious food, sibilant language, even the faces of its people.

As I speak, I'm reminded of the old saying that diseases go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves.

To learn a different language is to learn a different way of living

I'm reminded of the old saying that diseases go in through the mouth, disasters come out of the mouth, meaning that words can be like bombs themselves.

I would be a pillow at the small of her back, a glass of cold water on a tray, a cloth shielding her from the sun. I would be a dictionary holding all the languages known and unknown. I would save everything.