Quotes About Language

I can speak a little bit of Hindi but understand every word.

The word 'midget' is a slur. It evolved from P. T. Barnum's era of circuses and freak shows. Society has evolved. So should our vocabulary. Language is a powerful tool. It does not just name our society. It shapes it.

These names: gay, queer, homosexual are limiting. I would love to finish with them. We're going to have to decide which terms to use and where we use them. For me to use the word 'queer' is a liberation; it was a word that frightened me, but no longer.

My lad chewed and swallowed a dictionary. We gave him Epsom salts - but we can't get a word out of him.

I'm actually all for political correctness. If you want to work to change the usage of a word that's discriminatory then fine, I'm behind you. But that's a conversation that needs to be had in the culture. You can't just decide that commonly used parts of a language are evil and that the people who didn't get the memo must be bad people.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.

Media is just a word that has come to mean bad journalism.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word.

It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.

Even if you didn't see the movie, you'd see two words you'd never seen put together before - comedy and Muslim. Comedy is friendly - it's the least offensive word in our language.

Don't use that foreign word 'ideals.' We have that excellent native word 'lies.'

I was inspired by 'Bootylicious' being able to scale the dictionary walls thanks to just one individual, Beyonce. But Beyonce has the world's ears, so what I had to do was to work my word - which is 'honk', as slang for money, really really hard.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

I think the word 'progressive' is a very devious term. It was created as a substitute for 'communist.' What they propose is the reverse of progress.

The educated Southerner has no use for an 'r', except at the beginning of a word.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is 'naive' spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of 'bonsai.'

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

'Morsel' is a perfect word. Forming those six letters on the lips and tongue prompts an instantaneous physiological reaction. The mouth waters. The lips purse.

Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation, for, with a little conscientious research, we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.

I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.