Quotes About Language

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

Did you ever spell a word so bad that your spell check has absolutely no clue what you're trying to spell? What do you end up getting, you end up getting, like, a question mark. You got a million dollars of technology just looking back at you like, 'You got me, buddy. Which is pretty amazing because I have all the words.'

Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life... That's a superpower I've been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions.

Among my most prized possessions are words that I have never spoken.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, 'black feminist' does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it's just... womanish.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

Words have life and must be cared for. If they are stolen for ugly uses or careless slang or false promotion work, they need to be brought back to their original meaning - back to their roots.

Words are more powerful than some noises. Noises won't last long. Lyrics are so important, and people don't realise that.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

Be able to correctly pronounce the words you would like to speak and have excellent spoken grammar.

I have lexical-gustatory synesthesia. I can taste, and always have tasted, words. I remember when I was a kid and learning to read I mentioned to my mom that certain words I was learning tasted certain ways, thinking everyone was like that, and didn't understand why she didn't get what I was saying.

The subconscious doesn't distinguish sarcasm and jokes. It just accepts what it hears. That's the power of words.

Words outlive people, institutions, civilizations. Words spur images, associations, memories, inspirations and synapse pulsations. Words send off physical resonations of thought into the nethersphere. Words hurt, soothe, inspire, demean, demand, incite, pacify, teach, romance, pervert, unite, divide. Words be powerful.

We need words to name and designate things. But we have only a static language with which to express ourselves.

Words are powerful; if you change your words, you can change your life.

Shakespeare's taught me that there are more words in the English language than I have got in my head.

Short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.

I've got a 12-year-old grandson who, when he was 3 years old, before he could say many other words, could name the different kinds of dinosaurs.

There is no such thing as too much swearing. Swearing is just a piece of linguistic mechanics. The words in-between are the clever ones.

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.

I want my words to survive translation.

Dialect words are those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.