Quotes About Language

Most people take the way words look for granted ... Words are there to be read – end of story. Once however typomania sets in, it becomes quite a different story.

He handed her a tissue, but she didn't know what a tissue was, so she put it in her mouth and tried to eat it.

You speak the language far better than

like Turing and the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, the Navajo were ignored for decades. Eventually, in 1968, the Navajo code was declassified, and the following year the code talkers held their first reunion.

I think music is what language once aspired to be. Music allows us to face God on our own terms because it reaches beyond life.

Language is like looking at a map of somewhere. Love is living there and surviving on the land.

Language is like drinking from one's own reflection in still water. We only take from it what we are at the time.

And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings—the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

The English language was spoken and written—but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air—it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were—who knew?

In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.

The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.

An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary

God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device;

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.

One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. "No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers," he replied, archly. "I find, however, that you have been looking for them.

Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to 'fix our language forever'—no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.

was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.

Okay, seriously, I dont know if this is true or not, but I heard people who use profanity are trying to compensate for their lack of you know... size" -Tuck

If my name was Richard, I'd go by Richard or Rich...not Dick. Hell I'd even settle for being called Chard.

The Professor doesn't have a problem being called Dick? If my name was Richard, I'd go by Richard or Rich . . . not Dick. Hell, I'd even settle for being called Chard.

Wasabi. Now hoiteys. Seriously, you'd think I really didn't know English.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.