Quotes About Language

Ä°nsanlar dil konusunda merakl? olmaktan öte tutkuludur. Sebebi belli: Dil zihnin en ula??labilir k?sm?d?r. Ä°nsanlar dil hakk?nda bilgi edinmek ister çünkü bu bilginin insan doÄŸas?n?n iç yüzünü anlamaya yol göstereceÄŸini bilirler.

To show that these rules really are parts of a language engine, one needs to show that they mesh with other mechanisms of language, particularly in ways that would leave common sense and the desire to communicate frustrated.

As people ages, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days. And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it

As for government euphemism, it is contemptible not because it is a form of mind control but because it is a form of lying.

And in any case one should not confuse clarity with condescension.

For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, "Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?

Rather, there is friction between the speaker's square peg and the listener's round hole, and that friction itself conveys information in a parallel stream.

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don'ts.

never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:

In general, referring to a person by a body part, physical trait, or typical accoutrement—that is, by a metonym—is dysphemistic.

As people age, they confuse changes in themselves with changes in the world, and changes in the world with moral decline—the illusion of the good old days.4 And so every generation believes that the kids today are degrading the language and taking civilization down with it:5

Language is a lever with which we can convey surprising facts, weird new ideas, unwelcome news, and other thoughts that a listener may be unprepared for.

The idea that the language people speak controls how they think—linguistic determinism—is a recurring theme in intellectual life.

Do people literally think in English, Cherokee, Kivunjo, or, by 2050, Newspeak? Or are our thoughts couched in some silent medium of the brain—a language of thought, or "mentalese"—and merely clothed in words whenever we need to communicate them to a listener?

The errors could have been avoided by mentally moving the who or whom back into the gap and sounding out the sentence (or, if your intuitions about who and whom are squishy, inserting he or him in the gap instead).

According to studies of writing quality, a varied vocabulary and the use of unusual words are two of the features that distinguish sprightly prose from mush.

If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary.

According to Linguistic Determinism, the language we speak is the language of thought, or at least structures it in major ways.

The question is whether language determines thought—whether the language we speak makes it difficult or impossible to think certain thoughts, or alters the way we think in surprising or consequential ways.

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available.

the dozens of Eskimo words for snow.

The authors of Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, having surveyed the uses of the two forms over six hundred years, conclude, "The traditional rules about shall and will do not appear to have described real usage of these words precisely at any time, although there is no question that they do describe the usage of some people some of the time and that they are more applicable in England than elsewhere.

A verb, then, is not just a word that refers to an action or state but the chassis of the sentence. It is a framework with receptacles for the other parts-the subject, the object, and various oblique objects and subordinate clauses-to be bolted onto.