Quotes About Language

Tautologies, according to Wittgenstein, are senseless, because, as they do not picture the world, they lack sense.

Wittgenstein calls tautologies and contradictions 'pseudo-propositions'; they are not real propositions, because real propositions can be either true or false.

meaningful propositions are limited to picturing states of affairs in the world, and value

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

Frog backward is GO RF.

They call it golf because all of the other four-letter words were taken.

Qualia are difficult, propositional attitudes are difficult, selves are difficult, so away they must go: they cannot be accommodated in the third-person neurophilosophical framework that combines scientism with an analytical outlook that prefers concepts to consciousness, placing consciousness-free language at the heart of the human mind.[

The linguistic habit that has kept so many in thrall to Neuromania is referring to the brain and bits of the brain in ways that would be appropriate only if we were referring to whole human beings.

saying these words is like speaking avocodo. warm, ripe juicy mango.

The German word for tatting is Schiffchenarbeit meaning 'the work of the little boat

I think calling me 'full-figured' is just rude.

I talk funny 'cause I come from Canada.

People are amazed that I'm Canadian and I don't have this crazy accent.

A lot of the players that I play with who are Canadian, they call me Patty. Before then, I never heard it. I didn't mind Patty.

What can be shown, cannot be said.

Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information.

I'm always very careful to say I'm Irish-Ethiopian because I feel Ethiopian and I look Ethiopian and I am Ethiopian. But there are 81 languages in Ethiopia, and I don't know any of them.

I'm very much aware of the need for politicians to be careful with language as well as what they do.

You have to be so careful with your voice, especially when you're using it every day.

I learned that you have to be careful about how you say things but not what you say.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.