Quotes About Language

Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most 'fluent' in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the 'grammar' of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists.

The reasons for our prolific understating are not hard to discover: our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement.

What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.

Uh, puedo hablar con Andrew Nelson, por favor?" I asked, feeling like an idiot. "Quien?" "El americano," I explained. "Muy grande americano." In trying to describe my father, I sounded like I was ordering coffee. But it worked.

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During depression the world disappears. Language itself. One has nothing to say. Nothing. No small talk, no anecdotes. Nothing can be risked on the board of talk. Because the inner voice is so urgent in its own discourse: How shall I live? How shall I manage the future? Why should I go on?

Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As

Lady," we always call each other, partly a joke, partly in earnest, using still the old word, in its full flavor a kind of exorcism against "saleslady," "old lady," "ladylike." Relishing the anachronism, even the formality a type of aphrodisiac, a contrast to our delight in the horny, the vulgar, the vernacular which we cultivate just as ardently.

You see, if you ask an American how they are, they say fine, but if you ask a Russian, well, let's just say there's a reason why War and Peace is such a long book.

For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy,

As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson vividly illustrate in their 1980 classic, Metaphors We Live By, orientational metaphors such as 'good is up' and 'good is forward' are deeply embedded in Western culture, shaping the way we think and speak.

You should also have a bio that plays up your brand—this will be used for any kind of press or speaking engagement. Make it jazzy and exciting, and don't be afraid of language that really touts you.

with signs in Russian.

It starts by identifying your brand voice. Ask yourself these questions. What's your primary message? What tone of voice do you use? What type of language do you use? How do you want to speak to your audience? How do you want clients to feel when they communicate with you?

I think I would like to be a word - not a big important word, like "love" or "truth," just a small ordinary word, like "orange" or "inkstain" or "so," a word that people use so often and so unthinkingly that its specialness has all been worn away like the roughness on a pebble in a creekbed, but that has a solid heft when you pick it up, and if you hold it to the light at just the right angle you can glimpse the spark at its core.

Numbers arrange themselves the way numbers will, just as a word will, a story.

Even as I learned to name the plants -- dogwood, five-fingered fern, mugwort -- I was stunned by the failure of language to reflect what I saw or felt.

There is nothing that is not both narrative and language. Even the paradoxical physics by which the universe is held together is both. We are ourselves story, just as we are language. That is the nature of both narrative and love.

By the Lord of Hell's hairy balls!

English innovation was the indoor toilet, as opposed to an outdoor privy. Beginning about 1770, such an accommodation was known in France as the "lieu à l'anglaise," or "the English place.

The English word loo for toilet may come from 1) lieu à l'anglaise, the French term for toilet, or 2) Gardez l'eau! (Watch out for the water!), called to alert passersby that chamber pots were being emptied from upper-story windows into the street.

The archetypal link between dirt and guilt, and cleanliness and innocence, is built into our language—perhaps into our psyches.

With poetry, you take the stock and boil it down to where it's a glaze. It is the elixir of language.