Leonard is far and away my least favorite relative, and I have no clue why I call him one night, collect, very late, and give him an involved and scrupulously fair edition of the whole story. We end up arguing. Leonard maintains that I am just like our mother and suffer from an unhappy and basically silly desire to be perfect; I sat that this has nothing constructive to do with anything I've said, and furthermore I fail to see what's so bad about wishing to be perfect, since being perfect would be...well, perfect. Leonard invites me to think about how boring it would be to be perfect. I defer to Leonard's extensive and hard-earned knowledge about being boring, but do point out that since being boring is an imperfection, it would by definition be impossible for a perfect person to be boring. Leonard says I've always enjoyed playing games with words in order to dodge the real meanings of things; this segues with suspicious neatness into my intuitions about the impending death of lexical utterance, and I'm afraid I indulge myself for several minutes before I realize that one of us has severed the connection. I curse Leonard's pipe, and his wife with a face like the rind of a ham.
David Foster WallaceStichwörter: language perfection relatives david-foster-wallace
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes – our language is the language of everything we have read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version surface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
Penelope LivelyStichwörter: words language writings etymology lexicons
Whether the vessel is a legal document or a rap song, language is often chosen ot exclude. To use a scholarly phrase, "discourse communities" are often gated,so it's the good writer's job to offer readers a set of keys.
Roy Peter ClarkStichwörter: writing language word-choice writing-style roy-peter-clark the-glamour-of-grammar
A teacher of mine once said there are no true synonyms.
Roy Peter ClarkStichwörter: words language synonyms teacher roy-peter-clark the-glamour-of-grammar
The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled words, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.
Osip MandelstamStichwörter: language armenia armenian
A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth, and his desire to communicate it without loss.
Ralph Waldo EmersonStichwörter: truth communication language simpicity
The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.
Ralph Waldo EmersonStichwörter: nature language symbolism
Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!
Rick RiordanStichwörter: language zoe-nightshade
The problem Creationists identify is with the word 'theory', not with the case for evolution
Lance ParkinStichwörter: language evolution creationism
its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'ConnellStichwörter: art writing language criticism
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