Quotes About Language

You cannot tax unless you can compile records and issue receipts. The symbols employed in the accountant's ledger became the rudiments of written language, an innovation that had never existed among hunters and gatherers.

You are the shuckiest shuck faced shuck in the world!

was as if his memory loss had stolen a chunk of his language—it was disorienting.

Words go together in zillions of ways. Some ways go deep, and some ways go shallow.

What you have to realize when you write poetry, or if you love poetry, is that poetry is just naturally the greatest god damn thing that ever was in the whole universe

Three Tasks of a Good Missionary Learn the language: educate yourself on how to talk in a way that people can understand and to which they can relate and eventually respond Study the culture: become so sensitized to that culture that you can operate effectively within it Translate the gospel: translate it into its own cultural context so that it can be heard, understood, and appropriated

If our bodies were different, though, our metaphors would be different, as Olaf Stapledon showed in Star Maker. Crabs walk sideways, for instance. If crabs could talk, they would undoubtedly describe progress in difficult negotiations as sidling toward agreement and express the hope for a better future by saying their best days are still beside them. Our bodies prime our metaphors, and our metaphors prime how we think and act.

Few people may be consciously aware of the etymological origins of common words and phrases, but the essential metaphor-making process of comparing the unknown with the known is still vital and ongoing. This process is the way meaning was, is, and ever shall be made.

A kenning is a metaphorical circumlocution consisting of paired nouns or a noun phrase. For example, in ancient Icelandic verse, a sword is not a sword but an "icicle of blood"; a ship is not a ship but the "horse of the sea"; and eyes are not eyes but the "moons of the forehead." Similarly, the earth is "the floor of the hall of the winds" or "the sea trodden on by animals," while fire is "destroyer of timber" or "the sun of houses.

Comparing your beloved to a red, red rose might be fine if you're writing a poem, but these thinkers believed more exact language was needed to express the "truth"-a term, by the way, distilled from Icelandic, Swedish, Anglo-Saxon, and other non-English words meaning "believed" rather than certain.

that the unknown can only be made known through metaphor and analogy. "When we pass beyond pointing to individual sensible objects330, when we begin to think of causes, relations, of mental states or acts, we become incurably metaphorical," Lewis wrote. "We apprehend none of these things except through metaphor.

Witzelsucht, in which patients compulsively share dreadful puns, facetious jokes, and socially inappropriate wisecracks.

Jive undertakes to remedy that situation with language that makes up for the dullness of mere existence.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread. Now people leave paper trails.

Science and technology multiple around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.

Ours is a precarious language, as every writer knows, in which the merest shadow line often separates affirmation from negation, sense from nonsense, and one sex from the other.

Woe to our time, for the study of letters has perished from among us.

miracle it is to find the right words, words that carry soul accurately

I fear those big words which make us so unhappy.

Across the page the numbers moved in grave morrice, in the mummery of their letters, wearing quaint caps of squares and cubes.

Why is it that words like these seem dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

From ancient theology to contemporary psychology, our words shape our story and this story becomes the framework for our behaviors; and our behaviors determine the way we lead our life and the way we run our organizations.

El lenguaje que utilizamos se integra en nosotros y se convierte en acción, así que es importantísimo respetarlo, darle forma y utilizarlo de forma estratégica.