Quotes About Language

Nevertheless, C retains the basic philosophy that programmers know what they are doing; it only requires that they state their intentions explicitly.

The resulting texts always took a narrative term, enigmatic at first but ultimately explicit and often premonitory. The semantic distribution of these basic elements diverted them from their original meaning, thus revealing their real significance. Henceforth, every form of writing will consist of an operation of decoding, of contamination, and of sense perversion. All this because all language is essentially mystification, and everything is fiction.

Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody. "Your very own words," indeed ! And who are you?

Because this is one of the things I learned on my own: you need to say things simply, especially when they're complicated.

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine

This is a book in which we will dance with language, not a book in which we will trudge toward remedial correctness.

Unless the situation demands otherwise, sentences that convey more information are more effective than those that convey less. Sentences

I'm trying to make the point that the basic unit of writing is the proposition, not the word or even a sequence of words, and we build sentences by putting propositions together.

Karl Marx had said, 'Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world,' meaning of course the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.

Language exerts hidden power, like a moon on the tides.

Utterance is the evidence of foregone study.

But the concepts of 'good' or 'beautiful', so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas. The

Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode (melos) of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: everyday language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer. Martin Heidegger, 'Language

there had lived on the western frontier of China a people called the Yueh-chih, who had reddish hair and blue eyes and who spoke an Indo-European language similar, at several removes, to Gaelic. The Huns had horribly defeated the

The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

You're saying that man "makes" his territory by naming the "things" in it?

Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.

In fact, some theories of language development suggest that humans learned to dance and sing before we could talk, that music was actually the first human language.

She had sleep and attention problems (brainstem), difficulties with fine motor control and coordination (diencephalon and cortex), clear social and relational delays and deficits (limbic and cortex), and speech and language problems

One word the translators were able to figure out was that "Mum" meant "adult or caregiver," just as similar sounds mean mother in almost every known human language, since the "mm" sound is the first one babies learn to make while suckling.

When young children hear fewer words, they can still learn to speak—they'll just be less fluent. In the same way, when children have fewer relational interactions, they'll still develop social capabilities—they'll just be less mature, more self-centered, more self-absorbed.

I think about children who are molested when they are so young that they don't have the language to process what has happened. The experience locks into the brain in a way it wouldn't if the child could express with words what happened.

As we've said before, the cortex is the most uniquely human part of our body, and, no surprise, it gives rise to the most uniquely human capabilities: speech, language, abstract thinking, reflecting on the past, planning for the future.

when you experience trauma in the first years of life, meaning from birth through age two—before you've developed the ability to explain the event—it can have a deeper impact on your brain than when you actually do have the words to explain it.