2,489 Quotes About Language

With Barthes, signs no longer need to be signals: they have become clues. A seismic shift. They’re everywhere. From now on, semiology is ready to conquer the world.

Language teleologically seeks to express its most general form, to attain the universal. The universal language is unique. It is mathematics.

As you can see, madam, words are getting staler and staler… idiots have used them like so many wheelbarrows… loaded them up with all kinds of idiotic confessions, with all these ideas, each more stupid than the last… in short, with what people call messages.

Great prose replenishes the language it’s written in...

Et puis il faut écouter Donald Trump, parce qu'il est contagieux : au Brésil, en Hongrie, en Turquie, en Italie, en Autriche et ailleurs, la violence des mots et des actes s'intensifie. Dans ces pays, qui se croient è l'abri grâce aux leçons de l'histoire, de plus en plus de citoyens tendent l'oreille vers l'Amérique et écoutent, eux, la langue de Trump.

But the true delights of mobspeak, I found, stretched much further. The mobsters we dealt with were adept at casually twisting English into streetwise poetry and hilarious malapropisms. A cooperating witness, Joey Ambrosino, once told me his captain hadn’t directly come out and admitted a crime to him. “It was more of an insinnuendo,” he explained.

Language can facilitate understanding but it can also get in the way of understanding.

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don't...the language of bold assertion is simpler, less taxing, than the language of nuance and ambiguity and speculation.

Not every line of Hamlet is a jewel. nor every square inch of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling worthy of admiring gasps.