2,489 Quotes About Language

أَلا بوركت اللغة البشرية, فما أَوسعها على آلذينَ يسمعون ويقرأُون أَكثر من الحرف وتبًّا لها ما أَضيقها على الذين لا يقرأُون منها ولايسمعون غير الحرف.

One of the main functions of jargon is to exaggerate expertise.

The sky is blue,' he said, 'the grass is green.' Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. 'Upon my word,' he said [...], 'I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false.

We should torture language to tell the truth.

Over the years, she had encountered many French speakers in Maine, but they all produced a twangy, oddly-inflected Canadian dialect that sounded more like agitated goose honking than her native tongue

The corresponding metaphor, synecdoche, or metonymy, in another language will often be justly chargeable with obscurity and impropriety, perhaps even with absurdity. … {metonymy - sail vs vellum - for ship} … These tropes therefore are of a mixed nature. At the same time that they bear a reference to the primitive signification, they derive from their customary application to the figurative sense, that is, in other words, from the use of the language, somewhat of the nature of proper terms.

…the more a language advanceth in richness and precision, and the more a spirit of criticism prevails among those who speak it, the more delicate the people become in this respect, and the more averse to the admission of new metaphors.

London is a language. I guess all places are.

Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling.