Quotes About Language

And Mrs Verloc, in her varied experience, had come to the conclusion that some foreigners could speak better English than the natives.

Les mots, vous le savez, sont les plus grands ennemis de la réalité.

Wir gehen mit Worten Kompromisse ein. Es hilft uns auch nicht weiter.Es ist wie ein Wald in dem niemand den Weg kennt. Man ist verloren, während man noch ruft: Ich bin gerettet.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.

The epigrammatic saying that speech has been given to us for the purpose of concealing our thoughts came into his mind.

A diplomatic statement, Lena, is a statement of which everything is true but the sentiment which seems to prompt it.

The man up there raged aloud in two languages, and with a sincerity in his fury that almost convinced me I had, in some way, sinned against the harmony of the universe

In the works of Shakespeare, the most wonderful genius the world has ever known, there is the enormous number of 15,000 different words, but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

Never commence a sentence with And, But, Since, Because, and other similar weak words and never end it with prepositions, small, weak adverbs or pronouns.

There are four simple moods,—the Infinitive, the Indicative, the Imperative and the Subjunctive.

To use a big word or a foreign word when a small one and a familiar one will answer the same purpose, is a sign of ignorance.

If you use slang use the refined kind and use it like a gentleman, that it will not hurt or give offense to any one. Cardinal Newman defined a gentleman as he who never inflicts pain. Be a gentleman in your slang—never inflict pain.

The greatest scholar alive hasn't more than four thousand different words at his command, and he never has occasion to use half the number. In

Perspicuity demands the clearest expression of thought conveyed in unequivocal language, so that there may be no misunderstanding whatever of the thought or idea the speaker or writer wishes to convey.

An Article is a word placed before a noun to show whether the noun is used in a particular or general sense. There are two articles, a or an and the.

subjects. Directions. CHAPTER XIII CHOICE OF WORDS

REQUIREMENTS OF SPEECH

but almost 10,000 of them are obsolete or meaningless today.

Joseph Devlin

The three essentials of the English language are: Purity, Perspicuity and Precision.

the adverb as near as possible to the word it

The Danish element dates from the piratical invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. It includes anger, awe, baffle, bang, bark, bawl, blunder, boulder, box, club, crash, dairy, dazzle, fellow, gable, gain, ill, jam, kidnap, kill, kidney, kneel, limber, litter, log, lull, lump, mast, mistake, nag, nasty, niggard, horse, plough, rug, rump, sale, scald, shriek, skin, skull, sledge, sleigh, tackle, tangle, tipple, trust, viking, window, wing, etc.

When writing a letter the street laborer should bear in mind that only the letter of a street-laborer is expected from him, no matter to whom his communication may be addressed and that neither the grammar nor the diction of a Chesterfield or Gladstone is looked for in his language.

big word or a foreign word when a small one and a familiar one will answer the same purpose, is a sign of ignorance. Great scholars and writers and polite speakers use simple words.