Quotes About Language

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.

Every word we speak calls on 37 muscles and thousands of nerves. It's not surprising that sometimes these nerves and muscles fail us.

It's so wild to be able to say that I can do shows in front of thousands of people and have them sing my songs in Korean and in English - that is wild to me.

Music is thousands and thousands of years old and I don't think that basic, primitive connection to the language of music ever changes.

He can thread a needle with a well-turned phrase.

I think I developed language skills to deal with threat. It's the girl thing to do-you know, instead of pulling out a gun.

It's funny - I was a big fan of 'The Sopranos.' It became kind of a threat to 'The X-Files' in a way because they could play with language, character, and story in ways that we never could because of the limitations of network television.

The earliest dictionaries were collections of criminal slang, swapped amongst ne'er-do-wells as a means of evading the authorities or indeed any outsider who might threaten the trade.

I don't think poetry will die, but I think that poetry does demand a certain kind of attention to language. It does demand a certain space in order to read it, and I think that space is somewhat threatened by the lack of attention that people have and the amount of time that they give to things.

I wanted to write for all children, even those kids who might see language as a threatening thing, even if English is their second language.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

Even when a Geordie is trying to be nasty, it doesn't sound that threatening.

As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

I had to ask my grandchildren, 'What does it mean? I threw shade?'

Language is one of the only things that we truly share, and I sometimes used this joint inheritance to obfuscate and deflect and justify myself: to re-brand what was good for me as something appearing good for us both, when I threw around terms like 'the sharing economy' and 'disruption' and 'global resourcing.'

I mangle phrases constantly. The other day I was chatting with my boyfriend and I said to him, 'He really sold him under the bus.' And he said, 'I think you meant 'threw him under the bus,' or 'sold him up the river.'

I did get in a few fights in school. Kids threw around anti-Semitic slurs, not knowing necessarily what they meant. It was probably just something they picked up somewhere, as kids do.

I was, like, 12 or 13; the first hip hop song I tried to rapping to was Macklemore's 'Thrift Shop,' and my English was so bad, but learning to rap to different songs really helped me with my pronunciation, and looking at the lyrics on Rap Genius and stuff like that.

I get just as much of a thrill out of constructing a good sentence that gets a laugh at the end as I do from a joke.

The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

I've always liked texts that you immediately understand. I suppose the playwrights who really speak to me are Edward Bond, Joe Orton and Harold Pinter. I've been in six different Pinter productions - I love the clarity of his language. He has this way of using words - there's a thrill to them.

The word inventors have to create a new term to describe how I felt when I learned that 'Refund' was on the shortlist for the Frank O'Connor International Story prize - Excited, thrilled, honored, none of them quite do it.

I've just done a film in the United States. It's a thriller called 'A Crime', with Harvey Keitel, we play against each other, and it's so great to play in another language. But I'm definitely not American.