Quotes About Language

Dictionary: Opinion presented as truth in alphabetical order.

Governments produced by the most banal of electoral victories, like those produced by the crudest of coups d'état, will always feel obliged to dress themselves up linguistically in some way.

Sure, the comedians who swear or use scatological humor can get laughs, but they're uncomfortable laughs.

Good words cool more than cold water.

He that uses many words for the explaining any subject doth, like the cuttlefish, hide himself for the most part in his own ink.

there is a radical underdetermination of what is said by the literal meaning of the sentence. There is nothing in the literal meaning of the sentence "She gave him her key and he opened the door" to block the interpretation, He opened the door with her key by bashing the door down with the key; the key weighed two hundred pounds and was in the shape of an axe. Or, He swallowed both the door and the key and he inserted the key in the lock by the peristaltic contraction of his gut.

The best objects to think with are words, because that is part of what words are for. Indeed, it is a condition for something to be a word that it be thinkable. But

language is precisely designed to be a self-identifying category of institutional facts. The

institutional facts in general require language because the language is partly constitutive of the facts. But

I do not think there is a sharp dividing line between either the institutional and the non-institutional or the linguistic and the prelinguistic, but to the extent that we think the phenomena are genuinely institutional facts, and not just conditioned forms of habitual behavior, to that very extent we must think of language as constitutive of the phenomena, because the move that imposes the Y function on the X object is a symbolizing move.

In a normal literal utterance of each of these sentences, each verb has a constant meaning. There is no lexical ambiguity or metaphorical usage involved. But in each case the same verb will determine different truth conditions or conditions of satisfaction generally, because what counts as cutting or growing will vary with the context. If

nothing in the literal meaning of those sentences blocks those wrong interpretations. In each case we understand the verb differently, even though its literal meaning is constant, because in each case our interpretation depends on our Background abilities.

The Egyptian Origins of the Semitic Alphabet'.

Toral sucked down his last cigarette—a Faro, the slim-jim cheapos that were then the smoke of choice—and faced the firing squad still hollering "¡Viva Cristo Rey!" The term chupando Faros has since become Chilango slang for giving up the ghost.

Good Lord!" Henry Fairhurst did not often permit himself the use of strong language of this sort, but he felt that this was a privileged occasion.

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly misunderstand them.

We often attribute 'understanding' and other cognitive predicates by metaphor and analogy to cars, adding machines, and other artifacts, but nothing is proved by such attributions.

Syllables govern the world.

What happens to our thoughts as we clothe them in language, and how faithfully are they preserved when our listeners undress them?

Hallowed be thy name" means that the ultimate, the mystical, the ineffable can never be captured in human words. Perhaps we need to learn from the Jews that if one speaks the name of God, one is pretending that one is able to know and to define God, which is the beginning of human idolatry. That is when we begin to create God in our own image, while pretending it is the other way around. Perhaps

If you love language, it will love you back.

Poetry is a story that is so good, It doesn't need complete sentences.

Okie use' ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it.

True it is, no doubt, in the order of abstract relationship, thought is the father of speech, and speech is the harbinger of deed; but this abstract fatherhood of thought is a thing in itself absolutely without reality; the mere thought of an orange, though entertained and cherished in the most capacious of fertile brains for infinite ages, will never produce an orange.