Quotes About Language

Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all

So it was that neither for the first time nor the last my verbal mojo, my knack for the written word, served to save my reckless ass.

But . . ." said Sissy. Sissy said "but" while sitting on her butt on a butte. The poetic possibilities of the English language are endless.

As a result, our big "attic" room was a Hispanic gathering place. Afternoons, it was crowded with boys from Venezuela and Cuba, jabbering away in Spanish, the world's fastest language, seeming to all talk at once. It was like living in a cage full of parrots whose crackers had been laced with crystal meth. I found it agreeably colorful. For whatever reason, Brugál had not

The trip left the girl gaga, goofy, tainted, transformed, her nose a busted hymen through which sperm of a thousand colors swam a hootchy-kootchy stroke into her cerebral lagoon.

Oh, I thought that this day and age you maybe would be known as bovine custodial officers.

but the script he saw written all about him, on the signposts and facades of Alexandria, was musical, all right. It ran complicated scales on the optic nerve. Everywhere, the Arabic alphabet wiggled and popped, enlivening crumbling architecture with outbursts of linguistic jazz, notations from the DNA songbook, energetic markings as primal as grunts and as modern as the abstract electricity of synthesizer feedback.

Incidentally, he might have added, are you aware that there's no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.

However, one listing of common abbreviations compiled in 1859 includes 1 1 (dot dot, dot dot) for I AM READY; G A (dash dash dot, dot dash) for GO AHEAD, S F D for STOP FOR DINNER; G M for GOOD MORNING.

The language's two main advantages are its simplicity and flexibility. Its straightforward syntax and use of indented spaces make it easy to learn, read and share.

Words) deserve respect. Get the right ones in the right order, and you can nudge the world a little.

Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.

anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice...

Girls who kiss don't know Latin.

Le goût juif, the French said.

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

Nowadays silence is looked on as odd and most of my race has forgotten the beauty of meaning much by saying little. Now tongues work all day by themselves with no help from the mind.

Every sentence, every word, was new to them and they listened to what he said like bright-eyed ravens, trembling in their eagerness to catch & interpret every sound in the universe.

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

The death of self-esteem can occur quickly, easily in children, before their ego has "legs," so to speak. Couple the vulnerability of youth with indifferent parents, dismissive adults, and a world, which, in its language, laws, and images, re-enforces despair, and the journey to destruction is sealed.

In trying to make the slave experience intimate, I hoped the sense of things being both under control and out of control would be persuasive throughout; that the order and quietitude of every day life would be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead; that the herculean effort to forget would be threatened by memory desperate to stay alive. To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way.

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.

Language can never 'pin down' slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable.

Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear.