Quotes About Language

the complex responses prompted by the word 'Orwellian' which still carry force: fear, integrity, directness, concern for language, plain prose, individual humanity, a striving to see things as they really are, a willingness to admit error, and, above all, the concept of a sense of decency in human relations.

He did not believe he had ever heard the word Ingsoc before 1960, but it was possible that in its Oldspeak form—'English Socialism'

The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think.

A word contains its opposite in itself. Take 'good,' for instance. If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'? 'Ungood' will do just as well—better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not.

It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it.

Un escritor más escrupuloso se preguntará ante cada una de sus frases, al menos, cuatro cosas: ¿qué trato de decir?; ¿con qué palabras puedo expresarlo?; ¿qué imagen o frase hecha lo dirá más claro?, y, por último, ¿tiene esta imagen la frescura suficiente para causar en el lector el efecto deseado? Y

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller

En iyi kitaplar, bize bildiklerimizi söyleyenlerdir.

Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well.

Newspeak, doublethink, the mutability of the past. He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?

How could you have a slogan like 'freedom is slavery' when the concept of freedom has been abolished?

This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning "to quack like a duck." Like various other words in the B vocabulary, duckspeak was ambivalent in meaning. Provided

Te voy a decir estas cosas que quieres saber porque me estoy convirtiendo en un viejo, y a una lengua vieja le gusta menearse.

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d'empire que les idées. (It's not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas, particularly in France.)

That's all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence.

We consider speech to be the result of thought (we have a thought, then select a sentence with which to express it), but thought also results from speech (as we grope, in words, toward meaning, we discover what we think).

By honing the sentences you used to describe the world, you changed the inflection of your mind, which changed your perceptions.

Is this the baby? I said. Ma turned on me again. What do you think it is? she said. A midget that can't talk?

Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others).

Russian short story master Isaac Babel put it, "no iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.

And they left, neither knowing how close they had come to getting Darkenfloxxedâ"¢ out their wing-wangs.

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...

Something felt very familiar about the way I now began feeling. Suddenly Rachel looked super-good. Abnesti requested permission to pep up our language centers via Verbaluceâ"¢. We Acknowledged. Soon we, too, were fucking like bunnies.