Quotes About Language

If you do not use clean language in your NAPS the negative words can be literally taken as part of the NAPS, and then you wonder why your NAPS has gone adrift, or that it only partly worked for you.

Music is a foreign language which everyone knows but only musicians can speak.

language becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

If you want your style to be energetic and lively, take the most direct route and use the most energetic and lively part of speech in the English language: verbs.

Have something to say and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

As a personal comparison, my total lifetime output of published material has been a bit under 3 million words, and over the past 30 years I've written about 15 million words of email, and altogether typed perhaps 50 million words—and in just the past couple of years I've spoken more than 10 million words on livestreams. And, yes, I'll train a bot from all of that.)

So what can we do? The big idea is to make a model that lets us estimate the probabilities with which sequences should occur—even though we've never explicitly seen those sequences in the corpus of text we've looked at. And at the core of ChatGPT is precisely a so-called "large language model" (LLM) that's been built to do a good job of estimating those probabilities.

Most pets display so many humanlike traits and emotions it's easy to forget they're not gifted with the English language and then get snubbed when we talk to them and they don't say anything back.

When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn't 'pass away.' She died. Something about that verb, 'to pass away' always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother did not pass away. She definitely died.

All language is an aspiration to music.

music came before anything else, before language and large-scale war and liquid soap, and because music is the one giant thing America has done right, amid all it has done wrong. Music, that ancient and incorruptible bitch.

I think we should use some other greeting. Something like 'what the fuck?" "Okay," I said, "What the fuck?" "Exactly. Right on. I love you.

To his ear, of course, she suffered some from that malady of her generation- an almost laconic indifference toward speaking concisely- a circling and avoidance of linguistic specificity that bordered on a verbal form of shoulder-shrugging.

Words are the true weapons of mass destruction

Some people us language to describe the lives they lead, and other people use language to create the lives they lead.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

You couldn't have ironed her voice any flatter.

Concrete, sensory details such as these allow readers to form vivid pictures in their minds of what is being described. That is how writers bring a scene to life.

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left.

Happy talk must die

Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.

Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.

it is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart.

The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.