Quotes About Language

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him "Stumpy" or "the maimed one." It doesn't sound particularly flattering, but among Spanish speakers the giving of nicknames is tantamount to a declaration of love. Things that would sound insulting outright in English were tokens of deep affection when said in Spanish.

He says,'Why is it love, Esther? Why call it that?' 'Because. Why is what you do art? Because you say so.

Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words.

Here is a book of tongues. Take it. (Dark leaves invade the air.) Beware! I now know a language so beautiful and lethal My mouth bleeds when I speak it.

A language so beautiful and lethal My mouth bleeds when I speak it.—

Istenkém – mondta Bogus?awski –, nagyhatalom lettünk a mellébeszélésben.

Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone.

Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.

The Brandreth Rule is: when in Rome, do as the Romans do—speak English.

I aim to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time, work out where we've been going wrong (and why), and come up with some tips and tricks to help show how, in future, we can make fewer (rather than 'less') mistakes. All right? Is 'alright' all right? You'll find out right here.

If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don't need to add another full stop: He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless.

While an Edwardian dandy might have wooed his dimpled darling with lovey-dovey terms of endearment, a modern Romeo might use a more contemporary line in flattery: 'Bae, you is one cool, sick, mean bitch.

But language is power. Words do make a difference. They can reinforce stereotypes, cause offense, undermine, hurt, and humiliate. You don't have to wrap everything you say in cotton wool, but you should choose your words carefully. Good communication is about courtesy and kindness as well as clarity and getting your message across.

There is a wonderful Hungarian literature, especially in lyric poetry.

There was an ancient word, originating in one of the lost languages of Pre-Atomic Terra—sixtifor. It meant, the basic, fundamental, question. Rovard Javasan, he suspected, had just asked the sixtifor.

We must learn to speak the language women speak when there is no one there to correct us.

The most beautiful things cannot be written, unfortunately. Fortunately. We would have to be able to write with our eyes, with wild eyes, with the tears of our eyes, with the frenzy of a gaze, with the skin of our hands.

She alone dares and wishes to know from within, where she, the outcast, has never ceased to hear the resonance of fore-language. She lets the other language speak—the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death. To life she refuses nothing. Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.

This is what writing is: I one language, I another language, and between the two, the line that makes them vibrate; writing forms a passageway between two shores.

To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly.

for a week she has been tormented, she burns to write something, gentle warmth emanates from her whole body, but still nothing comes of it. Besides, at the same time she is also busy burning old books, manuals, professional papers, theoretical volumes--because they keep her from doing the one thing that now seems urgent and right to her: shouting her loud hymn of ecstatic pleasure, breaching the tide of the old tongue's hard blare.

Que naîtrait-il de mon désir? Le corps unique et inconnu de notre silence: il faut trouver cette langue sans mots et sans limites qui nous perpétuera sans erreur et sans affaiblissement.

In front of us there is an immense garden of words and non-words, a serre, that is, a greenhouse in which are preserved by my care so many things of speech you have given me while leaving me free to cultivate them.

Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body, of life in its remoteness; to saturate the distance with desire; in order to keep it from reading you.