Quotes About Language

Programmers who program into a language first decide what thoughts they want to express, and then they determine how to express those thoughts using the tools provided by their specific language.

You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking "How effectual are they?

The core of the ACT approach is built upon the idea that human language gives rise to both human achievement and human misery.

It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)

It should also be noted that many girls' names, including Shirley, Carol, Leslie, Hilary, Renee, Stacy, and Tracy began life as boys' names, but girls' names almost never cross over to boys.)

Mientras discutía acerca de su investigación sobre los nombres en un programa de radio, Roland G. Fryer Jr. aceptó una llamada de una mujer negra que se sentía disgustada por el nombre que acababan de dar a su sobrina recién nacida. Se pronunciaba shuh-Teed, pero en realidad se escribía como «Shithead» [tonta, despreciable].

We had to keep explaining things, backtracking and filling gaps. We realised our own conversations had evolved into a kind of shorthand, a tidy, neat little minimalism. Covering the whole canvas in broad obvious brushstrokes for outsiders felt like a waste of sounds, time and effort. Speaking with footnotes .

It's tiring not knowing people isn't it? Clio said later. It isn't word efficient, I agreed.

Ancient history is always colliding with the present in the most literal sense: our genes, our language, our culture all stamp the present moment with the imprint of the distant past.

Shifting culture requires a confluence of inciting incidents. Something directional that leads to a tribal fracturing and reknitting. Often shows up in language first. In music. Fashion. It can feel a little like hope." He points at the images. "This doesn't feel like hope.

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code. It's wired into every stage of meaning-making, from basic emotions all the way up to abstract thought. Once you can speak a language, you can feel in that language. It's automatic. It creates empathy.

This isn't just your mind paying more attention—suddenly your entire body is paying attention. When this happens, it's outside our conscious capabilities. There are no words. Our language becomes that of the river. All the features of the river speak to you and you to them through motion. There is tension, threat, there is joy and release, and overall, a deep, deep sense of flow. You are literally part of the flow of the world.

Words are too recent an imprinting. Animals, though, are part of our ancient grammar, prehistorically embedded in the brain.

Words are just bits of information, but language is the full code.

By using the tanks to eliminate all distraction, entrain specific brainwaves, and regulate heart rate frequency, the SEALs are able to cut the time it takes to learn a foreign language from six months to six weeks.

The difference between mainstream fiction and literature is what their writers do with words; the former places its emphasis on the story rather than the language used to tell that story; in literature, the language is the story; that is, the story is primarily a vehicle for a linguistic display of the writer's rhetorical abilities.

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.

One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with human language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Humans are so innately hardwired for language that they can no more suppress their ability to learn and use language than they can suppress the instinct to pull a hand back from a hot surface.

Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images

Chomsky is a pencil-and-paper theoretician who wouldn't know Jabba the Hutt from the Cookie Monster

A woman gets into a taxi in Boston's Logan airport and asks the driver, 'Can you take me somplace where I can get scrod?' He says, 'Gee, that's the first time I've heard it in the pluperfect subjunctive.

The best words not only pinpoint an idea better than any alternative but echo it in their sound and articulation, a phenomenon called phonesthetics, the feeling of sound.