Quotes About Language

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug (Mark Twain)

These descriptions do really state the truth- as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts-by help of the readers imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue (German) ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightening and the lightening bug.

Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue--where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk--otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.

I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy—what would you think? I wouldn' think nuffn; I'd take en bust him over de head—dat

There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness, both of phrase and expression, that compels belief in their sincerity.

Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil.   A which?   Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years.

Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

The difference between the ALMOST right word and the RIGHT word is really quite a large matter. It's the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout these-yer dead people, Tom.

I] shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it.

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.