Quotes About Language

English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey—just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.

It's Latin, which is an excellent language for mischief-making, which is why governments are so fond of it.

Anything is a poem if you say it often enough.

Endings are rubbish. No such thing. Never has been, never will be. There is only the place where you choose to stop talking. Everything else goes on forever.

One of the many quotes on love..."Love can come only with time and sentience. We learn it as we learn language--and some never learn it well. Love is like a tool, though it is not a tool; something strange and wonderful to use, difficult to master, and mysterious in its provenance.

A tongue is very like a gun, which is why they nearly rhyme. Both can be fired to devastating effect, for good or evil, and both can explode in your hands, wounding your comrades instead of your enemies.

no one says a word that has not been spoken a thousand times before, a thousand thousand times, and even the first of those was a repetition of words that came before.

When you can change something just by saying a word, that is magic.

In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is. It

but you can't forbid a word, so there.

Oh, please, do try to explain it to them. We'll be here for ninety years, and at the end of it they'll be quite certain you've told them that Mohammed is a turtle with an excellent singing voice. May you have better luck than I!

let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together. But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

These words were small and they only meant what they said, not how they felt before he said them. He nearly wept with the frustration of it.

Don't trust metaphors," the wombat snorted. "If you let things start claiming to mean other things, there's no limit on how many things they can mean!

He flipped through the biggest book imaginable, the dictionary, a book that contained and explained every word in the language, he said. The print was so small it looked like print for a mouse to read.

The word is "love," the story tells her, but she says No, that is nonsense. "Love" is a four-letter word, the story says, but Sally says, No, you are missing the point. There is no word, just words, lots and lots of them, a universe of words, galaxies of them

Word retrieval emergency

His point is, informal English is not wrong, and some of it stems from models older than 'standard' English, and he always puts 'standard' in quotes because there is no standard English, language keeps changing. And to understand language and teach it, you have to know what is actually spoken.

Words and students, Laurel thought—they could be recalcitrant, out of order, trying to slip by without being noticed. But once you got them working together, unobtrusive and efficient, it was beautiful.

Copyediting is helping the words survive the misconceptions of their authors.

Watts-English, Fortson, Gibler, Hooper, & DeBellis, 2006). Further compounding this limited verbal and conceptual ability is the observation that children from low verbal families develop language skills even more slowly (Hart & Risley, 2003). This results in protracted immature language usage, fewer words, shorter sentences, and the consideration of fewer details than children from high verbal families (Papalia & Olds, 1979).

While thinking, reasoning, and language abilities are desirable endpoints, children's immature development largely precludes their use as a medium of treatment.

Researchers have just recently become aware of the magnitude of developmental, health, and behavioral problems—including speech and language problems—that plague maltreated children

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.