Quotes About Language

Just because everybody uses language, that doesn't mean that they can write even tolerable prose.

American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm.

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God's language - it's better, it's finer, it's language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

Sit down, have a nice cup of coffee read a book in another language - the fountain of youth!

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer 'an alleged murderer' and the King of England 'the alleged King of England' to avoid libel suits.

I have often heard people who might sit with him on the lawn, ask him to translate some of it. But he always refused. One couldn't translate it, he said. It lost so much in the translation that it was better not to try. It was far wiser not to attempt it. If you undertook to translate it, there was something gone, something missing immediately.

I think we go brain-dead when talking with kids. All the sudden I was saying things my mi and da had said to me two decades ago. The words must sit around dormant, generation to generation, waiting to infect our vocal cords when we get older.

And commercialize was the word: Whereas much early software had been developed for the sheer challenge and shared like some favorite toy, the Gates/Allen edition of BASIC—the first personal computer language—was from the outset a business proposition, something people were supposed to pay for. That idea did not sit well with the pioneer hobbyists whose lame little machines needed BASIC to become something more than high-tech doorstops.

Example 3. (T: Male Mandarin teacher in his late twenties. B1 and B2 boys about 13 years old; G1: a 12-year-old girl.) T: (Speaking slowly as he writes on the whiteboard) ?-?-? (bai wulong). Mess up. ?? (wulong), black dragon. ??? ???? Wulong Tea, do you know? Black Dragon tea. ?? (wulong)? means /mI ?eIp/.

The change of language is a change in reality.

We are judged... not by how we understand our words but by how our words are understood by others.

Were they like Star Trek's Star-Base 9, polyglot

Webster defined "people" as "persons in general."4 Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was adopted as the standard by Congress and the American people and became the accepted norm even in England.5 Webster there defined "the people" as "the commonalty, as distinct from men of rank.

I fancy that the Irish language must have 57 different words for 'rain', in the same way that Inuit has for 'snow'. If, in reality, this is not the case, then I'm really glad I've never bothered to learn Irish'.

Thus, the world is changed—not with a sword, but with a word.

For the more words I had for things, the better I could frame my thoughts, the more vivid my thoughts became. Awareness deepened, consciousness sharpened.

Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart

Anger is the fire of the soul, love is the language of the heart ...

Positive words can bend your world in your favor.

How you speak is how you are.

The purpose of quantum linguistics is to survey the spirit of linguistics and finding solutions to the common barrier problems faced by means of deliberate use of language.

You can make as many NAPS as you like, but unless they have clean language in the narration then you could well be sabotaging your own dreams!