Quotes About Language

'Programming' is a four-letter word.

Sure, women sportswriters look when they're in the clubhouse. Read their stories. How else do you explain a capital letter in the middle of a word?

Never use a big word when a little filthy one will do.

If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!

Every creature is a word of God.

I picked up the Puerto Rican accent from my father, and my sister picked up my mother's very clear, concise, and slow Mexican-Spanish. So, when she does speak, she speaks with diction. She pronounces every word.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

Our language has wisely sensed the two sides of being alone. It has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word solitude to express the glory of being alone.

I started riding the whole 'fluffy' train, and it's a cute word and socially a lot more acceptable than someone saying is fat or obese. If you call a girl 'fat,' yo, she'll raise hell, but if you say, 'Aw girl, look at you, you're fluffy,' there's almost a sexy appeal to it.

I am accused of using hard language. I admit the charge. I have not been able to find a soft word to describe villainy or to identify the perpetrator of it. The man who makes a chattel of his brother - what is he? The man who keeps back the hire of his laborers by fraud - what is he?

'Therefore' is a word the poet must not know.

The closer the look one takes at a word, the greater distance from which it looks back.

I would like to electrocute everyone who uses the word 'fair' in connection with income tax policies.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter - 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

I cannot read a single word of the Hindoos without being elevated.

As far as I'm concerned, 'whom' is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

If the word has the potency to revive and make us free, it has also the power to blind, imprison, and destroy.

As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave.

I will not sit in a room with black people when the N word is used. I know it was meant to belittle a person, so I will not sit there and have that poison put on me. Now a black person can say, 'Oh, you know, I can use this word because I'm black.'

I find Shakespeare terrifying. When Simon Russell Beale does a speech, I understand every word of it, but if I did the same speech, people would be going, 'Huh? What?'

I don't follow anything blindly. I have to know the entire thing, if I have to get in to it. It might sound funny to you, but it's like using English language. I use an English word only when I know its meaning and understand its connotation. You won't hear me say, 'What's up, dude' or anything like that just for the heck of it.