Language Quotes
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Like the destroyer, the submarine has created its own type of officer and man with language and traditions apart from the rest of the service, and yet at the heart unchangingly of the Service.
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The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.
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Typography is what language looks like.
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Whether it's a professional, academic keeping people out by using certain mystifying language, or technologists presenting their work as incredibly complicated, no one can understand it (especially not "moms," who are always invoked as the ultimate know-nothings, which is incredibly insulting to a whole lot of people).
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Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels.
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It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
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I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me.
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Men know almost nothing about desire, they think it has to do with sexual activity or can be discharged that way. But sex is a substitute, like money or language. Sometimes I just want to stop seeing.
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Since the classical language has an easy grammar and limited vocabulary, a few months should suffice for the mastering of it.
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The real technology -behind all our other technologies- is language. It actually creates the world our consciousness lives in.
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People think that digital language is a fixed language, but it's not: it's very fluid. It's like I'm doing a painting where the paint refuses to dry.
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All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.
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I knew that all South Indian language films were first made in Chennai and that Tamil Nadu is one of the biggest film-producing centres in the country. I wanted to be part of films here.
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The language I have learnt these forty years, My native English, now I must forgo; And now my tongue's use is to me no more Than an unstringed viol or a harp, Or like a cunning instrument cased up Or, being open, put into his hands That knows no touch to tune the harmony.
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The superior man undergoes three changes. Looked at from a distance, he appears stern; when approached, he is mild; when he is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided.
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The liberal uses the radical's language to achieve the conservative's aim: the preservation of the capitalist system, and the traditional ethnic/racial hierarchy within society.
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Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
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Language is a virus from outer space.
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How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
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It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.
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What you hear depends on how you focus your ear. We're not talking about inventing a new language, but rather inventing new perceptions of existing languages.
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In # France we have a saying, 'Joie de Vivre,' which actually doesn't exist in the English language. It means looking at your life as something that is to be taken with great pleasure and enjoy it.
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The trodden worm curls up. This testifies to its caution. It thus reduces its chances of being trodden upon again. In the language of morality: Humility.
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If you have the language gift, you can use it as a tool.
