Quotes About Language

I dinna trust that Q, that's a letter than has it in for a man. That's a letter with a sting, that one!

Do you know where 'policeman' comes from, sir? ... 'Polis' used to mean 'city', said Carrot. That's what policeman means: 'a man for the city'. Not many people knew that. The word 'polite' comes from 'polis', too. It used to mean the proper behaviour from someone living in a city.

There may be a lot of things I'm not good at, thought Vimes, but at least I don't treat the punctuation of a sentence like a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey…

My mother didn't like to hear profanity, and she certainly never spoke it. She had always told us that swearing was the sign of a lackluster vocabulary and, worse, a stunted imagination. There are so many interesting words to use, along or in combination, she said, that I don't know why anyone would fall back on one-syllable obscenities.

To write," Marguerite Duras remarked, "is also not to speak. It is to keep silent. It is to howl noiselessly.

Roland Barthes says, "That which cannot be named is a disturbance.

I speculate over some of the Anglo nomenclature of birds: Wilson's snipe, Forster's tern . . . : What natural images do these names conjure up in our minds? What integrity do we give back to the birds with our labels.

words are much stronger than I am.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.

O my poor words, bear with me.

O my poor words, bear with me. — Theodore Roethke, Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke , ed. David Wagoner (Copper Canyon Press November 1, 2006)

No me gustan los intelectuales hombres de las letras con sus conversaciones sobrecargadas de citas.

Acaso hay algún amor en alguna parte sin su propio lenguaje?

If words are to be uttered, they would be from behind the partition. Unaccountable is distance, time to transport from this present minute. If words are to be sounded, impress through the partition in ever slight measure to the other side the other signature the other hearing the other speech the other grasp.

We have to restore the meaning of the word 'love.' We have been using it in a careless way. When we say, 'I love hamburgers,' we are not talking about love. We are talking about our appetite, our desire for hamburgers. We should not dramatize our speech and misuse words like that. We make words like 'love' sick that way. We have to make an effort to heal our language by using words carefully. the word 'love' is a beautiful word. We have to restore its meaning (31).

We have to make the effort to heal words by using them properly and carefully.

A Zen Master uses concepts and words like everyone else; but he is neither conditioned nor captivated by these concepts and these words. The language of Zen always aims at destroying the habits of those who only know how to think by concepts. It tends to provoke crises, whose function it is to bring to fruition the precious moment of Awakening.

Hindi writing, as well as Hindi journalism, is a great gift to Indian writing.

I think grammar teaching should start with real examples of language in use: journalism, fiction, songs, ads, instructions, headlines, transcripts of conversations and so on.

You come across words all the time that are everyday sexism. I was described as 'competently bossy' and 'bossily competent' by a male journalist, and I thought, 'Gosh, 'bossy' is never used of a man.'

Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.

One of the many joys of tongue-twisters is that they serve no purpose beyond fun.