Quotes About Language

Now I must listen again to Claude's set piece on menu terms, as if he's the first ever to spot these unimportant absurdities. He lingers on "pan-fried." What is pan but a deceitful benediction on the vulgar and unhealthy fried?

Podía hablar de los bosques en invierno, y del siniestro muro de un castillo. ¿Pero cómo hablar de sentimientos?

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to insist on saying no to what you believe is wrong, becomes at a stroke refuse, an insurmountable pile of garbage. As with words, so with sentences.

the exclamation mark was the first resort of those who shout to make themselves clearer.

They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now.

didn't use, and hadn't even heard, the word "totalitarianism." I probably would have thought it had something to do with refusing a drink.

Life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It's more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly's eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths.

Ragged curls of unfurling ampersands swam across her vision.

Language is a smokescreen. A psycho in black velvet optioning mischief

Sh!t. F_ck sh!t.'.... 'Sh!t f_ck would have also been accepted.

Screwy, I said. Is that a medical term? Of course.

Only Celts would use nine letters to make one sound.

There was tartle, a Scottish word for the panicked pause you experience when you have to introduce someone, but you don't remember their name. There was backpafeifengesicht, a German term for a face you'd love to punch. There was gigil, a Filipino word for the urge to squeeze an item because it is unbearably cute.

If a cultural reference flies over a man's head, does it make a sound if nobody else gets it.

Here in America, money is something everyone can have, and because Trump poured cement with blue collars when he was a young man, he knows the vernacular; he speaks that language. In fact, he was probably much more comfortable with them than he is with the aristocrats, who are his financial peers.

Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.

The poem is the literary form of the 21st century. It's able to connect young people in a deep way to language... it's language as play.

You see young people, or kids, and they're fascinated by the way people talk. And that's great. But eventually you get to the point where you think, 'You know what? I don't care how you talk, I'm just listening to what you're saying.'

I've had Republicans come to me and say, 'Tell me how I should talk to young people!' as if it's some foreign language or something.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting 'O.K.' has deposed the more affirmative 'Yes,' so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of 'like' are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

It has always seemed to me a pity that the young people of our generation should grow up with such scant knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, its wealth and variety, its freshness and its imperishable quality.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

Comedy Central is what these young people are viewing. The network speaks to their audience, which is saying, 'Give me fast jokes. Give me party stories and party language.'

I don't like the way young people write and talk about the old. I don't like their attitude, which, if they weren't young and therefore bright and vibrant, would be called outdated.