Quotes About Language

Its easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it

Writing in English was a major challenge. I didn't want other songwriters to write for me. I wanted to preserve the spirit of my songs in Spanish. I am the same Shakira in English as I am in Spanish.

Words are such a poor medium when you really want someone to feel something.

People may or may not say what they mean... but they always say something designed to get what they want.

There needs to be an app that edits what I say versus what I want to say.

Do you want me to call you Celery Stick instead of Cupcake or Honey-Pie? It just doesn't inspire the same warm and fuzzy feelings.

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.

Begin to listen to what you say. Don't say anything that you don't want to become true for you.

Sometimes I want to joke but my English isn't perfect. Sometimes people are wondering what I'm talking about.

It's a damn shame we have this immediate ticking off in the mind about how people sound. On the other hand, how many people really want to be operated upon by a surgeon who talks broad cockney?

I'm very anxious not to fall into archaism or 'literary' diction. I want my vocabulary to have a very large range, but the words must be alive.

Don't say 'the White House wants.' Buildings can't want.

The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.

It's often not the message that's sent that causes offence but the one that is received.

We ought to call ourselves Homo clamorans . Noisemaking man.

Some of these families paused long enough to pick up the German language and to take German names. (In future generations, in New York, it would become a matter of some importance whether such and such a Jewish family, with a German-sounding name, had been a true native German family, like the Seligmans, or a stranger from the east, passing through.) Swelled by immigrants from the east, the Jewish population in Western Europe more than tripled during the nineteenth century.

But some strange sea change had taken place. He was no longer August Schönberg but August Belmont, the French equivalent of Schönberg (meaning "beautiful mountain"). As August Belmont, furthermore, he was no longer a Jew but a gentile, and no longer German but, as people in New York began to say, "Some sort of Frenchman—we think.

Kanal' means 'sewer' as well as 'channel'. 'Kanakafü' has echoes of 'Kacke', a baby word for faeces.

When a Quebecker is interviewed for French TV, he or she is often subtitled in 'normal' French, as if the language they speak in francophone Canada is so barbarous that Parisians won't be able to understand

This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be 'Cray-see' and Waterloo 'Watt-air-loh'), with Agincourt ('Ah-zan-coor') we even get the spelling wrong.

We Brits feel no resentment about 'losing' our American colonies. We're quite fond of independent Americans, and see them as distant cousins who can't spell our language properly. We've cooperated with America pretty amicably on projects like liberating Europe and inventing pop music. And we have no desire whatsoever to try and govern Texas.

heard how badly I mangled French. Even if it was no good for my education, I was delighted to find that

Attend to the Mission Statement One of the most important dimensions of this anthropological work is researching the culturally approved language of the institution. A junior member of an organization who wishes to persuade those in power of the merits of a new and potentially threatening initiative would be well advised to couch his or her proposal in the language that is spoken and approved by those in power.

The child's reluctance to speak for the first few months of his residence in a new country is not pathological, but normal.