Quotes About Language

A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language, not set its style.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

A dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive.

The first book of the nation is the dictionary of its language.

Dictionaries are like watches. The worst is better than none at all and even the best cannot be expected to run quite true.

No one is the worse for knowing two languages.

My father spoke French with a Bank of Montreal accent.

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

Always! That is the dreadful word ... it is a meaningless word, too.

Colors speak all languages.

Speech is civilization itself.

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Debate is masculine; conversation is feminine.

Each person has a literature inside them. But when people lose language, when they have to experiment with putting their thoughts together on the spot-that's what I love most. That's where character lives.

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

Discretion in speech is more than eloquence.

I knew I was drunk. I felt sophisticated and couldn't pronounce it.

True eloquence consists in saying all that is necessary, and nothing but what is necessary.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

Flowers are words Which even a babe may understand.

If Jesus was Jewish, how come he has a Mexican name?