Quotes About Language

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics.

Among human beings, vocabulary was considered the best measure of intelligence.)

this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself.

In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He'd speak a language everyone understood.

Jak siÄ™ zastanowisz, to bÄ™dziesz musiaÅ' przyzna?, ?e wszystkie historie Å›wiata skÅ'adajÄ… siÄ™ tylko z dwudziestu szeÅ›ciu liter. Litery sÄ… wci?? te same, tylko zmienia siÄ™ ich zestawienie. Å» liter tworzy siÄ™ sÅ'owa, ze sÅ'ów zdania, ze zdaÅ" rozdziaÅ'y, a z rozdziaÅ'ów historie.

Un día nos dimos cuenta de que faltaba una palabra. Nadie nos la había robado, tampoco la habíamos olvidado. Sencillamente ya no estaba. Pero sin esa palabra no podíamos seguir actuando, porque ya nada daba sentido. Era precisamente la palabra por la que todo se relaciona con todo. ¿Comprende, bella dama? Desde entonces viajamos de un lado a otro para encontrarla de nuevo.

Other animals can make sounds, and sounds can indicate pleasure and pain. But language, a distinctly human capacity, isn´t just for registering pleasure and pain. It´s about declaring what is just and what is unjust, and distinguishing right from wrong. We don´t grasp these things silently, and then put words to them; language is the medium through which we discern and deliberate about the good.

The Piranha didn't talk like a person. He said things like "If you fuckin' buy this bond in a fuckin' trade, you're fuckin' fucked." And "If you don't pay fuckin' attention to the fuckin' two-year, you get your fuckin' face ripped off." Noun, verb, adjective: fucker, fuck, fucking. No part of speech was spared. His world was filled with copulating inanimate objects and people getting their faces ripped off.

We tried to trademark proximity, but you can't because it's a word

The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.

How do you explain to an innocent citizen of the free world the importance of a credit default swap on a double-A tranche of a subprime-backed collateralized debt obligation? He tried, but his English in-laws just looked at him strangely. They understood that someone else had just lost a great deal of money and Ben had just made a great deal of money, but never got much past that. I can't really talk to them about it, he says. They're English.

The trouble was that clarity and simplicity were more important in computer language than in human language.

Liquidity. When an executive said his bank had plenty of liquidity it always meant that it didn't. At

Cajun coach for a good thirty minutes, as he listened to the other coaches, only in Coach O's case there was a twist: Michael couldn't understand

how can a man who doesn't speak English lie

you get when you can't think of a word that feels as if it's right on the tip of your tongue. For most people the relief they experience upon finding it is almost physical. They sink back in their

People said some strange things. For

he needed them to translate his extraordinary ambition into the ordinary language understood by corporate America.

I caught one last glimpse of her face, howling something at me. There were too many vowels in what she said, and they were in an unkind order. (Substitutions)

The telephone, though a remarkable device, is not designed for real communication, for the heavy lifting of personal interaction. For the big stuff, you have to be in the same physical space. Questions are asked and answered on a chemical level: Our species lived and loved and dealt with each other for millions of years before we developed language. It's still only ever background music.

That was a double negative, Jemail. By saying that you haven't seen nobody, you're actually saying that you have seen somebody.

That night they slept restlessly and, as he had predicted, Elric screamed agonizingly in his turbulent, terror-filled sleep and he called a name which made Shaarilla's eyes fill with pain and jealousy. Wide-eyed in his grim sleep, Elric seemed to be staring at the one he named, speaking other words in a sibilant language which made Shaarilla block her ears and shudder.

They fight a war and they do not know what it is for. Isn't that crazy. How can one man kill another and not know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different colour uniform and speaks a different language?

For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.