Quotes About Language

English is the product of a Saxon warrior trying to make a date with an Angle bar-maid, and as such is no more legitimate than any of the other products of that conversation.

you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids.

Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

[On Warren G. Harding:] He writes the worst English I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.

we will have learned to understand and express all of physics in the language of information.

Some carry out their work explicitly denying that it is a revolution; others deliberately use Kuhn's language of paradigm shifts to describe the changes they witness.

The code became known as the dot-and-dash alphabet, but the unmentioned space remained just as important; Morse code was not a binary language.*) That

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point.

The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying.

Names are not the things they name. Classes are not coextensive with subclasses.

The alphabet, however, had a definite order—the first and second letters providing its very name—and

To spell (from an old Germanic word) first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter. Then, by extension, just around Cawdrey's time, it meant to write words letter by letter. The last was a somewhat poetic usage. "Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find," wrote

the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts.

Here we see the word brain occurring for the first time in human speech, as far as it is known to us; and in discussing injuries affecting the brain, we note the surgeon's effort to delimit his terms as he selects for specialization a series of common and current words to designate three degrees of injury to the skull indicated in modern surgery by the terms fracture, compound fracture, and compound comminuted fracture, all of which the ancient commentator carefully explains.

He loved the stuff. But unfortunately he couldn't say "Propamidine." In fact nobody on the entire establishment could say it except Charlie the farm foreman and he only thought he could say it. He called it "Propopamide" but his lordship had the utmost faith in him.

Gently I pointed out that it should be "sheep," and though he was so tired that he could hardly keep his eyes open, he launched into an interrogation as to why the singular should be the same as the plural and wanted to know all the other English words which had this peculiarity.

Those were dreadful words. "Not many minutes" was a common phrase in Yorkshire and could mean anything up to two hours.

Psychology ideally means giving soul to language and finding language for soul.

In contemporary psychological language, efficiency is a primary mode of denial.

I suppose I could still read Virgil or Sophocles with the help of a dictionary, but I do not do so, because it would give me no pleasure

Let us dance to express our love. For it is the hidden language of the soul

Sometimes I forget how country my accent is... Until I hear a recording of myself and I literally sound like cornbread.

I fear those big words, Stephen said, which make us so unhappy.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.