Quotes about language

Latin is majestic, especially when you don’t understand it.

In the first place, very little thinking was ever done in English; it is not a language suited to logical thought. Instead, it’s an emotive lingo beautifully adapted to concealing fallacies. A rationalizing language, not a rational one.

Even the word depression itself was the terminological product of an effort to soften the connotation of deep trouble. In the last century, the term crisis was normally employed. With time, however, this acquired the connotation of the misfortune it described.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process?"

Speaking our language, you will understand us—and if you can think as another man thinks, you cannot dislike him.

"Understanding being nothing else, but conception caused by Speech."

The best way to learn a language may be an episode of jail in a foreign country.

Half of life—the interesting half of life—we don't even have a name for.

Of all the mind tools we acquire in the course of furnishing our brains from the stockpiles of culture, none are more important, of course, than words — first spoken, then written. Words make us more intelligent by making cognition easier, in the same way (many times multiplied) that beacons and landmarks make navigation in the world easier for simple creatures. Navigation in the abstract multidimensional world of ideas is simply impossible without a huge stock of movable, memorable landmarks that can be shared, criticized, recorded, and looked at from different perspectives.

“You speak metaphorically, I hope,” said Peggy.

“I hope not,” said Becca. “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.”

Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea.