Quotes About Language

Um, I asked, isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else? Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes enslaved African sound nonchalant. As in Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns.

Jefferson's pretty phrases were incomplete without the punctuation of French gunpowder. That

Before the verb "to electrocute" came to define death by electricity, Edison advocated that the verb be named for his nemesis, that a person who had been electrocuted would have been westinghoused instead. I bet Westinghouse came up with some possible definitions of what it meant to be edisoned himself.

What's a ree-tard?" I asked Bernadette when I to back upstairs. "In music it's pronounced rih-tard, short for the Italian ritardando, which means slowing down," she said. 'What does it mean when it's pronounced ree-tard and somebody says it about you in English?" I asked. "It usually means the person saying it is a dimwit." (27-28)

Thoughts should be real. Words should have a definite meanings and a man should believe what he said.

Roumanian is an easy language. You just add a tl to everything.

A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness--Truth, Knowers, the Good, Man--but we can by no means deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about values.

That's from the Middle Ages.' My God! We have a name for everything except what we really think and feel.

To have assumed, for instance, that the deterioration of language and its debasement was tantamount to dehumanization led straight to cultural fascism.

You were lucky even then to make yourself understood. And this happened over and over and over with everyone you met. You had to translate and translate, explain and explain, back and forth, and it was the punishment of hell itself not to understand or be understood, not to know the crazy from the sane, the wise from the fools, the young from the old or the sick from the well.

Even in a few minutes' conversation, do you realize how many times what you feel is converted before it comes out as what you say?

Well, we were here, first-generation Americans, our language was English and a language is a spiritual mansion from which no one can evict us.

I pray for meaning. I pray for the limits of reality to become clear. For a world – and a type of being – that makes sense. I pray for a life after death that is not like this life. I pray for the end of mystery. What would a life be like with all the mysteries solved? If there were no questions, there'd be no stories. If there were no stories, there'd be no language. If there was no language there'd be no . . . What?

But I quite like the way you can talk about science without necessarily using mathematics, but using metaphors instead.

The principle of contradiction establishes merely the agreement of concepts, but does not itself produce concepts.

thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words

Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain's limits, not the universe's.

Scientists often invent words to fill the holes in their understanding. These words are meant as conveniences until real understanding can be found. Sometimes understanding comes and the temporary words can be replaced with words that have more meaning. More often, however, the patch words will take on a life of their own and no one will remember that they were only intended to be placeholders.

Our language and our minds are too limited to deal with anything but a fixed reality, regardless of whether such a thing exists. The best we can do is to update our delusions to fit the times. We live in an increasingly rational, science-based society. The religious metaphors of the past are no longer comforting. Science is whittling at them from every side. Humanity needs a metaphor that allows God and science to coexist, at least in our minds, for the next thousand years.

Internet search for "the McGurk effect." Click on the first video you see.

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason. But that's okay, because facts and logic are not persuasive anyway. Word-thinking usually happens when people are bad at logic but don't realize it.

Public speaking Psychology Business writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology (hobby level) Proper voice technique

keep in mind that California schools still teach French for some ridiculous reason, so clearly someone hasn't gotten the commonsense memo. Golf

Word-thinking is a term I invented to describe a situation in which people are trying to win an argument by adjusting the definition of words. In these situations there is no appeal to reason.