Quotes About Language

Polite conversation is rarely either.

Your responsibility as a parent is not as great as you might imagine. You need not supply the world with the next conqueror of disease or major motion-picture star. If your child simply grows up to be someone who does not use the word collectible as a noun, you can consider yourself an unqualified success.

From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings.

Louise Clark's southern accent was as thick as hominy grits. No one else in the Philadelphia branch of her family had such an accent. Her mother and father had dropped theirs as soon as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line.

Words were dangerous when loosed. They were more powerful than cannon and more unpredictable than storms. They could turn men's heads inside out and warp their destinies. They could pick up kingdoms and shake them until they rattled.

This was thieves' cant. Mosca was a lover of words, and she had a sneaking liking for the grimy panache of cant, and those who wore it like a ragged red cloak.

He was bellowing a great many words that were new to Mosca and sounded quite interesting. She memorized them for future use.

That is a judgment upon me for seeking to extend your vocabulary. If I hear you using such words to describe a duke in my hearing again, I shall put you on a diet of dry verbs and water until you have learned to speak more wisely.

There were a lot of other words that Clent used after this, mostly to describe his opinion of Mosca's conduct. None of them were profane, but all of them were long and highly specific, and Mistress Leap might as well have been a goose for all the sense she could make of them.

How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.

So much is spoken about music and so little is said. For my part I do not believe that words suffice for such a task, and if they did I would no longer make any music. . . . The thoughts that are expressed to me by the music I love are not too vague to put into words but, on the contrary, too precise.

The kind of people who spoke mostly Yiddish, which is a combination of German and phlegm. This is a language of coughing and spitting; until I was eleven, I wore a raincoat.

Golden years' must have been coined by the young. It is doubtful that anyone over seventy would have described this phase of life with such a symbolic word.

Prayers have no boundaries. They can leap miles and continents and be translated instantly into any language.

One result of family failure has been the loss of dignity. No better example can be found than in the use of language. [Language has been reduced to] a four-letter word in movies, on television, in comedy routines, and in real life.

One result of family failure has been the loss of dignity. No better example can be found than in the use of language. It's a four-letter word in movies, on television, in comedy routines, and in real life. Time magazine asks, "Are the '90s destined to be the Filth Decade?

Each of us has a tongue and a voice. These instruments of speech can be used destructively or employed constructively.

Cursing, telling smutty stories, smearing the good name of another, and referring irreverently to God and the Scriptures may be considered as coming under the expression corrupt speech. Our speech is to be clean, pure, and wholesome.

Rock isn't art, it's the way ordinary people talk.

on sound] It's just the one most all-embracing, forgiving, understanding thing there is. Just in the full abstraction of it, it doesn't ask any questions and you don't have to explain yourself. And it's the one world where...that can cover all the ... emotional levels of you. At least, I'm the kind of person who when it comes to, say, something like language or just communicating on a daily basis, I feel like I'm trying to put an ocean through a straw.

Bad and cruel as our people were treated by the whites, not one of them was hurt or molested by our band. (...) The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon their rights. They made it appear that they were the injured party, and we the intruders. They called loudly to the great war chief to protect their property. How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

I'll tell ya, in New York City, where I've lived far too long, 'f***' isn't even a word, it's a comma.

There's no such thing as soy milk. It's soy juice. But they couldn't sell soy juice, so they called it soy milk. Because anytime you say "soy juice", you actually start to gag.

The only word in the Martian language is written phonetically: Kay-ray-kh-kuh-ko-kex. It means whatever you want it to mean.