Quotes About Language

Once the grammar has been learned, writing is simply talking on paper and in time learning what not to say.

The only thing I'd rather own than Windows is English. Then I'd be able to charge you an upgrade fee every time I add new letters like N and T.

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement... says heaven and earth in one word... speaks of himself and his predicament as though for the first time.

I certainly don't walk around my home or being with my family and just using profane language all the time, but on stage, it's a constant.

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.

In my time, you needed to speak a little Italian, and that was it.

I believe that our Great Maker is preparing the world, in His own good time, to become one nation, speaking one language, and when armies and navies will be no longer required.

The lapse of ages changes all things - time, language, the earth, the bounds of the sea, the stars of the sky, and every thing about, around, and underneath man, except man himself.

A speaker is like a lousy auto mechanic: Every time he fixes something in the language, he screws up something else.

Any euphemism ceases to be euphemistic after a time and the true meaning begins to show through. It's a losing game, but we keep on trying.

Poetry should help, not only to refine the language of the time, but to prevent it from changing too rapidly.

Past, present and future are not amenities of language. Time unfolds into the seamsof being. It passes through you, making and shaping.

It is never a waste of time to study the history of a word.

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

I don't mean to be gross, but the only time it's good to yell "I have diarrhea" is when you're playing Scrabble because it's worth a shitload of points.

By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

Your voice is wild and simple. You are untranslatable Into any one tongue.

Words, words. They mean nothing, less than nothing. I know.

Sometimes you say a word so many times that it loses its meaning...

Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.

it examines the abuse of language in the small talk of women, the big talk of men, in prattle, insult, gossip, curses and the bearing of false witness both through lies and self-delusion.

I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi , never the hoi polloi , because hoi meant the, and two the's were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say.

Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.