Quotes About Language

economist Friedrich Hayek observed, "If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

So if the language is our guide, the lofty declaration of abstract principles is really a story with a strange and clunky plot. Some people are hanging beneath some other people, connected by cords. As stuff flows by, something forces the lower people to cut the cords and stand beside the upper people, which is what the rules require. They see some onlookers, and clear away the onlookers' view of what forced them to do the cutting.

Adam Freedman points out in his book on legalese, "What distinguishes legal boilerplate is its combination of archaic terminology and frenzied verbosity, as though it were written by a medieval scribe on crack.

Careful writers pick up the nuances of words by focusing on their makeup and their contexts over the course of tens of thousands of hours of reading.

If old truths are to retain their hold on men's minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations

the major distinction between the indefinite article, a, and the definite article, the.6 When a character makes his first appearance on stage, he is introduced with a. When we are subsequently told about him, we already know who he is, and he is mentioned with the:

So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate structure, elegantly assembled by layers of rules and lawful even at its quirkiest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of a cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the mind of the child, the mind of the adult, and the texture of reality.

Radical Pragmatics – "words are fluid, and can mean different things in different circumstances. […] And what we draw upon in memory is not a lexicon of definitions but a network of associations among words and the kinds of events and actors they typically convey.

Sometimes it is not easy to find any words that properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words.

A good rule of thumb is that any country that has the word "democratic" in its official name, like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (a.k.a. North Korea) or the German Democratic Republic (a.k.a. East Germany), isn't one.

Now, if concepts are undefinable, that means they aren't built out of more elementary concepts, which means they must themselves be elementary concepts, which means they must be innate.

Nor does the atomic nature of word meanings mean that people are ignorant of the information traditionally plunked into their definitions.

If p or q is true, and p is false, then q is true." They just wouldn't be part of the word's meaning.

Linguists call this the container-locative construction, because now it's the container that's being focused upon.

Linguists call this the content-locative construction, because the contents being moved are focused upon in the object of the sentence

The reason to believe that many polysemous meanings are memorized, rather than stretched as the need arises, is that they are conventional—they are arbitrary practices of a language community, neither deducible nor universal.

Avoid clichés like the plague—it's a no-brainer.

meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self:

Although 'to paint' means something like to cause to be covered with paint, one does not 'paint a brush' when one dips it in the can, and it is hard to say with a straight face that Michelangelo painted the ceiling when he caused the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel to be covered with paint.

Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot.

The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.

what is style, after all, but the effective use of words to engage the human mind?

freshmen. Even among English speakers, then, geocentric terms may be used when the terrain offers a conspicuous visual frame of reference

Steven Pinker