Quotes About Language

He called everyone sweetheart. There was nothing particularly special about it.

She described the work as Girl Friday; it was, in fact, Dogsbody, which scanned perfectly, and after all, words mean what you want them to mean. These

Newton's language choices were Orwellian: restraining others was "a privilege"; having no freedom of speech, movement, or activity was "a respite.

Well, it's really no use our talking in the way we have been doing if the words we use mean something different to each of us...and nothing.

You have a faculty for defining the simplest in terms of the grandiose, so that a poor devil like me can't understand it.

No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.

Words belong to the person who wrote them

Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation.

the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice

any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you

When we read, we are capable of taking in only about one key word and then four characters to the left and fifteen characters to the right at any one time.

fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise southern

Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine.

there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers.

Whatever mechanism passes on speech patterns probably passes on behavioral and emotional patterns as well.

she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn't know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month."* Friedman's mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the

Your world of poverty can be recreated to that of affluence simply by speaking the Prince's language.

Logos and branding are so important. In a big part of the world, people cannot read French or English--but are great in remembering signs

Write like you speak with the 'rhythms of human speech, ' as William Zinsser said, and in as few words as possible. Use action verbs to carry water.

You'll find sympathy in the dictionary between sh*t and suicide.

Learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children.

The secret of language is the secret of sympathy, and its full charm is possible only to the gentle

Apt words have power to suage the tumors of a troubled mind.

Praise is the symbol which represents sympathy, and which the mind insensibly substitutes for its recollection and language.