Quotes About Language

Analysis of error begins with analysis of language.

firstly, prayer is a conversation between God and the soul, and secondly, a particular language is spoken: God's language. Prayer is dialogue, not man's monologue before God.

If orthodoxy is impure water, he tells us, neology is liquid manure.

Oviedo y Valdes, Bat? Hint Adalar?'nda hastal?ktan (büyük ihtimâlle frengi) çekmi? ilk hristiyan yerle?imcilerden bahseder ve ekler: "?talyanlar?n buna 'Frans?z Hastal???' ve Frans?zlar?n da 'Napoli Hastal???' dedi?ini duyup çok güldüm; asl?nda ikisi de 'Hint Adalar? Hastal???' deseymi? daha yerinde olurmu?.

I don't mind you thinking I'm stupid, but don't talk to me like I'm stupid

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.

I would say that there is no future for literary studies as such in the United States.

Aesthetic value emanates from the struggle between texts: in the reader, in language, in the classroom, in arguments within a society. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones ... successful literary works are achieved anxieties, not releases from anxieties.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves.

Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Speechwriter Barton Swaim cheerfully explains why the opaque may be a virtue. "Using vague, slippery or just meaningless language," he writes, "is not the same as lying: it's not intended to deceive so much as to preserve options, buy time, distance oneself from others, or just to sound like you're saying something instead of nothing.

Prepositional verbs grow like toadstools. Once there was credit in facing a problem. Now problems have to be faced up to. The prepositions add nothing of significance.

Orwell, of course: Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservative to anarchist—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The proliferation of nominalizations in a discursive formation may be an indication of a tendency toward pomposity and abstraction.

Author Edward Johnson neatly labels such cop-outs as the pussyfooting passive.

I appreciate engineers, I wrote a book about their achievements, but I deprecate what they and other techies do to English words. Hey, these nouns and verbs aren't bits of silicon you can dope with chemicals (boron, phosphorus, and arsenic), drop into a kiln at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and slice and dice. Words breathe. They need TLC—you know

Greeley knew no language but his, but of that, he possessed a most extraordinary mastery. An employee

A Foreign Secretary is forever poised between the clich

One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness.

My aunt touched my shoulder, I opened my eyes startled for a moment. She was smiling softly but I could see the tears sparkling in the corner of her eyes. "It's the same God, Frankie." I could feel the tension flow out of me. Suddenly I smiled at her. She was right: the Word meant God in no matter what language you spoke it—English, Latin or… Hebrew.

In the English language, the word "sadism" only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn't until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) In that sense, "sadism" is like "serial killer": a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

Atticus told me to delete the adjectives and I'd have the facts.

Een boek bestaat alleen uit woorden. En dat is het prachtige ervan. Het is misschien niet gemaakt van de stof waarvan dromen gemaakt zijn, maar wel van iets dat er vlak naast gelegen heeft.

He had been able to repress every disrespectful word; but the flashing eye, the gloomy and troubled brow, were part of a natural language that could not be repressed,-- indubitable signs, which showed too plainly that the man could not become a thing.