Quotes About Language

a simile is not a lie, unless it is a bad simile.

La gente habla mucho sin utilizar ninguna palabra.

We have nobody in Washington that sits back and says, 'You're not going to raise that fucking price!'" And the Chinese: "Listen, you motherfuckers, we're going to tax you 25 percent!

Romney spent the next twenty-four hours with McCain, traipsing with him from Manchester to Peterborough to Salem, agog at his inability to complete three sentences without dropping an f-bomb. (Romney employed prim substitutes for profanities: "blooming" for "fucking," "grunt" for "shit.")

The unfolding scene was a semiotician's fantasia.

That's writing, huh. What does it do?" "It's like talking, but it makes no sound.

He thought only of one thing--the geometries before him. Here was God speaking in His simple absolute language, according to the same grammar that He had used to start the planets on their smooth and silken dance.

When finally the sky grew ink-black, the trees were visible only as their swaying branches blotted out the stars that crossed in blazing showers, as sometimes they do. The language of the stars, seldom read and heeded less, told beautifully and in silence of all the victories that had ever been won and all the defeats ever suffered. In uncountable lines of light across the widest sphere, the stars spoke of everything notable even down to a leaf blowing rhythmically in the wind.

I don't know for sure, he said, but I can't imagine that God, who is so adept at linking parents with children, would so cruelly separate them. Perhaps it isn't anywhere near the truth. Perhaps I'm merely self-serving. I don't know, but I believe against all odds in exactly what you say. You don't care what anyone else thinks, do you? No, Papa. I never did. That can only be because you believe. Yes. And how does God speak to you? In the language of everything that is beautiful.

Prepositions are to language as aim is to a gun.

It is a peculiarity of the English language that while most fish swim in schools, herring swim in shoals, a word of the same meaning derived from the same Anglo-Saxon root.

The Phoenicians are also credited with the first alphabet. Chinese and Egyptian languages used pictographs, drawings depicting objects or concepts. Babylonian, which became the international language in the Middle East, also

In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.

ONE GROUP OF Vikings remained in Iceland, becoming the Icelanders. A second group remained in the Faroe Islands. The main body of Vikings were given lands in the Seine basin in exchange for protecting Paris. They settled into northern France and within a century were speaking a dialect of French and became known as the Normans. Soon the Vikings had vanished.

In Middle English, cod meant a bag or a sack, or by inference, a scrotum, which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.

Typical of Iberia, both the Basques and the Catalans claim the word comes from their own languages, and the rest of Spain disagrees. Catalans have a myth that cod was the proud king of fish and was always speaking boastfully, which was an offence to God. Va callar! (Will you be quiet!), God told the cod in Catalan. Whatever the word's origin, in Spain lo que corta el bacalao, the person who cuts the salt cod, is a colloquialism for the person in charge.

At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

while every major language has a word for violence, there is no word to express the idea of nonviolence

The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the word salacious.

The Roman army required salt for its soldiers and for its horses and livestock. At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier. To

nunna daul Tsuny in the Cherokee language

One of the consequences of printing is that it tends to standardize language

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why

Melchior Lotther, originally from Leipzig, who printed Luther's Bible in both Low and High German on three printing presses working simultaneously. It was the first good translation of a Bible into spoken language.