Quotes About Language

Can I fetch you something, madam? A cup of tea?' In the old days she'd have been 'miss' and he'd have offered her a cocktail.

Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.

I've always felt that good writing does not have to be literary.

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.

The best metaphors are a bit magical. They conjure connections that weren't there in our minds before

The youth-pastor-as-bard is charged with expressing the language, narrative, and culture of the kingdom to listeners who think they already know what the kingdom is all about. For the leader among quasi-believers who are bored and mostly apathetic, who think they know all about "God and stuff," the emphasis is on story.

Like fish, when metaphors get old, they go bad," writes Christian poet Jeanne Murray Walker,9 and nowhere is that more apparent than among Christians on a Sunday morning.

From ancient times discipleship training has involved learning the biblical narrative and theological language of the Christian community:

Everyone's talking about metaphor and the nature of narrative, as if these are new discoveries rather than the very building blocks of language and understanding (not to mention faith).

Youth are natural-born storytellers. Our task in discipleship training is to steer them into a particular storytelling tradition—that is, the narrative, language, and culture of the Christian faith as it has been lived and expressed for two thousand years.

we must become bards: poets charged with the task of keeping and imparting the stories, language, values, and beliefs of a culture.

I shrug and smile amiably the way you do when you're in a foreign country and have no idea what anyone is saying, so you end up grinning and nodding your way into a three-way with a henna vendor and a camel.

Swearing can be fun, but doing it all the time causes a lot of problems

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

It seems a long time since the morning mail could be called correspondence.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

The expression working like a dog dates back to a time in America when men would rise early, then lie around all day and lick their balls.

The only time the word baby doesn't scare me is the time that it should, when it is what a man calls me.

The F-bomb. It's everywhere. You hear it all the time. And I honestly don't understand what the appeal is over the word.

It's my language, the language I speak. I've spent a lot more time playing music than talking or writing.

I think MTV should consider using subtitles. Half the time, even I can't understand what the fu*k I'm talking about.

Words fail, there are times when even they fail.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.