Quotes About Language

The person who gives expression, by word of mouth, to negative or destructive thoughts is practically certain to experience the results of those words in the form of a destructive "kick-back." The release of destructive thought impulses, alone, without the aid of words, produces also a "kick-back" in more ways than one.

Be careful of your words. Man shall be held accountable for his lightest word. If you talk about substance in a negative way, your finances will be decreased, but if you talk about it in an appreciative, large way, you will be prospered.

A master salesperson has the ability to influence people through the printed page as well as by the spoken word.

It is not what you are telling people, it is how you are saying it.

English does not distinguish between arrogant-up (irreverence toward the temporarily powerful) and arrogant-down (directed at the small guy).

A mathematician thinks in numbers, a lawyer in laws, and an idiot thinks in words.

Those who use foul language on social networks (such as Twitter) are sending an expensive signal that they are free—and, ironically, competent. You don't signal competence if you don't take risks for it—there are few such low-risk strategies. So cursing today is a status symbol, just as oligarchs in Moscow wear blue jeans at special events to signal their power.

You can tell how poor someone feels by the number of times he references "money" in his conversation.

From such examples, I derived the rule that what is called "healthy" is generally unhealthy, just as "social" networks are antisocial, and the "knowledge"-based economy is typically ignorant.

You need a story to displace a story. Metaphors and stories are far more potent (alas) than ideas; they are also easier to remember and more fun to read. If I have to go after what I call the narrative disciplines, my best tool is a narrative.

you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

Wittgenstein is occasionally mentioned (you can always mention Wittgenstein since he is vague enough to always seem relevant).

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically.

By throwing enough words together, some unusual and magical-sounding metaphor is bound to emerge according to the laws of combinatorics.

regretted not having insisted on speaking in Arabic

just as with the color blue, having a word for something helps spread awareness of it.

is the exact contrary of knowledge; one should learn to avoid using terms made for knowledge to describe its opposite.

Another forgotten property of stressors is in language acquisition—I don't know anyone who ever learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by biquarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules.

Croesus, King of Lydia, was considered the richest man of his time. To this day Romance languages use the expression "rich as Croesus" to describe a person of excessive wealth.

so she could read it in the original.

Our inferential machinery, that which we use in daily life, is not made for a complicated environment in which a statement changes markedly when its wording is slightly modified.

Almost anything around us of significance is hard to grasp linguistically—and in fact the more powerful, the more incomplete our linguistic grasp.

the way we always speak with modest words, we never use clear and urgent words, our words are gray, harmless, floating, and useless