Quotes About Language

That is how poets write, the similar sounds. But then Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn.

She never blows her nose. A form of speech: the lesser for the greater.

Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetrameter of iambs march ing.

And he has pipettishly bespilled himself from his foundingpen as illspent from inkinghorn.

bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)

In one letter that he had written to her then he had said: 'Why is it that words like these seem to me so dull and cold? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?

Sayyessik, Ballygarry. The fourscore soculums are watchyoumaycodding to cooll the skoopgoods blooff.

James Kelman

Unfortunately, the struggle can degenerate from the affirmation of a language and/or culture to the point of tradition at all costs, especially that of the individual, i.e., tradition at the expense of existence, where art becomes simply heritage, from there the path spirals downwards into "blood and soil" politics, the "purity" of the language into the "purity" of the race, and so on.

How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets?

Philosophy is common sense with big words.

The big break from the past may come when speech recognition software is perfected. At that point we'll be able to write simply by talking: Speak into your computer's recorder, and it'll do all the messy work of punctuation and spelling. This could result in the elimination of the keyboard, [Dennis] Baron speculates. 'We'd get back to oral composition--reinventing Homer.

The Old Man was a lunatic, but he was a good, kind lunatic, and he couldn't no more be a sane man in his transactions with his fellow white man than you and I can bark like a dog, for he didn't speak their language. He was a Bible man. A God man. Crazy as a bedbug. Pure to the truth, which will drive any man off his rocker. But at least he knowed he was crazy. At least he knowed who he was. That's more than I could say for myself.

I love the swing and swirl of words as they tangle with human emotions.

Be happy to, I said, cringing to hear such a dumb, folksy locution escape my lips, then launched into my well-rehearsed precis. The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition, I explained, need not trouble us from an ethical perspective.

I muttered a swear word to myself. After I heard Angel cussing like a sailor when she stubbed her toe, my new resolution was to watch my language. All I needed was a six-year-old mutant with a potty mouth

Veins practically popping out of his neck, the jerk leaned out his window and yelled a bunch of swear words, including a new one I tucked away in my brain for future use, if necessary.

Do you want me to swear this time? Yes. Well, crap.

Yesterday I asked my teacher, 'How come I have to study English? I'm never going to England!' " Stevie still isn't laughing, but

Her English had an elegant European lilt, what I thought was a French accent—?vowels in the front of her mouth, consonants brushed with feathers.

also miss the Cockney accent.

Cinco hundred dollars. No habla español

Ha!" I said. "Ha, ha, ha." Yeah, for a word guy, I sometimes run out of them.

Cave quid dicis, quando, et cui.