Quotes About Language

Worship is the language of belief.

Now, as a ghost, of course I am invisible, but when I wish for information I have the power of investing myself with the outward appearance of an intelligent stranger, and of assuming the language of the country in which I am sojourning. People who would naturally be shy of a Greek-speaking ghost, might have no objection to impart information to a quiet looking stranger dressed in black, and indulging in broken English.

Your fragments of knowledge will lead to competence. Your competence will lead to fluency. Your fluency will intensify to higher and higher levels of fluency. The best attitude, however, is that your attempt to master the foreign language, should remain perpetually unfinished business. You'll succeed if you make sure you never go to bed knowing no more of your target language than you did when you woke up!

Let me hasten to point out that Indonesian is the easiest language in the world-no hedging, no "almost," no "among the easiest." In my experience, Indonesian is the easiest. The grammar is minimal, regular, and simple.

I have never been able to understand why perfectly sensible people waste time being wittily obscure instead of just saying what they want and going on about their business.

In some ways we should be far better off if we never used words. There are those who think that, in this matter of confusion, learning helps. But it may be the means of making confusion worse confounded.

We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.

Length isn't as important as what you say and how you say it.

Nice is the white bread of the English language adjective breadbox. It's tasteless, bland, and forgettable.

Howie swore translated to "I am strong and mighty in the wind," but which Jazz feared actually translated to "Another dumbass white kid with Asian tats. LOL.

Era inútil, algún demonio de la dislexia había hechizado aquellos libros, las palabras que tenía delante se resistían a encajar de forma coherente, se mantenían alejadas de mí, arraigadas en su contexto específico.

You may not have known this, but animals can talk.

Myth is depoliticized speech.

Men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues, and can moderate their desires more than their words.

As users of English we often need a grammatical device to make reference to the way a particular event unfolds in time. This is called aspect.

It is because the verb BE has a plain form which does not share its shape with any of the present tense forms that we need to distinguish the plain form as a distinct inflectional form. And if we do so for BE we should do so for all verbs.

Aspect is a grammatical notion, which refers to the way the associated semantic notion of aspectuality is implemented linguistically.

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal.

Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality -- a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look.

People often ask for my advice and counseling, but overall, the best advice I can give to anyone at any time is: never complete a negative statement.

To call you a whore," Emile said, "would be to denigrate a profession. No, sir, you are a cunt.

Don't use your words to describe your reality. Use your words to create your desired reality.

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

We have to realize that when we talk in front of other people about things only we can understand, those people will not be able to avoid getting wrong impressions.