Quotes About Language

Language was all that I could do, but it never, I felt, came close to a dance or a song or a gliding through water. Language could serve as a weapon, a shield and a disguise, it had many strengths. It could bully, cajole, deceive, wheedle and intimidate. Sometimes it could even delight, amuse, charm, seduce and endear, but always as a solo turn, never a dance.

The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time. Poppycock means soft shit - from the Dutch, I need scarcely remind you, pappe kak.

I am a lover of truth, a worshipper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.

I like to think of this little [newspaper] column as a brassière, or do I mean brasserie? Brazier, possibly. All three! A column that lifts, separates, supports, serves excellent cappuccino and crackles merrily with sweet-smelling old chestnuts.

I have always wanted to be able to express music and love and the things that I have felt in their own proper language – not like this, not like this with the procession of particular English verbs, adjectives, adverbs, nouns and prepositions that rolls before you now towards this full-stop and the coming paragraph of yet more words.

Sometimes political correctness exists more in the furious minds of its enemies than in reality, which gets n with compromise and common sense without too much hysteria.

HEDYLOGOS - the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentines cards, love-letters and romantic fiction.

Just let the words fly from your lips and your pen. Give them rhythm and depth and height and silliness. Give them filth and form and noble stupidity. Words are free and all words, light and frothy, firm and sculpted as they may be, bear the history of their passage from lip to lip over thousands of years. How they feel to us now tells us whole stories of our ancestors.

People (even Americans) often find it difficult to talk about themselves.  Poetry gives them a kind of verbal costume in which they can express themselves with more dignity and confidence than the common dress of everyday speech will allow.

The poor bloody poet can no longer say "ope" for "open," or "swain" for "youth," he is expected to construct new poems out of the plastic and Styrofoam garbage that litters the twentieth-century linguistic floor, to make fresh art from the used verbal condoms of social intercourse.

I will never forget my puzzlement when, in a vocabulary list, it presented the verb thaumazo, offering this helpful thought: "thaumazo, I wonder, or marvel at. This is easily remembered by thinking of the English word 'thaumaturge.'" And I suppose that was true, since I've never forgotten it.

t is generally recognized that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multitasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics and physics. It is not politically correct to say such things....But it cannot be denied that there are differences between men and women. Of course, these are differences between the averages only. There are wide variations about the mean.

Ä'hn ?i, múa nhiêu qúa?" "Ph?i roi, ch?c không có ngú?i m? dêm na?

There should be a way to surgically remove and store children's tongues as soon as they learn to speak," said Hugh. "Then, when they've graduated from college and distinguished themselves in the workplace, they could file a petition to have their tongues reattached." "I don't think that's feasible

We reveal ourselves in the metaphors we choose for depicting the cosmos in miniature.

This or that is proclaimed awesome every second sentence - and we have lost a wonderful English word.

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham? Ded-a-chek?

When you want to feel better, call something a piece of shit. It usually works.

The medical definition of miracle is misdiagnosis.

Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words - the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both good story and good words, treasure that book.

The thought process can never be complete without articulation.