Quotes About Language

If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pretend?

Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.

Top–down language teaching just does not work well – it's like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.

The point is that nothing could be more "instinctive" than the predisposition to learn a language. It is virtually unteachable. It is hard-wired. It is not learned. It is—horrid thought—genetically determined. And yet nothing could be more plastic than the vocabulary and syntax to which that predisposition applies itself. The ability to learn a language, like almost all the other human brain functions, is an instinct for learning.

The phenomena we refer to as intelligence may be a byproduct of intergenomic conflict between genes mediating offense and defense in the context of language', write Rice and Holland.

Roger Bacon held that three classes of substance were capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal. With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words, books are an amalgam of the three.

explanation of the difference between a language and a dialect:

a language, he said, is a dialect with an army and a navy.

Because HTML is a living language, an HTML page will never become obsolete and stop working. HTML pages will never use a version number (even in the doctype), and web developers will never need to "upgrade" their markup from one version to another to get it to work on new browsers. By the same token, new features may be added to HTML at any time.

I have to speak carefully now because I have this strange habit of imitating British people without even realizing that I'm doing it.

Words are lies. It's what's beneath the words that has any hope of being true.

Gatsby's fall from grace may be grim, but the language of the novel is buoyant; Fitzgerald's plot may suggest that the American Dream is a mirage, but his words make that dream irresistible.

When you have enough power and money, you can dictate the meanings of words.

The whole weak in the knees thing,which she always thought was just some idiotic expression back from the golden age of idiotic expressions,was real. -Suite Scarlett

That's the thing about speaking—you can talk and talk and have no idea at all what the words leaving your mouth mean, or where they came from.

I wish I'd remembered not to use it around other people, because it was kind of our word.

Stevie had absolutely no idea what he meant by "have a butcher's" and was not going to ask.

But, of course, it is not for their language that the tribalists are fighting: they are fighting to protect their level of awareness, their mental passivity, their obedience to the tribe, and their desire to ignore the existence of outsiders.

He was searching for words to name his meaning without naming it, she thought, to make her understand that which he did not want to be understood.

If we don't use ugly words, we won't have any ugliness

A sentence in Atlas Shrugged that is applicable to all rational people, but particularly to writers, is the one where I say that Dagny "regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath—an oath of allegiance to reality." In regard to words, this should be the motto of every writer.

By refusing to say 'It is,' you are refusing to say 'I am.

Lois Cook said that words must be freed from the oppression of reason. She said the stranglehold of reason upon words is like the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. Words must be permitted to negotiate with reason through collective bargaining. That's what she said. She's so amusing and refreshing.

Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man's reach.