Quotes About Language

Listening to Spanish, Italian, or German opera, you, like me, may have no idea what the words of a particular aria mean, but you don't need this knowledge to understand the feeling they convey. You can tell if it's a song of pleasure, jubilation, triumph, or tragedy.

peroration—the

Oh, God, I don't know what's more difficult, life or the English language.

What kind of person actually sits down and decides that no one should be allowed to end a sentence with a preposition? Not even decide what ideas you should or shouldn't talk about, but to actually make rules about what order to put your words in... It's such an amazing kind of petty tyranny.

words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say [...]

The written word has its limits and its challenges, for the primal sound in the whole world is that made by the human voice, and the likeness of this human voice must be rendered in dots and strokes...Yet I never forget that the voice, too, is important...Don't mumble or hesitate. Speak...in a loud voice, clearly, and without fear.

I am not ashamed to own that I believe that the whole universe, heaven and earth, air and seas, and the divine constitution and history of the holy Scriptures, be full of images of divine things, as full as a language is of words; and that the multitudes of those things that I have mentioned are but a very small part of what is really intended to be signified and typified by these things.

The Indian languages are extremely barbarous and barren, and very ill fitted for communicating things moral and divine, or even things speculative and abstract.

The most determining external influence on his style was unquestionably the old, so-called King James version of the English Bible. His language is saturated with its thought and phraseology. And as he is intimately acquainted with it in all its parts, so he is continually quoting it and constantly surprising us with fresh discoveries, in novel collocations, of its variety, beauty and impressiveness.

The desire not to use disparaging terms for other groups can have its comic side, and is often dismissed as a product of 'political correctness'. But the concern behind it is part of the growth of one of our central moral resources.

What is it about legs? Or what is it about breasts? Or the small of the back? What is it about anything? One day there will be no difference between anything. It'll all be the exact same thing. One day you'll look in the dictionary and there will be only one word and you'll just have to make do.

To replace wiring diagrams, Marcus suggests a better analogy: The brain is like a book, the first draft of which is written by the genes during fetal development. No chapters are complete at birth, and some are just rough outlines waiting to be filled in during childhood. But not a single chapter—be it on sexuality, language, food preferences, or morality—consists of blank pages on which a society can inscribe any conceivable set of words.

Asking children to grow virtues hydroponically, looking only within themselves for guidance, is like asking each one to invent a personal language?a pointless and isolating task if there is no community with whom to speak.

One use of language is that it partially freed humans from "stimulus control.

The Penn students spoke almost exclusively in the language of the ethic of autonomy, whereas the other groups (particularly the working-class groups) made much more use of the ethic of community, and a bit more use of the ethic of divinity.14

In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they'll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn't embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name.

Las palabras que generan estrés o miedo a los miembros de algunos grupos a menudo se consideran ahora como una forma de violencia. Las palabras no son violencia. Tratarlas como tal es una decisión interpretativa, y esa elección aumenta el dolor y el sufrimiento mientras que impide otras respuestas más eficaces, como la respuesta estoica (cultivas la no reactividad) y la respuesta antifrágil.

It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.43

Little questions," continued Facher. "Little bricks build big walls. Too many of you are afraid to ask simple questions. The tools of the trade are the English language and the rules of evidence.

Design is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing.

He said, "Now all I have to do is find eight homeless people—'scuse me, unhomed individuals. You're the social scientist. Tell me why people think renaming anything makes a difference." "It's easier than finding a real solution.

But take away the violence and you didn't have serenity. What remained were what psychiatrists labeled the negative symptoms of psychosis: apathy, flat mood, deadened voice, blunted movement, impoverished thinking, language stripped of nuance and humor. An existence devoid of surprise and joy.

chefs, the Guatemalans, sometimes

Not a word about the tiny bones. I wondered why a married woman would avoid the plural form.