Quotes About Language

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world.

For instance, it's a little better now than it was two or three years ago, but something like 70% of the poems I receive seem to be written in the present indicative.

When I last went to Italy, over two years ago, I had a lot more trouble understanding the language than I used to when I lived there for a year. I used to speak very little but I could understand very well.

I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.

I've been banging on about doing stuff in Birmingham for years and years, and everyone says 'We can't, it's the accent thing.' For some reason it's a very difficult accent to get right, harder even than Geordie.

Years and years ago, I said I did not want to write academic books. I want to write books that are in the language of the common person so that Joe, who didn't even go to college, can sit down and read my book and get it and apply it to his life.

The Republican Party's typical position is to preemptively surrender whenever liberals start yelling 'Oh that's mean. You can't use that word': 'Oh I did not realize that 'The New York Times' made a finding that the term 'anchor baby' is offensive. Henceforth I shall not use it.'

I noticed that there are no B batteries. I think that's to avoid confusion, cause if there were you wouldn't know if someone was stuttering. 'Yes, hello I'd like some b-batteries.' 'What kind?' 'B-batteries.' 'What kind?' 'B-batteries!' and D-batteries that's hard for foreigners. 'Yes, I would like de batteries.'

I studied in American school, so yes, I grew up speaking English and Spanish. Obviously, Spanish is my first language.

Of course, yes, I watched 'Dora' growing up. I'm bilingual, and she's like my icon.

There are more and more adult subjects with explicit language or explicit scenes... Yes, I feel there should be a category for such films so that instead of cutting it, censoring it or deleting a few scenes we can show it in its entirety.

Yes, OK, farty is a silly word. I wish I'd never used it. I'm 34. Perhaps it was a word for my 20s.

English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow': German provides single words for both.

At age 11, I went to a Jewish school. I speak Yiddish. I'm Church of England Protestant. My father was Catholic, and my mother was Protestant. My wife is a Muslim.

My dad was raised Orthodox in Atlanta. He speaks Hebrew. He speaks Yiddish. He married a Jewish woman who is not Orthodox, so I was brought up by two different kinds of Jews.

Growing up in South London, we went to a school where there were not that many Jewish kids. I love being Jewish in L.A.; it feels really normal. The culture seems to be integrated into Hollywood. Everyone uses Yiddish words like 'schlep' and 'schmooze.' That's what I love about New York, too.

I did not grow up singing Yiddish.

I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.

On 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' I remember that sometime in Season 3, there was a Yiddish phrase, 'Kinahura,' and a friend of mine who was Jewish said that the closed captioning said 'Can of Hurrah.' And I thought 'Oh, God.' I never had bothered to see the transcripts but from that point on all the transcripts had to come to me and I checked them.

Yiddish, originally, in Eastern Europe was considered the language of children, of the illiterate, of women. And 500 years later, by the 19th century, by the 18th century, writers realized that, in order to communicate with the masses, they could no longer write in Hebrew. They needed to write in Yiddish, the language of the population.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

The Yiddish language is so rich and unusual that I've always been hooked on its sounds, although I don't speak it.

I know very little about my great grandparents, who came through Ellis Island in the early twentieth century, settled in Baltimore, and spoke only Yiddish.