The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout, embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and caress the snouts of adorable chows; and then all tingling and streaming, plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the English language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating feelings, was not for them.
Book: Mrs. Dalloway
Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar…
Romance languages lead to premarital sex.
TV: The Colbert Réport: 26 Apr 2006
The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
…and I discovered to my delight and amazement that the world is quiet a complex place, quiet a large percentage of it goes on outside the descriptive power of any metaphor that we presently have a handle on.
The limits of my language are the limits of my world.
If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.
A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.
Take away their language, destroy their souls.
As long as a word remains unspoken, you are its master; once you utter it, you are its slave.
Canadian French is essentially bad English as spoken by a Belgian with an inferiority complex.
Technology is a language. Technology is a language of artifacts. And when you have a bad thought, when you have a stupid thought, the answer to that is not to be silent. The response to a stupid thought is a wiser thought. Since technology is a language of artifacts, the response to “this technology is stupid” is to make smarter technology, not to withdraw from it.
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
What I do for a living is try to make decent sentences, caring about commas and caring about the difference between a proper and a regular noun. What I think about on a daily basis is language, trying to put sentences down that I can live with. As writers, all we have [is] language and nothing else. We’ve got these 26 letters of the alphabet and some punctuation marks — that’s it. And out of those 26 letters you can make Ulysses or you can make “Cosmo”. You can make pure crap or you can make great art.
German, it’s basically like English. English, you know, spoken by a monster, underwater, into a walkie-talkie.
Comic: Penny-Arcade
Math is its own language, and, if you can read it and you can speak it, you will do all right.
The fact of grammar, a universal trait of language, is simply a generalized expression of the feeling that analogous concepts and relations are most conveniently symbolized in analogous forms. Were a language ever completely “grammatical,” it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.
Book: Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech.
Man knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest… Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
Perhaps the reader may ask, of what consequence is it whether the author’s exact language is preserved or not, provided we have his thought? The answer is, that inaccurate quotation is a sin against truth. It may appear in any particular instance to be a trifle, but perfection consists in small things, and perfection is no trifle.
The proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic recursion.
Book: Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
The language of friendship is not words but meanings.
No writing has any real value which is not the expression of genuine thought and feeling.
The most important things are the hardest to say, because words diminish them.
Book: “The Body” by Stephen King
It is only by introducing the young to great literature, drama and music, and to the excitement of great science that we open to them the possibilities that lie within the human spirit — enable them to see visions and dream dreams.
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Her profession was words and she believed in them deeply. The articulation, interpretation, appreciation and preservation of good words. Words could incite, soothe, destroy, exorcise, redeem.
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.
The reader is entertained by the journey of another, but the writer is the changer of worlds.
Proverb: “D’ni”
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.
Book: How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later
Fair speech may hide a foul heart.
Book: “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” by J.R.R. Tolkien
My class, you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
Movie: Dead Poets Society
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, ‘O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?’ Answer. That you are here—that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
Movie: Dead Poets Society
A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.
“A Note on [toward] Bernard Shaw”