Quotes About Language

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

Fou!" "Who?" "I didn't say 'who'; I said 'fou,' " "I know you did. I said who?" "Who?" "Who's fou?" "Oh, is. By Jove, 'suis'! 'Je suis fou.

With tobacco and literature one could face out any situation, provided, of course, that the book was not written in an unknown tongue.

Joyce has freed us from the superstition of syntax, agreed the curly man.

Do you find it easy to get drunk on words? So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober. Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night

Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations;

The professional interpreter is a minor miracle—far better

For example, the word 'daffy-down-dilly.' It is a criminal libel to call a lawyer a daffy-down-dilly. Ha! Yes, I advise you never to do such a thing.

You said 'The glass-blower's cat is bompstable'," retorted Lord Peter. "It's a perfectly rippin' word, but I don't know what you mean by it.

So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.' Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

The two most beautiful words in the English language are 'check enclosed.

And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.

I can't write five words but that I change seven.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. The boys have gone hog-wild with liberty, yet the short flat terms used over and over, both in dialogue and narrative, add neither vigor nor clarity; the effect is not of shock but of something far more dangerous — tedium.

But I give you my word, in the entire book there is nothing that cannot be said aloud in mixed company. And there is, also, nothing that makes you a bit the wiser. I wonder--oh, what will you think of me--if those two statements do not verge upon the synonymous.

If the English language made any sense, a catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.

Capital Letters Were Always The Best Way Of Dealing With Things You Didn't Have A Good Answer To.

Words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

Goosnargh, said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn't know what it should be.

to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before

I think he probably wants you to play Scrabble with him again,' said Ford, 'he's pointing to the letters.' 'Probably spelt crzjgrdwldiwdc again, I keep on telling him there's only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term future perfect has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

And now we have the World Wide Web (the only thing I know of whose shortened form—www—takes three times longer to say than what it's short for)