Quotes About Language

I've never met all these people you speak of. And neither, I suspect, have you. They only exist in words we hear. It is folly to say you know what is happening to other people. Only they know, if they exist. They have their own Universes of their eyes and ears.

This sentence is not true

I said 'dear lady,' explained Ford Prefect, because I didn't want her to be offended by my implication that she was an ignorant cretin-

Si los seres humanos no dejan de hacer ejercicio con los labios, su cerebro empieza a funcionar.

It is a farewell gift from the dolphins," said Wonko in a low quiet voice, "the dolphins whom I loved and studied, and swam with, and fed with fish, and even tried to learn their language, a task which they seemed to make impossibly difficult, considering the fact that I now realize they were perfectly capable of communicating in ours if they decided they wanted to.

You are, without doubt, holding in your hands one of the best-introduced books in the English language. We hope you enjoy the Introduction to the New Edition that follows this Introduction to it and continue to read on even into the book itself.

We started to collect more and more of these words and concepts, and began to realize what an arbitrarily selective work the Oxford English Dictionary is. It simply doesn't recognize huge wodges of human experience.

After a few months of observation he had come up with a second theory, which was this - 'If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

IT CAN HARDLY be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression "As pretty as an airport." Airports

if human beings don't keep exercising their lips, their brains start working.

Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.

We didn't need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don't (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

Ich kriege schon Kopfschmerzen, wenn ich bloß versuche mich auf euer Niveau runterzudenken.

What did "psychosassic" mean? It was his own word and he vigorously denied that it meant anything at all.

Out," he said. People who can supply that amount of firepower don't need to supply verbs as well.

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

Why?' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it.

The alphabet does not go "A B C D What? When? How?" but it does go "V W X Why? Z.

Many words and expressions which only a matter of decades ago were considered so distastefully explicit that, were they merely to be breathed in public, the perpetrator would be shunned, barred from polite society, and in some extreme cases shot through the lungs, are now thought to be very healthy and proper, and their use in everyday speech and writing is seen as evidence of a well-adjusted, relaxed and totally un****ed-up personality

The protruding upper halves of the letters now appear, in the local language, to read "Go stick your head in a pig," and are no longer illuminated, except at times of special celebration.

It is worth repeating at this point the theories that Ford had come up with, on his first encounter with human beings, to account for their peculiar habit of continually stating and restating the very very obvious, as in 'It's a nice day,' or 'You're very tall,' or 'So this is it, we're going to die.' His first theory was that if human beings didn't keep exercising their lips, their mouths probably seized up.

It's translating for you. It's a Babel fish. Look it up in the book if you like.

Howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl howl gargle howl gargle howl howl gargle gargle howl gargle gargle gargle howl slurrp uuuurgh

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "Future Perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.