Quotes About Language

One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called "weasel words." When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a "weasel word" after another there is nothing left of the other.

in the writing of good English is indispensable to any learned man who expects to make his learning count for what it ought to count in the effect on his fellow men.

That was a good mark in Latin, and I am pleased with your steady improvement in it.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

Writing is a communication.

Why do you talk all the time?" I asked. It was a rhetorical question, but she cocked her head on one side and considered it carefully. "I think it's 'cause I don't know any big words, like you and Mummy," she said, just in time to pull me out of my magazine again, "so I have to use lots and lots of little ones.

How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word? 'Why is this so?' I demanded to know.

The scribe was a strict teacher and he did not accept anything less than perfect... Like a mother sensing the baby quickening within her, suddenly, to me, the letters were no longer hostile and unwieldly. I had command of them, with my head and with my hand... The words struck, as clear and as pure as a bell peal on a winter morning.

Cuvintele sunt ca energia brut?: înc?rcate cu putere, capabile s? È™ocheze sau s? aline, s? r?neasc?, s? fac? r?u ori s? consoleze. Efectul lor e mai lung decât al unei lovituri. În mâini nemiloase, sunt o arm? periculoas?.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.

I am a person. You are a person. Without you I am not a person, for only through you is language made possible and only through language is thought made possible, and only through thought is humanness made possible. You have made me important. Therefore, I am important and you are important. If I devalue you, I devalue myself. This is the rationale of the position I'M OK – YOU'RE OK.

Yet no-one can say that God has not a Word, for it would follow that God is most foolish.

Objection 6: Further, evening and morning do not sufficiently divide the day, since the day has many parts. Therefore the words, "The evening and morning were the second day" or, "the third day," are not suitable. Objection 7: Further, "first," not "one," corresponds to "second" and "third." It should therefore have been said that, "The evening and the morning were the first day," rather than "one day.

In the significance of names, that from which the name is derived is different sometimes from what it is intended to signify, as for instance, this name "stone" [lapis] is imposed from the fact that it hurts the foot [loedit pedem], but it is not imposed to signify that which hurts the foot, but rather to signify a certain kind of body; otherwise everything that hurts the foot would be a stone [*This refers to the Latin etymology of the word "lapis" which has no place in English].

Causes of individuals presuppose causes of the species, which are not univocal yet not wholly equivocal either, since they are expressing themselves in their effects. We could call them analogical. In language too all universal terms presuppose the non-univocal analogical use of the term *being*.

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.

He was just scraps of words and dislocated phrases.

Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.

but the beauty of the youngest was so wonderful that the poverty of language is unable to express its due praise.

Real people are made out of a whole lot of things—flesh, bone, blood, nerves, stuff like that. Literary people are made out of words.

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It's all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.