Quotes About Language

No existe nada igual en ningún sitio -dijo -. En ningún sitio. No se trata de los sonidos. No es en los sonidos donde vive el significado.

The thing is," Deeba said, eyeing Mr. Speaker, "you could only make words do what you want if it was just you deciding what they mean. But it isn't. It's everyone else, too. Which means you might want to give them orders, but you aren't in control. No one is.

Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause. In

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

His fidelity to the cliche transcended the necessity to communicate.

A filthy mouth will not utter decent language.

After three days without reading, talk becomes flavorless.

It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

There are two streams in the minds of our people: one in which women are really oppressed and given very low status and one in which they are given very high honour, sometimes even greater honour than men, at least if not in fact, in language and metaphor.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

When your finance professor starts using the word "dude," you must eliminate the word from your vocabulary.

Concreteness is an indispensable component of sticky ideas.

Rule 2. Concrete Is Better: Use Whole Numbers to Describe Whole Objects, Not Decimals, Fractions, or Percentages.27

Rule #2. Concrete Is Better: Use Whole Numbers to Describe Whole Objects, Not Decimals, Fractions, or Percentages.

psychologist analyzed 558 emotion words—every one that he could find in the English language—and found that 62 percent of them were negative versus 38 percent positive.

If you've got to teach an idea to a room full of people, and you aren't certain what they know, concreteness is the only safe language.

Language is often abstract, but life is not abstract. Teachers

Words are tricky. Sometimes you need them to bring out the hurt festering inside. If you don't, it turns gangrenous and kills you. . . . But sometimes words can break a feeling into pieces.