Quotes About Language

When Halt was in a bad mood, he invariably paid careful attention to his grammar.

We all write poems; it is simply that poets are the ones who write in words.

yes I speak a different language - the dark fire of poetry - it flutters and gutters in tune with the mood ...

it's merely writing, but you have to adjust your ear – I speak quietly – I sob – I whisper ...

yes, I wrote that for you, who can't sort out lie from lay no matter how often I explain it - crayons and perfume - you still don't get it ...

there's an impotency Viagra can't touch - the inability of a man to speak ...

I threw out all those Latin words - the ones that end in 'ion' - the ones that never quite describe you...

at seventeen I tried to write poetry confining myself solely to Anglo-Saxon words - don't know if it helped, but it made me more concrete ...

language always occurs in a context - you can speak Elizabethan words, but to speak the language you have to put on the mindset...

He had led a sheltered childhood and never learned to swear convincingly. He had long ago learned that swearing, like foreign languages, is best learned at an early age, but because he regarded it as a social grace he never gave up trying to master it.

Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss.

The rules of capitalization are so unfair to words in the middle of a sentence.

You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

Applications of NLP

the ability of a religious or business leader to inspire, motivate, generate interest, capture attention, depends critically on metaphor. if you actually listen to what people say, there's almost no content substance to it.

In the English language, it all comes down to this: Twenty-six letters, when combined correctly, can create magic. Twenty -six letters form the foundation of a free, informed society.

Language itself is a cultural convention, and since the Bible and other ancient documents use language to communicate, they are bound to a culture.

As for the use of the bomb, she would say, "It was war and we had to expect it." And then she would add, "Shikata ga nai," a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word "nichevo": "It can't be helped. Oh, well. Too bad." Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: "Da ist nichts zu machen. There's nothing to be done about it.

It hurteth not the tongue to give fair words.

Italian has fewer words in common with Sardinian than it does with French. And the two languages look very different when written down. For example, the Italian proverb Il sangue non è acqua (the equivalent of "Blood is thicker than water") in Sardu becomes Su sambene no est abba. The overwhelming majority of Sardinians—about a million people—speak Sardu, which has three dialects of its own.

Imprecision is, on the whole, highly prized. Definition and categorization are, by contrast, suspect. For

Skepticism about ever being able to reach firm conclusions is both reflected in, and encouraged by, the Italian language.

Traditionally, common social location meant that the two partners used the same family name. In recent years alternative patterns of naming have been developed, for reasons which are more convincing to feminists than they are to genealogists or to mail carriers.