Quotes About Language

Using words to de-escalate a situation is always ideal. No cop wants a physical altercation.

roll out of the faculty lounge wondering if turkey is the language they speak in Turkey. Or if talking turkey is just something you should only do around Thanksgiving.

You're taught not to call someone who's fat fat, or someone who's stupid stupid. That's wrong, we tell our kids. Don't tell the truth if it's going to hurt someone's feelings. Those lies are okay, too—desirable, in fact.

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir. They'd sent for a translator, but nobody had shown up yet.

Uh, that wasn't French, Rhonda.

The big problem in translating is that we had to translate the language. People may not know that we record the podcast in Japanese, translate it to English and then actors play us on the podcast. I'm not actually Scott Aukerman, I'm the actor who plays his voice on the podcast. Unfortunately, it's cost prohibitive on a television show.

Russian subs are a bargain at $60,000. Unfortunately, none of the dials or instructions are in English.

Well, unfortunately, my father passed away before my first book was published, so he never lived to see me as an author. But I think my mum was suitably pleased because she was mad about words. If she ever came across a word that she didn't know, she would always look it up in the dictionary.

Truth-tellers who expect others to believe them tend to speak naturally and un-self-consciously. But if they don't expect to be believed, they may try too hard to seem honest. Unfortunately, the result makes them sound less believable. Obviously, then, not every oddly phrased statement is a lie.

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

New fathers, political prisoners, traumatised presidential aides, resolute schoolboys, MEPs addressing unfriendly chambers - we all find that Shakespeare has magically anticipated our precise circumstances. How he was possible, I still don't understand; but there isn't a day I'm not grateful that he speaks to me in my own language.

Unhappy is a nice word.

I can't imagine a world where I wouldn't have the means of expression. When I talk to people who don't, it seems like they're really unhappy.

Man is an unhappy animal and one that can talk. If he was not unhappy, he would have nothing to talk about. But if he had nothing to talk about, he would be unhappy.

The two biggest legacies of the Raj are the unification of India and the English language. Moreover, without the railways, India would not have been connected and could not have become one country.

Now between the meanings of words and their sounds there is ordinarily no discoverable relation except one of accident; and it is therefore miraculous, to the mystic, when words which make sense can also make a uniform objective structure of accents and rhymes.

Instead of this confusion, we need the unifying force of an official language, English, which is the language of success in America.

Art is a unifying language for all of us from across the world, and it transcends boundaries.

English is still the unifying language in Sarawak and I use my blog and broadcasts to expose the outrageous deforestation which has seen 95 per cent of Sarawak's rainforest cut down and replaced by logging and palm oil plantations which have enriched Taib and his family.

Jimmy Baldwin was the creator of contemporary American speech even before Americans could dig that. He created it so we could speak to each other at unimaginable intensities of feeling, so we could make sense to each other at yet higher and higher tempos.

Though music transcends language, culture and time, and though notes are the same, Indian music is unique because it is evolved, sophisticated and melodies are defined.

We are a unique ape. We have language. Other animals have systems of communication that fall far short of that. They don't have the same ability to communicate complicated conditionals and what-ifs and talk about things that are not present.

Nobody can doubt Puerto Rico, sociologically, linguistically, culturally, and historically, is a nation. We have our own rich culture, thousand years of history, unique territory, and almost everyone's first language is Spanish, not English.

One of the things that's pretty unique about nu shu, when you look especially at these old letters and stories that have been saved, is that there are certain lines that are very standard that are used again and again. It's almost like a formula in a sense, so that these certain lines come up again and again.