Quotes About Language

Military and corporate structures are hierarchical, complex, and arcane. Both science and technology employ an esoteric language familiar mainly to the initiates, while military-speak is a language unto itself. Democracy, whose culture extols the common and shared, is alien to all of these practices and their modes of communication.

You pay attention to how people talk when they answer, rather than what they talk about. Even when a person does not answer the question directly, they will reveal their pattern by the manner in which they answer (or don't).

I patch together a living language out of reanimated parts, like Frankenstein, and feel no disgust at scrabbling in the charnel house. Each of us makes her own monster, who earns a cozy co-tenancy of our tomb. We're all the last native speakers of a language that dies with us. Am I so special for tasting the rot on my tongue? For knowing whose remains I'm kitted out in?

Language is a terrible, cold thing, I think. One may recount an event, calmly selecting the most suitable words, that to remember without benefit of ink is almost beyond bearing. We accept the counterfeit and are thankful, for it spares us the awful weight of our lives.

She'd never call Smith males "womanizers." Although she would call them whores.

When the word 'nostalgia' was coined in the 18th century, it was used to describe a pathology - not so much a sense of lost time, but a severe homesickness.

I have spent a lot of time in the art world, and I guess I do listen to how people speak. I'm interested in what they say and how they say it.

The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. ... In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections.

Time reveals all translation to be paraphrase.

Every time I see Dan Quayle I feel like buying a vowel.

The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

The human need for language is not simply for the transmission of meaning, it is at the same time listening to and affirming a person's existence.

Why do 'slow down' and 'slow up' mean the same thing? Why is the third hand on the watch called the second hand?

The New Testament is not new anymore' it's thousands of years old. It's time to start calling it the Less Old Testament.

I am intentionally avoiding the standard term which, by the way, did not exist in Euler's time. One of the ugliest outgrowths of the "new math" was the premature introduction of technical terms.

I've seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.

A conversation in English in Finnish and in French can not be held at the same time nor with indifference ever or after a time.

Another stupid thing I believed for a long time was that pizza was supposed to be said peed-za.

There has never been a time when there has been no person in Cornwall without a knowledge of the Cornish language.

I remember the first time I heard a teenager say 'LOL.' Just what? But it means 'laugh.' Why don't you just laugh? What are you doing?

A lot of times, if you watch sign language interpreters, there can be some lag time issues. When that happens, I think you lose the hearing audience.

For the word is dialectical in itself and at the same time is integrated into the whole of existence. By this I mean that the word is intended to be lived.

According to all the experts, it's time for me to talk about what I'm going through... I can't. I'd need a new alphabet, one made of falling, of tectonic plates shifting, of the deep devouring dark.