Quotes About Language

For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.

The quickest way to demonstrate the sheer symbolicity of the negative is to look at any object, say, a table, and to remind yourself that, though it is exactly what it is, you could go on for the rest of your life saying all the things that it is not. "It is not a book, it is not a house, it is not Times Square," etc., etc.

Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.

Speech in its essence is not neutral.

Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric, and wherever there is rhetoric, there is meaning.

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I'm telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren't reading it.

o fato de um relato parecer ser "exato" ou não é algo que irá depender de uma tradição da comunidade (...) "falar a verdade" é falar de uma forma que confirme a tradição de uma determinada comunidade.

Without a possibility of change in meanings human communication could not perform its present functions.

Bad writing slows things down; good writing speeds them up.

A common mistake in business writing is to use quotation marks for emphasis: This bolt provides "superior" tensile strength. When the head of a large company put quotation marks around a word in an important paper, his administrative assistant asked him why he did that. He replied that it was to stress the truth of the point. The assistant asked whether it would stress the truth if he were to register at a hotel as John Durgin and "wife.

trying to translate into a language that's known a poem writ in the language of stone

I mean, what is music anyway? It's a form of communication - at least for me it is. And that's why I play the kind of music that I think - that I hope - can communicate with people.

Call-by-reference went out of fashion in language design a couple of decades ago because of the possibility for unintended consequences.

Simplicity only makes sense in context. If I'm writing a parser with a team that understands parser generators, then using a parser generator is simple. If the team doesn't know anything about parsing and the language is simple, a recursive descent parser is simpler.

He wanted to think of words that would make some difference but there were none in any language he knew that were sufficient to the moment or that would change a single thing.

But metaphor, however poetic, never slaked a dry throat.

From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

Stupid people can learn a language quiet and easy because there is nothing going on in there to keep it out.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the first word you thought of.

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of.

If you open a book and find that the writer is trying to impress you with his knowledge of long, unusual words or by his use of foreign phrases, close the book quickly with no sense of loss or of deficiency or of having missed anything; for the author has not learned how to write and perhaps never will, and there is no need for you to offer yourself as a sounding board for his incompetence.

We can say nothing but what hath been said.

The way I see it is, I am a boon to the English language.

And then I went to 'Dawson's Creek ' which is a show that was, for better or for worse, all about the language. It was a word-perfect show, which I'd never had any experience with. And it was really shocking for me. I felt really hemmed in. At the time, it wasn't my favorite working experience.