Quotes About Language

Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: "It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor" (Poetics 1459a); "ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh" (Rhetoric 1410b).

there is no real person whose embodiment plays no role in meaning, whose meaning is purely objective and defined by the external world, and whose language can fit the external world with no significant role played by mind, brain, or body. Because our conceptual systems grow out of our bodies, meaning is grounded in and through our bodies. Because a vast range of our concepts are metaphorical, meaning is not entirely literal and the classical correspondence theory of truth is false.

Language was a kind of passport. You could go where you like if you had a clean record. You could say what you like if you know how to say it. It didn't matter whether you felt everything you said. You had language, good, big words to make up for what you didn't feel. And if you were really educated, and you could command the language like a captain on a ship,

Language was a kind of passport. You could go where you like if you had a clean record. p.155

Remember that those five hundred words an average Englishman uses are far from being the whole vocabulary of the language. You may learn another five hundred and another five thousand and yet another fifty thousand and still you may come across a further fifty thousand you have never heard of before, and nobody else either.

If you want to sound truly English, you must learn to speak the language really badly. It will not be difficult, there are many language schools where they teach you exactly that. (If you are unlucky you may choose one of the old-fashioned ones and be taught English as it should be, and not as it is, spoken.)

But even in Curzon Street society, if you say, for instance, that you are a tough guy they will consider you a vulgar, irritating and objectionable person. Should you declare, however, that you are an inquisitorial and peremptory homo sapiens, they will have no idea what you mean, but they will feel in their bones that you must be something wonderful.

You should be careful when using these endless words. An acquaintance of mine once was fortunate enough to discover the most impressive word notalgia for back-ache. Mistakenly, however, he declared in a large company: 'I have such a nostalgia.' 'Oh, you want to go home to Nizhne-Novgorod?' asked his most sympathetic hostess. 'Not at all,' he answered. 'I just cannot sit down.

All official letters are written in such a language that the oracles of Delphi sound as examples of clear, outspoken, straightforward statements compared with them.

When some years ago, knowing ten words of English and using them all wrong, I applied for a translator's job, my would-be employer (or would-be-not-employer) softly remarked: 'I am afraid your English is somewhat unorthodox.' This translated into any continental language would mean: EMPLOYER (to the commissionaire): 'Jean, kick this gentleman down the steps!

PossibleTo useWords provided one treat themAs enemies.

It is not] the poet's business to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth.

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

All relations are power relations, everything is political, and claims of reason and truth are social constructs that maintain those in power. Unlike orthodox Marxism, critical theory is concerned with language and identity more than with material conditions.

We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.

Besides, good swearing is used as a form of punctuation, not necessarily a response to pain or insult, and is utilized by experts to lend a sentence a certain zest, like a sprinkling of paprika.

Cunt again? It was odd how men like Suggs used that word to demean women when it was the only part of a woman they valued.

Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be.