Language is a poor thing. You fill your lungs with wind and shake a little slit in your throat, and make mouths, and that shakes the air; and the air shakes a pair of little drums in my head—a very complicated arrangement, with lots of bones behind—and my brain seizes your meaning in the rough. What a roundabout way, and what a waste of time.
George du MaurierTags: language
If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.
Friedrich HebbelTags: language
Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds.
John LawlerTags: language
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Samuel JohnsonTags: language dictionaries
If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.
Heinrich HeineLanguage is the light of the mind.
John Stuart MillTags: language
A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man
Frederick DouglassTags: humanity language smile brotherhood nation tear
A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.
Bertrand RussellIn my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything.
Neil GaimanMikä etu, mikä verraton taivaan lahja onkaan mielihyvän ilmaisemisen taito äänin ja elein. - Ensin hyräilin, sitten sain tuon jäljittelemättömän kyvyn heilautella häntääni mitä siroimmissa kiekuroissa, sitten ihmeellisen lahjan ilmaista yhdellä pikku sanalla iloa, surua, riemua ja ihastusta, kauhua ja epätoivoa, sanalla sanoen kaikkia tunteita ja intohimoja mitä moninaisimpine vivahteineen. Tämä pikku sana on miau. Mitä on ihmisen kieli verrattuna tähän kaikkein yksinkertaisimpaan ajatuksen ilmaisukeinoon!
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