Quotes About Language

Julia's vocabulary was chock-full of strangely archaic words - spiffing, crumbs, jeepers - that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls' annual rather than in Julia's own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.

Dear God. When did language and meaning divorce each other and decide to go their separate ways?

Je suis désolé ,' he said. You had to wonder about the French, how they could make a simple 'sorry' sound so extreme and forlorn.

And who thought it was a good idea to rent bicycles to Italian adolescent language students? If hell did exist, which Jackson was sure it did, it would be governed by a committee of fifteen-year-old Italian boys on bikes.

words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Mr. Carver hadn't been such a bad sort really. He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

You don't see the point of English literature?' 'I don't see the point of studying it. Surely one just reads it?

Mrs. Appleyard, in contrast, was thin and sallow and when her husband was out of the apartment Ursula could hear her singing mournfully to herself in a language that she couldn't place. Something Eastern European by the sound of it. How useful Mr. Carver's Esperanto would be, she thought. (Only if everyone spoke it, of course.) And especially these days with so many refugees flooding into London.

Chevaunne. C-h-e-v-a-u-n-n-e, I have to spell it every time, it's a fucking pain. It's Irish." At least the girl could spell, even if it was only her own misspelled name. Kelly Cross was so thick she couldn't even spell "Siobhan

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once been. Oh, yes, Miss Woolf said, a common language was a wonderful idea, but utterly utopian. All good ideas were, she said sadly.

There is no curse in Elvish, Entish or the tongues of Men for this treachery!

It seems to me you do not care what banality a man expresses so long as he expresses it in Irish.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

Punning is a talent which no man affects to despise but he that is without it.

Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts.

A woman uses about 20,000 words per day while a man uses about 7,000.

When a man seduces a woman, it should, I think, be termed a left-handed marriage.

He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.

It's not what enters men's mouth that is evil," said the alchemist. It's what comes out of their mouths that is.

The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not by what he says about it.

The pretence that numbers are not the humble creation of man, but are the exacting language of the Universe and therefore possess the secret of all things, is comforting, terrifying and mesmeric.

You may be sure, dear Crito, that inaccurate language is not only in itself a mistake: it implants evil in men's souls.

Profane swearing never did any man any good. No man in the richer or wiser or happier for it.