Quotes About Language

Wisdom does not always speak Latin.

Joan" was an Anglicized pronunciation of the French "Jeanne

Everyone knows ladies love Cajuns. It's in our blood and our language is the language of romance. Your language is the language of bullshit. You're just a couple of good ole boys with pretty faces. Women just ought to know better.

Why do men always resort to calling women bitches when we kick their asses?

I was to suffer considerably from the wide acceptance of the dictionary's limited definition of the word, transvestite. Perhaps my discomfort was not without some reason, for since then, a number of medical authorities have posed the question of whether or not it is advisable to apply new terms to cases such as mine.

I'll have you know I keep detailed notes. Mistakes sometimes occur in translation.' 'Why do your notes need translating?' 'I write them in Aramaic. It's a three-thousand-year-old language so I have to make up a lot of words.

The Postmodernists' tyranny wears people down by boredom and semi-literate prose.

Be ... suspicious ... of all those who employ the term 'we' or 'us' without your permission. This is [a] form of surreptitious conscription ... Always ask who this 'we' is; as often as not it's an attempt to smuggle tribalism through the customs.

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

But what [Orwell] illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

You've heard it all right. People don't have cancer: They are reported to be battling cancer.

At a certain point talk about 'essence' and 'oneness' and the universal becomes more tautological than inquisitive.

It was well said—by Jean Tarrou in The Plague, I think—that attendance at lectures in an unknown language will help to hone one's awareness of the exceedingly slow passage of time. I once had the experience of being 'waterboarded' and can now dimly appreciate how much every second counts in the experience of the torture victim, forced to go on enduring what is unendurable.

What if, I never tire of asking, we said 'Secret Council' instead of the archaic and therefore cuddly 'Privy Council'?

By the way, if you knew how you sounded when you hissed, you wouldn't do it: you sound like such berks when you do that.

Some statements are too blunt for everyday, consensual discourse. In national "debate," it is the smoother pebbles that are customarily gathered from the stream, and used as projectiles. They leave less of a scar, even when they hit. Occasionally, however, a single hard-edged remark will inflict a deep and jagged wound, a gash so ugly that it must be cauterized at once. In

It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory.

I'm reminded of the lady governor of Texas who, during a controversy about bilingualism in the State House in Austin, said if English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it was plenty good enough for her.

that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write "more like the way you talk.

Incidentally, by what awful ironic betrayal of our language do we find ourselves accusing bigots and tribalists of the sin of 'discrimination'? They are the ones who judge severely by category, and yet can't tell anyone apart. 'Discrimination' is only one of the moral and intellectual exercises that they are quite unable to perform.

Orwell's 'views' have been largely vindicated by Time, so he need not seek any pardon on that score. But what he illustrates, by his commitment to language as the partner of truth, is that 'views' do not really count; that it matters not what you think, but how you think; and that politics are relatively unimportant, while principles have a way of enduring, as do the few irreducible individuals who maintain allegiance to them.

This is made additionally problematic by the tendency of modern medicine to fall back on the use of euphemistic

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had completed the first real dictionary of the English language, he was visited by a delegation of respectable old ladies who wished to congratulate him for not including any indecent words. His response - which was that he was interested to see that the ladies had been looking them up - contains almost all that needs to be said on this point.

he begins to feel this utterly mysterious unsensational thing—not bliss, not ecstasy, not joy—just plain happiness. Das Glueck, le bonheur, la felicidad—they have given it all three genders, but one has to admit, however grudgingly, that the Spanish are right; it is usually feminine, that's to say, woman-created.