Quotes About Language

find a way to build with language a bridge between a failure to believe and a witness to what is incomprehensible.

Paul, and all the other authors of the New Testament, wrote in Greek).

But there are some rare terms that simply don't have satisfactory, simple words that adequately express the same thing, and the word hypostasis (plural: hypostases) is one of them.

propositional statements

In the Hebrew language, the word for "anointed one" is mashiach, from which we get our word messiah. In Greek, the language of the New Testament, the translation of mashiach is christos, whence we get our word Christ.

I'm not a Coptologist. Coptic is one of those languages that I taught myself in my spare time over the years, mainly because I wanted to be able to read ancient Coptic translations of the New Testament and some of the Gnostic Gospels discovered in the twentieth century.

Wisdom is referred to as "she"—or even as "Lady Wisdom"—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine);

The English word "Almighty" is a bit weak for the Greek term used here: Pantokrator, a rare word, or at least it was before the book of Revelation.

A girl has shorter vocal cords than a boy, so it actually takes less effort for her to talk. As for boys' their vocal cords double in length during puberty. This can make it a lot of work for them to spit something out! Guys are four times more likely than girls to have a stuttering problem. So, because many boys aren't as good at talking as girls, they do less of it.

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

What I hide by my language, my body utters

A trick of vocabulary: we say to develop a photograph '; but what the chemical action develops is undevelopable, an essence (of a wound), what cannot be transformed but only repeated under the instances of in-sistence (of the insistent gaze). This brings the Photo-graph (certain photographs) dose to the Haiku. For the notation of a haiku, too, is undevelopable: everything is given, without provoking the desire for or even the pos-sibility of a rhetorical expansion.

The mason stirs. Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write.

The word is only a representation of the meaning; even at its best, writing almost always falls short of full meaning. Given that, why in God's name would you want to make things words by choosing a word which is only cousin to the one you really wanted to use?

Roll me in sugar and call me a fuckin jelly-doughnut!

he had discovered, as many others had before him, that only the first cussword is really hard; after that, there's nothing quite like them for relieving one's feelings.

Common tools go on top. The commonest of all, the bread of writing, is vocabulary.

Joy—damn, but that's a cheerful little word.

Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.

but what I mean is she talks like a cliche. Do you know that word?" "It means what is always said or believed by people who think only a little or not at all.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes. The object of fiction isn't grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story … to make him/her forget, whenever possible, that he/she is reading a story at all.

to raise the cultural level of the laboring masses and rear them in a socialist manner, promote a literature in the local languages, appoint local people who are most closely connected with the proletariat to the Soviet organizations and draw them into the work of administering the territory.

Mr. Gingham had the true spirit of his profession, and such words as funeral or coffin or hearse never passed his lips. He spoke always of interments, of caskets, and coaches, using terms that were calculated rather to bring out the majesty and sublimity of death than to parade its horrors.