Quotes About Language

By reading so much, my vocabulary automatically improved along with my comprehension.

Anyone who writes a law that cannot be easily understood by an average citizen is not worthy of leadership. The Constitution, which was written by extremely learned men, is quite easy to understand and should serve as a gold standard for the language and size of subsequent legislation that is introduced.

They forbid the use of the word slavery by conservatives, the mention of Nazism by conservatives, or the mention of homosexuality in anything other than a positive context, to name a few of their rules.

Good, because words are important, Trafford. Clear thinking. Logic. Precision. Above all, understanding. You can understand nothing if words can mean anything.

Oh yes, you know that men are dying, dying in their thousands day after day. Everybody knows that. But you don't know what it's like. You could spend the rest of your life trying to imagine it but you'd never get even close. …Let me tell you, Kingsley, nothing, no words in the English language or any other bloody language for that matter, could ever describe what it's like.

But these are only words and probably convey only a fraction of their meaning to the hearers. They shudder and it is forgotten.

I'm twenty-two and a woman. One of the ways men diminish women's status and our contribution whilst simultaneously entrenching their quasi-paternal male authority is to call us girls. Girls go to school, Captain. Women tend the wounded, make the shells and drive the ambulances.

any one episode, or even moment, in a person's life is so complex, with so many layers of past and present, desire and indifference, drift and drive, consciousness and unconsciousness, that language is the best means we've found of approaching that kind of complexity.

Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.

Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail.

It would seem that, through touch, through kissing, we might have gouged a worm-size channel through which crucial information could pass, sublingual messages, the kind of pre-verbal intimacy that should flow with thunderous force between the bodies of people so bonded. We should have been able to bypass a mere inability to exchange language.

Anyone who believes that you can make art from language is part of a small, nearly-vanishing community, and we should all form a wedge and march on the enemy. Do we need different uniforms in this struggle, different stripes on our arms so that it's clear who the realists are? Maybe, but I care less and less.

If the words of this book are misspelled, but accidentally spell other words correctly, and also accidentally fall into a grammatically coherent arrangement, where coherency is defined as whatever doesn't upset people, it means this book is legally another book, and not this book.

One has the sense of her deciding roughly at Page 2 whether or not a book is worthy; reading the rest of it to gather evidence for her case; spending some quality time with the Thesaurus; and then taking a large blunt hammer and pounding the message home.

designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word "ampersand" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced "and." When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself ], 'and.'" This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand." The symbol is a favorite of law and

Latin! The language of God! Or perhaps He speaks Hebrew? I suppose that's more likely and it will make things rather awkward in heaven, won't it? Will we all have to learn Hebrew?

Language is now my trade, boy, because I have become a skald.' 'A skald?' 'A scop, you would call me. A poet, a weaver of dreams, a man who makes glory from nothing and dazzles you with its making. And my job now is to tell this day's tale in such a way that men will never forget our great deeds.

Words are like breath. You say them and they're gone. But writing traps them.

The spelling of place names in Anglo Saxon England was an uncertain business, with no consistency and no agreement even about the name itself. Thus London was variously rendered as Lundonia, Lundenberg, Lundenne, Lundene, Lundenwic, Lundenceaster and Lundres.

I spoke in English because the language of the Frisian people is so close to our own.

Bishop Asser was an earsling, which is anything that drops out of an arse.