Quotes About Language

Docs? Oh, you mean the stuff you wipe up coffee with?

A good pun is its own reword.

Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.

BASIC - A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company.

Never assume, for it makes an ASS out of U and ME.

Real programmers don't write in PLI. PLI is for programmers who can't decide whether to write in COBOL or FORTRAN.

Some words can make or break a person, but they'll never forget the words that were spoken.

Pereant qui nostra ante nos dixerunt [May they perish who have used our words before us].

the soul of man lives in his language.

I have said too much, it is my way. I forget, you English, you like to come at things slowly, little by little, to leave much unsaid.

escrever é um bocado fazer respiração boca-a-boca ao dicionário de Moraes, à gramática da 4ª classe e aos restantes jazigos de palavras defuntas

Memory, language, imagination, and reasoning are leading participants in cultural processes

Language may not be the source of the self, but it certainly is the source of the "I.

Our perceptions and the ideas they evoke continuously generate a parallel description in terms of language. That description is also constructed with images. All the words we use, in any language, spoken, written, or appreciated by touch, as in Braille, are made of mental images. This is true of the auditory images of the sounds of letters and words and inflections and of the corresponding visual symbol/letter codings that stand for those sounds.

You don't want to lose the foreign feel of a book entirely, but for me the prime requisite is to get it sounding good in English. If it sounds clumsy, readers will pounce on it of course.

We have not fully deciphered his language but I have, as instructed, been keeping full phonetic transcriptions of his every remark. Trubaz has calculated psychologically that the meaning of this remark to be: "Ministers of the Great one, be gracious to me." The phonetic transcription is as follows: AND THEY TALK ABOUT PINK ELEPHANTS!

The only french sentence he could call to mind was a passage which had caused him some trouble in class the previous day. So far as he had been able to judge the translation was: 'the gentleman who wears one green hat approaches himself all of a sudden.

Journalism may not dare too much. It can be gently humorous and ironic, very lightly touched by idiosyncrasy, but it must not repel readers by digging too deeply. This is especially true of its approach to language: the conventions are not questioned. The questioning of linguistic conventions is one of the main duties of what we call literature.

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

slang the home-made language of the ruled, not the rulers, the acted upon, the used, the used up. It is demotic poetry emerging in flashes of ironic insight.

It is generally felt that the educated man or woman should be able to read Dante, Goethe, Baudelaire, Lorca in the original - with, anyway, the crutch of a translation.

That shut her up real horrorshow and lovely.

Language exists less to record the actual than to liberate the imagination.

I said, smiling very wide and droogie: 'Well, if it isn't fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby bottle of cheap stinking chip-oil? Come and get one in the yarbles, if you have any yarbles, you eunuch jelly, thou.' And then we started.