Quotes About Language

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

Among the disciples of Jesus, it seems most likely that at least Philip was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek.

Formal logic is mathematics, and there are philosophers like Wittgenstein that are very mathematical, but what they're really doing is mathematics - it's not talking about things that have affected computer science; it's mathematical logic.

I was really grateful to have a chance to have some really in-depth study about the power of language using a philosopher who taught at the University of Chicago by the name of Paul Ricoeur. I'm really happy to be in Chicago because a lot of what I do is rooted in his approach to language.

Music does communicate across language and racial and religious and philosophical barriers. It is one of the most distilled forms of human emotions.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

It's clear to me that there is no good reason for many philosophy books to sound as complicated as they do.

In Algeria, I had begun to get into literature and philosophy. I dreamed of writing-and already models were instructing the dream, a certain language governed it.

Real philosophy is like trying to read an alarm system installation manual in Korean.

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

The language that photography has is a formal language. Any photographer is doing something formal. If it's formal, then it must be an aesthetic way to communicate.

I do like to turn a phrase, but it's all about how you turn it.

Well first of all, I think the phrase 'jump the shark' has jumped the shark. I read it in every article and I think that when Fonzie actually jumped the shark, 'Happy Days' was on the air for another five years.

I know Irish-American people. I know what their homes look like. I know what they have for dinner. I know how they turn a phrase.

Sometimes I have a very fleeting emotional dance with a fleeting phrase, like 'half-Mexican.'

I have a phrase I say: 'What the damn?' It's my favorite. It just came to me one day.

As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.

There are times when I need to dig up the diagram for a type of satellite dish, for instance, but I just can't seem to phrase this need correctly. As a result, I'm inundated by advertising for satellite television and people's online customer reviews of such services when, in fact, I was only trying to figure out what a certain component is called.

Shakespeare had found language for the agony of living with one's own mistakes. There were words for finding yourself isolated with your failures. Phrases for discovering that you were wrong, all, all wrong, wrong, wrong.

I think it would be funny for people to read in obituaries of me that my major contribution to the arts was the popularization of the phrases 'neutral facial expression' and 'screaming in agony.'

Children frequently sing meaningful phrases to themselves over and over again before they learn to make a distinction between singing and saying.