Quotes About Language

I grew up in the South Pacific. Basically, my brothers were Guamanian. I spoke words of Guamanian long before I spoke words of English, and so I've seen a lot. You know, I've traveled in places where people don't have the benefits of American life. And so I've seen a lot of stuff.

I lived in Italy for two months when I was in college. And I traveled to Paris. I traveled to Egypt. I traveled to Spain. I just would travel a lot. I remember going to Paris and saying, speaking French, 'I would like some chicken and some fries.' And just the chicken and fries was, oh my gosh, just so amazing. I became intrigued and inspired.

For Elektra, I just wanted to be very clear. She's traveled the world. She didn't go to boarding school, but that's the type of girl that she'd be. So, I just wanted to make sure that I could bring that to her, which goes through the language.

I learned Spanish as my second language from middle school through high school. I grew up volunteering at homeless shelters and tutoring kids of Latin immigrants in Atlanta, who didn't speak any English. That prepared me for when I traveled.

We had to speak in a different dialect for '1666.' And when we were told that we would need to do that, I think that was the most daunting part of traveling back 300 years.

Come to think of it, I have really travelled across accents.

I've travelled to some of the places where Russian language and Russian culture were made part of the fabric of life long before Lenin arrived at Finland Station - and where Russian is now being rolled back, post-1991.

Well, I am from an army background. My dad is in the Defence forces and I have travelled enough in the north to get my Hindi right.

Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

My music was about travelling a lot and connecting with other people, and English is the voice of travelling.

After university, I travelled through China for about two or three months in 1985. It was very much a closed-off country and no one spoke English, so it was very hard travelling through it.

When everyone at school is speaking one language, and a lot of your classmates' parents also speak it, and you go home and see that your community is different -there is a sense of shame attached to that. It really takes growing up to treasure the specialness of being different.

I think the reason that swearing is both so offensive and so attractive is that it is a way to push people's emotional buttons, and especially their negative emotional buttons. Because words soak up emotional connotations and are processed involuntarily by the listener, you can't will yourself not to treat the word in terms of what it means.

My philosophy is to do the best you can for somebody. Help. It's not just what do you for yourself. It's how you treat people decently. The golden rule. There isn't big anything better than the golden rule. It's in every major religion in one language or another.

I hadn't seen that many movies that really go deep enough into the fears of playing music or the language that musicians can use to treat each other or, like, the way that you can see it dehumanize and the way that it can feel like boot camp.

In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics.

But when, in the first setting out, he takes it for granted without proof, that distinctions found in the structure of all languages, have no foundation in nature; this surely is too fastidious a way of treating the common sense of mankind.

I spent most of my career in business not saying the word 'woman.' Because if you say the word 'woman' in a business context, and often in a political context, the person on the other side of the table thinks you're about to sue them or ask for special treatment, right?

My feeling is that my body and all my things inside me - when I move, when I do everything - are Brazilian because my family is Brazilian, and my mother language is Brazilian Portuguese. But all the thinking in my life, all the treatment with people, I think I'm more from Spain. That's how I grew up.

I am painfully familiar with the impossible juggle for caretakers trying to navigate language and cultural barriers, insurance pitfalls, and their own unyielding work schedules - only to be heartbroken by the limits of medical treatment.

Every religion implies that it treats the problem of being and nonbeing, life and death. Their languages are different, but they speak about the same things.

When I started school, I would draw pictures at the end of my sentences: a house, a flower, a tree, a bird. Whatever was in the sentence, I'd draw it.

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

A lot of my comedy is physical, so you don't have to understand English to get that I'm choking to death on cinnamon or falling out of this tree or whatever.