Quotes About Language

The fantastically wasteful prodigality of human tongues, the Babel enigman, points to a vital multiplication of mortal liberties. Each language speaks the world in its own ways. Each edifies worlds and counter-worlds in its own mode. The polyglot is a freer man.

Ours is the ability, the need, to gainsay or 'un-say' the world, to image and speak it otherwise. In that capacity in its biological and social evolution, may lie some of the clues to the question of the origins of human speech and the multiplicity of tongues. It is not, perhaps, 'a theory of information' that will serve us best in trying to clarify the nature of language, but a 'theory of misinformation'.

When a language dies, a possible world dies with it.

No phonetic sign, except at a rudimentary, strictly speaking pre-linguistic level of vocal imitation, has any substantive relation or contiguity to that which it is conventionally and temporally held to designate.

The letter kills the spirit. The written text is mute in the face of responding challenge. It does not admit of inward growth and correction. Text subverts the absolutely vital role of memory.

after Spinoza, philosophers know that they are using language to clarify language, like cutters using diamonds to shape other diamonds. Language is seen no longer as a road to demonstrable truth, but as a spiral or gallery of mirrors bringing the intellect back to its point of departure.

But there is a third mode of trancendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.

I love the song 'El Rey.' And for years, I never knew what the song was totally about. It was something new for me. I'd never sung a song in Spanish before. Then I got the translation and saw what a really cool song it was.

The irony of this endeavor is palpable, for English itself is a hopeless hodgepodge of other tongues, with more exceptions than rules, more chaos than order, and enough new words created each day to keep the Oxford English Dictionary folks very, very busy.

Your Egnlish is so atrocious I don't feel the need to even respond' seems but a long-winded way of saying, 'Home-schooled dumbass.

IMHO, we groan at puns because we sense, deep in our souls, that there has been some egregious violation of the rules forbidding the base exploitation of language. Indeed, the pun is considered by many to be more distasteful than the common expletive. You might even say the pun is mightier than the s-word.

Indeed, the pun is considered by many to be more distasteful than the common expletive. You might even say the pun is mightier than the s-word.

An aside: I learned that the correct term is "Maya" and not "Mayan," which apparently refers only to the language. The incorrect term is in such common usage, however, that people often don't know what I'm talking about if I use

Turkey bacon. It's like saying "shoot" instead of "shit." It just doesn't quite carry the moment.

The term cartel was virtually unknown to the American language a generation ago. Like most borrowed words, when first taken over it meant different things to different persons. Time was required to crystallize its meaning. In this country it now commonly refers to international marketing arrangements. In a companion study we have defined such a cartel as an arrangement among, or on behalf of, producers engaged in the same line of business designed to limit or eliminate competition among them.

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.

Sometimes, words have consequences you don't intend them to mean.

The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.

Language like this, no doubt, seems foolishness and affectation to the world; but the well-instructed Bible reader will see in it the heartfelt experience of all the brightest saints. It is the language of men like Baxter, and Brainerd, and M'Cheyne. It is the same mind that was in the inspired Apostle Paul. Those that have most light and grace are always the humblest men.

As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise.

The phrase "domestic cat" is an oxymoron.

The almost-always-ghastly exclamation point has been lately compared to canned laughter.

The columnist gives these words to the longings of an 11-year-old he meets with Tourette's syndrome: "Wisdom is encoded in our common language. We all have, to some extent, a complex, sometimes adversarial, relationship with our physical selves. And I more than most people know that it is correct to say,'I have a body.' There is my body, and then there is ME, trying to make it behave.

The verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.