Quotes About Language

When the term ham sandwich can refer to a man sitting at a lunch counter, there seems to be little hope for the logician's dream that the expressions in a language can be mapped onto states of the world according to a fixed set of pointers.

I told him to be fruitful and multiply, but not in those words.

If I use the verb pour, my field of vision narrows to how the water is caused to move, ignoring its destination; that's the reason we can say pour the water but not pour the glass. But if I use the verb fill, my field of vision narrows to the resulting fullness of the glass, ignoring the trajectory of the water; that's why we say fill the glass but not fill the water.

Without a substrate of thoughts to underlie our words, we do not truly speak but only babble, blabber, blather, chatter, gibber, jabber, natter, patter, prattle, rattle, yammer, or yadda, yadda—an onomatopoeic lexicon for empty speech that makes plain the expectation that the sounds coming out of our mouths are ordinarily about something.

the difficulty of a sentence depends not just on its word count but on its geometry. Good writers often use very long sentences, and they garnish them with words that are, strictly speaking, needless. But they get away with it by arranging the words so that a reader can absorb them a phrase at a time, each phrase conveying a chunk of conceptual structure.

This new usage may fall deadborn from the innovator's lips or be welcomed into a segment of the community with open arms. The reception is partly capricious (as we shall see in chapter 6), but when a new combination does catch on, it could involve the later adopters' grasping the rationale with a stroke of insight recapitulating that of the original coiner, their dumbly memorizing the verb in that construction, or something in between.

if some metaphors can persist in the language as fossils, it puts every metaphor under a cloud of suspicion.

at the other end of the shelf, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language is truly a surprising discovery, rich with implications. Even the killjoy has to admit that metaphors were alive in the minds of the original coiners and compelling to the early adopters.

The cause of the onset of overgeneralization [of regular past tense forms to irregular verbs] is not a change in vocabulary statistics, but some endogenous change in the child's language mechanisms.

For the expressions to proliferate so easily, speakers and hearers must be dissecting the implied metaphor to lay bare the connexions between the things named by the metaphor and the abstract concepts they are really talking about. (In literary theory these are sometimes called the 'vehicle' and the 'tenor' of the metaphor; cognitive scientists call them the 'source' and the 'target'.)

language often allows us to express that aspect as a noun, whether or not it is a physical object. For example, when we say I have three reasons for leaving, we are counting reasons as if they were objects (though of course we do not literally think that a reason can sit on a table or be kicked across a room).

the mind is a metaphor-monger

Contrary to popular belief, the Eskimos do not have more words for snow than do speakers of English. They do not have four hundred words for snow, as it has been claimed in print, or two hundred, or one hundred, or forty-eight, or even nine. One dictionary puts the figure at two.

Moving from philosophy to psychology, we discover a big problem with the claim that most of our thinking is metaphorical: people effortlessly transcend the metaphors implicit in their language.

people could not analyse their metaphors if they didn't command an underlying medium of thought that is more abstract than the metaphors themselves.

Thinking can not trade in metaphors directly. It must trade in a more basic currency that captures the abstract concepts shared by the metaphor and its topic […] while sloughing off the irrelevant bits.

I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

Chinese, in contrast, lacks a subjunctive and any other simple grammatical construction that directly expresses a counterfactual.

Lakoff is right to insist that conceptual metaphors are not just literary garnishes but aides to reason – they are 'metaphors we live by.' And metaphors can power sophisticated inferences, not just obvious ones…

Words make love with one another.

Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.

Love is a child that talks in broken language, yet then he speaks most plain.

Love fattens on smooth words.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.