Quotes About Language

My voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making little mouth noises that are carrying agree-upon meaning, and it is meaning that matters. Without the meaning one has only little mouth noises

The twentieth-century linguistic revolution," says Boston University anthropologist Misia Landau, "is the recognition that language is not merely a device for communicating ideas about the world, but rather a tool for bringing the world into existence in the first place. Reality is not simply 'experienced' or 'reflected' in language, but instead is actually produced by language.

El diccionario es el único libro ameno y reposante, cuya amable incoherencia, tan parecida a la de nuestra madre la naturaleza, nos hace descansar de la lógica, de las declamaciones y de la literatura.

Qué es una frase sin tono ni ritmo? Una muerta, una momia. ¡Ah, hermosa voz humana, alma de las palabras, madre del idioma, qué rica, qué infinita eres!

Thus, I am here where poets come to drink a dark strong poison with tiny shards of ice, something to loosen my primate tongue and its syllables of debris. I know all words come from preexisting words and divide until our pronouncements develop selves.

I thought you just told me they used radio." They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat.

A poem is a piece of semiotic sport, in which the signifier has been momentarily released from its grim communicative labours and can disport itself disgracefully. Freed from a loveless marriage to a single meaning, it can play the field, wax promiscous, gambol outrageously with similar unattached signifiers. If the guardians of conventional morality knew what scandalous stuff they were inscribing on their tombstones, they would cease to do so immediately.

One of the striking aspects of the lines is the way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language.

It is language's lack of visualisability which confers such enviable freedom upon it. Seeing language as no more than an image or representation of reality is a way of restricting its liberty.

Language is a work of astonishing creativity. It is by far the most magnificent artefact humanity has ever come up with. It even surpasses the movies of Mel Gibson in this respect.

Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.

It is silly to call fat people gravitationally challenged, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.

What Wittgenstein calls a 'grammar' is a set of rules by which we are able to make sense of things; and such grammars are not correlated with reality. It is not as though some of them provide us with a more accurate representation

Books must be treated with respect, we feel that in our bones, because words have power. Bring enough words together they can bend space and time.

You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more, said Yo-less. It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.

Nanny Ogg knew how to start spelling 'banana', but didn't know how you stopped.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

It is at this point that normal language gives up, and goes and has a drink.

The trouble was that he was talking in philosophy but they were listening in gibberish.

Rincewind could scream for mercy in nineteen languages, and just scream in another forty-four.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

Ah, said Mr Pin. Right. I remember. You are concerned citizens. He knew about concerned citizens. Wherever they were, they all spoke the same private language, where 'traditional values' meant 'hang someone'.

Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language.