Quotes About Language

Political correctness is a minefield

Minsk! How pissed-off that sounded! It was great. You could scare the bejayzus out of someone if you said it right.

Waren er geen herinneringen als er geen woorden waren? Wat was er dan, buiten woorden? Er moest toch íéts zijn? Niet buiten woorden, maar erachter, aan de andere kant ervan.

Met de komst van de woorden verliezen we het oorspronkelijke gevoel, dacht ze. Het geeft een veilig gevoel, dat is waar. Alleen de dingen die een naam hebben gekregen, worden werkelijk voor ons. Werkelijk en begrensd.

Verliezen we soms met de komst van de woorden het vertrouwen? Het vertrouwen dat het volk in het bos wel bezit?

Words cluster like chromosomes, determining the procedure.

The past is carried to us on simple things—a written page, a spoon, a glove, a bowl of water: carried by the souls who touched them, those plain relics emanate, a language, freed of time, language without cadence—mute and eerie as the sound a granite planet makes giving birth to mountains, coursing its way through space.

a novelist...we dream non-living characters and animate them with out words...

How we are talking to each other is as corrupt and corrupting as what anyone is saying

Elle essaie de former des sons avec sa bouche. Mais ils éclatent comme des bulles, et ne reste qu'une impression blanche, un pli dans quelque chose qui se lisse dès qu'apparu, qui s'efface sitôt pensé. (p245)

Il moque l'accent américain, « ils disent champagne comme John Wayne ».

eTraduire est la plus amoureuse des lectures.

Traduire est la plus amoureuse des lectures.

He could have a twenty-minute discussion with a semiliterate horticulturalist who spoke a dialect so thick it could not be called English, but he couldn't start a conversation with Lillian about love. Instead, he offered only this: "Barbuda's got pink sand, and seventeen miles of unbroken beach.

We have become desensitized, in ways discussed earlier, to the electrifying power of the well-chosen word. But sometimes it breaks through like a ray of light through a cloud bank. We all know the experience of reading or perhaps writing a sentence that evokes with absolute laser-like precision a particular feeling, atmosphere, action, or thought which, being named, seems to take on brand-new life.

George] Steiner makes two other points worth mentioning about the consequences of language abuse: as usable words are lost, experience becomes cruder and less communicable. And with the loss of the subtlety, clarity, and reliability of language, we become more vulnerable to crude exercises of power.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we feed on in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

In a broad and true sense, good conversation is life-giving: it inspires and invigorates...livelieness in our use of language, both oral and written, matters: how lively language is life-giving - how it may literally, physiologically, quicken our breath, evoke our laughter, raise our eyebrows, open our hearts, renew our energies. Lively language invents and evokes and sustains.

The filth hissed at us when we venture out-- always in twos or threes, never alone-- seems less a language spoken than one spat in savage plosives, primitive, obscene: a cavemob nya-nya, limited in frame of reference and novelty, the same suggestions of what we or they could do or should, ad infinitum.

feeling that old thrill of dread and compulsion, he knew circumstances had once again put him too close to a fragile thing. He said, Look at the life we live, Della. I have to sneak over here in the dark just to steal a few words with you. Is that language, or is it noise? She said, It's noise that you have to do it, and language that you do it, anyway. She said softly, Maybe poetry.

Language is music. Written words are musical notation. The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means. It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do. To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for." (p 114)

It all means more than I can tell you. So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for." (Gilead, p 114)

There is no strictly secular language that can translate religious awe.