Quotes About English

exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

Words aren't just sounds or shapes. They're meaning. That's what language is: a protocol for transferring meaning. When you learn English, you train your brain to react in a particular way to particular sounds. As it turns out, the protocol can be hacked.

By its very looseness, by its way of evoking rather than defining, suggesting rather than saying, English is a magnificent vehicle for emotional poetry.

It's the obvious, painful example, yes. The scandalous thing, really, is that I do not believe the English are the most superior beings to ever breathe air. Do not dare repeat that to anyone or they'll revoke my title and execute me for treason.

English women made it harder to get them naked than Tahitian women, but he was a practiced bloke at such important life skills.

Oh, did I mention that he's Spanish, as in from Spain, and that he occasionally slips into his native tongue? (Add your own sexual innuendo here. It's just too easy for me. Really.) He's from Madrid but has lived here for more than a decade, long enough to master English, but without flattening his Castilian quirks. Who knew a lispy accent could be so manly? So damn sexy? I hear those "ths" clinging to his tongue and go loco.

The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English.

What happened to English after the Battle of Ethandune was that it not only endured, it thrived, it grew. Having held steady under fire, it moved forward. The two principal reasons for this were Alfred himself and what seems to me to be the profoundly self-preserving nature of the language which had so slowly and doggedly alchemised into English.

But English was at the heart of it. As far as we know, Richard II is the first recorded example of a monarch using only English since the Conquest. And he reached for it when he was within a few minutes of seeing his kingdom transformed utterly.

Before the fifteenth century was out, William Caxton had printed two editions of The Canterbury Tales and they have never been out of print since. They have been enjoyed, imitated, copied, re-translated, put on stage, screen and radio, and generations have rightly regarded Chaucer as the father and founding genius of English literature.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him But imagine the feminine she, shis and shim! So our English, I think you'll all agree Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

In 1362, for the first time in almost three centuries, English was acknowledged as a language of official business. Since the Conquest, court cases had been heard in French. Now the law recognised that too few people understood that language, perhaps because many of the educated lawyers, like the clergy, had died in the plague. From now on, it was declared, cases could be pleaded, defended, debated and judged in English.

The English Bible has often been called a preacher's Bible. Written to be spoken, written to spread the word in the language of the land, a cause for which Wycliffe and Tyndale and hundreds of other English Christians had lived and died.

I despise the way blackness in the English language, symbolizes death and negativity. Because I believe that the absorption of these connotations contributes to self-hate, I avoid them at all cost.

Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

I long for sleep, and for soft English rain. But they do not come.

We now live in the Esperantists' dreamworld, but the universal language of natural science is English, a language that is the native tongue of some very powerful nation states and as a consequence not at all neutral ["Absolute English," Aeon , February 4, 2015]

These bloody holes can't offer protection from the rain let alone from fat Goering's bombs. They aren't finished and already they've begun to fill with water, sullen and brown. Typical English idiocy. Treating war like a game of cricket. Something to be called off if it rains.

Yeah, Wacko Jacko, where did that come from? Some English tabloid. I have a heart and I have feelings. I feel that when you do that to me. It's not nice.

Tonally, the jagged syntax of 'Inch-thick', the Ovidian lyricism of 'O Proserpina' and Autolycus's bawdy swagger show Shakespeare at his widest-ranging. This is total mastery. Nobody had taken the English language further, and nobody has done so since.

That was one of my dad's greatest gifts, as well as one of the greatest characteristics of the English, they find things funny quickly. My dad would say, 'There is nothing so terrible that can't be laughed at.

Japan is not fucked because it lost the war or did bad things. Japan is fucked because there is no more war, and in peacetime everyone actually wants to be mediocre and is terrified of being different. The other thing is that the elite Japanese want to be English and white. That's pathetic, delusional, and merits another discussion entirely.

Since there is no mention of an English prophet in the scriptures, the name God is just a title that refers to an entity.

Tyrannical fathers, oppressed daughters, and repugnant suitors are scattered throughout English history.