Quotes About Language

The more clearly we are able to express ourselves, the less room there is for ambiguity. The more elaborate and the more precise our vocabulary, the greater the scope for thought and expression. Language is about subtlety and nuance. It is power and it is potent. We can woo with words and we can wound. Despots fear the words of the articulate opponent. Successful revolutions are achieved with words as much as with weapons.

We no longer watch television news but, in the language of the broadcasting bosses, 'consume' it.

Funny how one little word can mean 'full of or disposed to joy and mirth', 'homosexual' and 'rubbish'. It just shows that context is everything.

Incidentally, it seems that 'apartment' has finally taken over from 'flat'; I fancy they'll soon have 'closets' rather than wardrobes. Anyway,

once computers gain good language understanding and we can speak to them, then reading and writing are going to seem cumbersome'.

He has his world and I have mine and we each speak our own kinds of English in them. But we also have a shared world where we need a dependable common language if we are all going to get by. And

Language so remote from the way we speak in the real world prompts the question: what's behind all that, then? Gushing vacuity addressed

In Chinese, the character for danger is the same one for opportunity." -- Kim Ling Levine in Madhattan Mystery

Guess what hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia means? Fear of long words. Isn't that the coolest?" - Kevin McGill in Madhattan Mystery

The modern chess player's cry of "Checkmate!" is a corruption of the Persian "Shakh Mat!" which translates, "The king is dead!")

Poetry should please by a fine excess and not by singularity. It should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost as a remembrance.

It has yet to be proved that the Harappans' language was some form of Dravidian, but the survival of a pocket of proto-Dravidian-speakers in Baluchistan, the Pakistan province which borders with Iran, does suggest that the language was in use west of the Indus and could have emanated from there.

the ancient Persians had indeed used their arya word in an ethnic sense; they called themselves the 'Ariana' (whence derives the modern 'Iran').

Je ne give a damn pas about le français, Les filles en France ne wear pas les pantelons

Emotions are none of these. As a result, there's a huge blind spot in the language of emotion, vast holes in the lexicon that we don't even know we're missing. We have thousands of words for different types of finches and schooners and historical undergarments, but only a rudimentary vocabulary to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience.

skidding v. intr. the practice of making offhand comments that sound sarcastic but are actually sincere and deeply felt.

Life and thought mutually illuminate each other: I come to understand what I believe and the language I use only as I live it, and I am able to live my belief and the language I use only as I come to understand them more clearly."9

the words lex monetae are really just a polite Latin way of saying, "Suck it, creditors.

On a more specifically practical level, my main initial impression was to do with the fact that nobody spoke English. Okay, that's an exaggerated way of putting it, a good few people did speak English

But apart from that, I was amazed by how little the language had penetrated the place – given, after all, that we Brits had been running the colony for 150 years. Other groups you might well have expected to speak English were, as a rule, remarkable for being monoglot Cantonese:

In Polish, the language of Poland, all green vegetables are known as w?oszczyzna, which means 'things Italian

Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

Punctuation is to words as cartilage is to bone, permitting articulation and bearing stress.