Quotes About Language

All War Departments are now Defense Departments. This is all part of the doubletalk of our time. The aggressor is always on the other side.

Political correctness is a war on noticing.

Being stubborn won't make you fluent. Practicing will! The more mistakes you make, the more you'll learn not to.

You have a college degree? You can barely talk.

Sometimes I think bimbo is just another word men made up so they could feel superior to women who are better at survival than they are.

Isn't it fascinating that he mainly dates women with limited English? But I guess it prevents a silly thing like conversation from interfering with sex.

He talked with more claret than clarity.

When we hear that "war" is made for "peace", or that "pain" is sought for "pleasure" or that "brutality" helps one "feel", in our minds, language ceases to describe reality. Words lose their direct relationship with actuality. And thus language and culture begin to exist entirely independently of nature.

But there is yet another prejudice that dyslexics, and those who try to help them, have to combat. This is the deep-rooted idea that all learning, all education, any expression of ideas, must be done through language, through words. The idea that is possible to learn and communicate visually, through colour and shape, seems to be heresy, though it is one that naturally occurs to dyslexics.

Though I normally approve of plain speaking, as you know, I would suggest that as part of your good behavior, you refer to the king as 'his grace' or even simply 'the king' instead of 'that creature,' by the way.

I hate alliterative names. They suck.

I've never been able to understand this generation's infatuation with using last names a first names.

However, there are ways of trying to strangle ideas that do not involve straightforward attempts at censorship or intimidation. The suggestion that there is something sinister, even un-American, about intense devotion to ideas, reason, logic, evidence, and precise language is one of them.

Obama, of course, is an outstanding orator—but even outstanding orators (unlike nineteenth-century presidents) feel obliged to dumb their words down a bit for the American public. President Donald Trump, however, is proud of his limited tweetish vocabulary. "I know words," he declared at a campaign appearance in Hilton Head, South Carolina. "I have the best words. But there is no better word than stupid. Right?

As George Orwell noted in 1946, "A man may take to drink because he feels himself a failure, and then fall all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Public ignorance and anti-intellectualism are not identical, of course, but they are certainly kissing cousins. Both foster the rise of candidates who regard a broad knowledge of history, science, and culture, and a decent command of their native language as political liabilities rather than assets—and who frequently try to downplay these qualities, even if they possess them, in order to pander to a public that considers conspicuous displays of learning a form of snobbery.

She was English, with all the characteristics that word implies.

I'd never been fond of gratuitous cursing. I figured it was lazy, a communication habit of people who couldn't be bothered finding the correct word.

I think experienced makes me sound like an aging hooker.

Words are such fun!

Having words opened up a world of possibilities for Martha.

They spoke in languages that bore no resemblance to anything familiar: long, ribboned sentences looped together with alphabetic sounds that had no rhyme or meter.

Music is the language of the soul. Music captures our prayers and hopes and joys—and yes, our sorrows—and gives them voice, just as the paintings and the statues give them dimension.

The nation must achieve a coherent and widely accepted national narrative. Here language is front and center. ... Narratives start with words and are reinforced by symbols. ... Narratives are transported through education.