Quotes About Language

M.I.T. has a reputation for turning out Dilberts. They may be brilliant in what they do, but no one can understand what they say.

As a medium, electronic screens possess infinite capacities and instant interconnections, turning words into a new kind of active agent in the world.

We should quit using phrases like 'turning points' and 'tipping points.' There's been multiple turning points, multiple tipping points.

French is the language that turns dirt into romance.

The things I see now on TV and in movies are so outlandish. Kids doing rude things with pies! And the language that they use! It's being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. I can't watch it. It turns me off.

Pay attention to how you think and speak, and if it turns out that you're sounding snide or crappy or doubtful, make the conscious decision to change.

The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning.

I'm visually stimulated, so I watch TV, movies, even Pinterest. A song could come from something as simple as being words splashed across a billboard or changing everyday turns of phrases.

Words have a life of their own. There is no telling what they will do. Within a matter of days, they can even turn turtle and mean the opposite.

I hear what they're saying. I ask my English tutor, 'What is this word 'tinkerer?''

In TV, when you come in to direct an episode, you are effectively learning an established language; you then have to try to learn to speak it really well. But on a movie, you are the guy. You are creating the language; you make most of the decisions.

Mommy, why does daddy cuss the TV and call it Howard?

I forced myself to watch Spanish TV and listen to Spanish radio all the time. I think I'm lucky because, for whatever reason, people from the Balkans seem to have a talent for learning languages.

I lived in Holland for one year when I was younger and, although they speak Dutch there, I learned a little bit of English while I was there, but really I learned from movies and TV series like '24' and 'Prison Break.'

I've always loved English and loved English music and TV shows.

Some people say I sound Australian. I guess it's all down to Miss Matthews, who taught me English when I was growing up in Dar es Salaam. Nearly everyone in Denmark speaks English, and TV shows are only ever subtitled, not dubbed.

Korean, yes, I am now fluent in Korean. I was not always. When I got to Korea, I was constantly put on TV shows not knowing what was going on. So that forced me to learn Korean so I could stop looking like an idiot.

In fact, I learnt Hindi over a period of time after I started doing TV shows.

I grew up with Mark Twain, and we had the complete Hemingway at home, of course in German translation.

'Twas but my tongue, 'twas not my soul that swore.

We've got so many different cultural groups in my family that I've had to learn to accommodate them in different ways. My father speaks different to my mum. My mum speaks different to my grandmother. Everybody speaks different, so you find you start tweaking your language to be more accessible to people.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

I try to do it in both languages: English and Spanish. But sometimes I just Tweet in Spanish.