523 Quotes About English

English is not spare. But it is beautiful. It cannot be called truthful because its subtleties are infinite. It is the language of a people who have probably earned their reputation for perfidy and hypocrisy because their language itself is so flexible, so often light-headed with statements which appear to mean one thing one year and quite a different thing the next.

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

"Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.

Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s.

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him "Stumpy" or "the maimed one." It doesn't sound particularly flattering, but among Spanish speakers the giving of nicknames is tantamount to a declaration of love. Things that would sound insulting outright in English were tokens of deep affection when said in Spanish.

No language is as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem'd polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.

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لن أستبعد أن يأتي يوم تحذو فيه الكنيسة الإنجلزية حذو سائر المؤسسات هناك، وذلك بأن تقفل أبوابها في أيام الأحد !