Quotes About Language

Got to love a dude that says things like "kinetic" and "detritus.

Lawyers love paper. They eat, sleep and dream paper. They turn paper into gold, and their files are colorful and their language neoclassical and calli-graphically bewigged.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

I love profanity, but I think if it's used too much, it just sounds a little trashy. I think it's more effective when it's dropped intelligently. I like intelligent profanity.

What you call love does not sound very beautiful.

Cor, love a duck. And also Lawks-a-mercy. I said that inwardly, but outwardly I said, "Blimey, and also, what larks.

I believe in the fatal hairdo just for the love of saying fatal hairdo.

We need French chaplains and imams, French-speaking, who learn French, who love France. And who adhere to its values. And also French financing.

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

What is love at first sight but a proof of the powerful but silent language of physiognomy?

If eskimos can come up with fifty words for snow because its a matter of life and death, why do we have just one word for love?

I've always loved rhyming. I love language.

I honor English majors. It's a dumb thing to major in. It leads nowhere. It's good to be dumb, it allows us to love something for no reason. That's the best kind of love.

If she can't spell, she shouldn't be a librarian.

How can there be no such word as can't? Ramona wondered. Mrs. Rudge had just said can't. If there was so such word as can't then Mrs. Rudge could not have said there was no such word as can't. Therefore, what Mrs. Rudge said could not be true.

The world, Ramona decided, was full of people who used their dictionary skills and probably weren't any fun. Then

Se lo interrogavano, rispondeva a monosillabi e cercava di non sbilanciarsi. Su Deneb questa gli sarebbe sembrata una ipocrisia, ma sulla Terra si chiamava essere diplomatici.

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance. That is jargon - the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement - and it is one of the great curses of modern English.

Before, prior to. There is no difference between these two except length and a certain affectedness on the part of 'prior to.' To paraphrase Bernstein, if you would use 'posterior to' instead of 'after,' then by all means use 'prior to' instead of 'before.

The dandelion was long popularly known as the 'pissabed' because of its supposed diuretic properties, and other names in everyday use included 'mare's fart', 'naked ladies', 'twitch-ballock', 'hounds-piss', 'open arse', and 'bum-towel'.

Just because a word or expression has an antiquity or was once widely used does not confer on it some special immunity

Eenie, meenie, minie, mo" is based on a counting system that predates the Roman occupation of Britain, that may even be pre-Celtic. If so, it is a rare surviving link with the very distant past. It not only gives us a fragmentary image of how children were being amused at the time Stonehenge was built, but tells us something about how their elders counted and thought and ordered their speech.

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.