Language Quotes - Page 85

You will hear people say the C-word. Except, it's a regional language: in British English, c - t has much less of an inflammatory sense than it does in North American English. You can hear someone on British TV called "a c - ting monkey" or a man being called a c - t. The particular fascination of profanity is how culturally specific it is and how it evolves.

I certainly self-police my language depending on who I'm talking to. I try to be very careful about using filler words, about not drawling certain vowels, even when I can't say "drawl" without drawling. That's kind of sad, because self-policing inhibits communication. You're more focused on the words coming out of your mouth or that should not be coming out of your mouth than making a connection with the person you're speaking to.

There's a measure of prescriptivism and descriptivism in every dictionary. Prescriptivism believes that the language should mirror the best practices of English, and editors are prescriptivist in so far as they don't want to let things they consider to be inelegant or ungrammatical into print.

Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.

The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.

Be careful. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to the worst Spanish student in the history of the language.” I laughed. “No problemo.

I like to use my own language. Political movements are like living creatures - they develop. Each document expresses the times, the different stages and is part of the natural development.

I'm not sure which I dislike more: 'Ulysses' or the James Joyce estate. Admittedly, a few people have got some pleasure from 'Ulysses', but against that, you have to weigh the millions of lives that have been ruined by the futile attempts to read it.

It was all completely incomprehensible to me. I was fearful of the language. You had to look up every third word.

I've long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity.

Javier Chevanton don't speak the language too good.

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such an effective tool of thought.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

Crusaders have just f-ked me over what a bas-rd joke, excuse my language I'm absolutely furious.

I grew up with the piano. I learned its language as I learned to speak.

Lie detection is like language; there is a learning window. Telling whoppers to small children seems to be a family tradition in many families.

We share plates [with Jordan Peele], and we also very often will sit in the corner and kind of speak in our own language.

The language of God is Mystery.

Language is present in a piece of work like the sea in a single drop.

Content is built on communication. You can't learn anything if you haven't learned how to understand language, or to read.

I'm so language-based and I'm so about communicating, and my art has always been very audience-based, and very about being functional and communicating something, and about feeling like I have to be heard.

if you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

For years I lived rather medicated and muted - I did not possess language to describe my vague feelings of unhappiness, to politicize it, to attempt to transcend it.

Numbers are really fascinating things, and they do play a big part in our lives. They are a language of their own.