enriched” by all this.

This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. …But we have a difficult situation here so I guess we’ll be looking at putting different sound chips in the dolls heading there [Britain].

Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.

Language is the dress of thoughts.

Raymond collected expressions. He repeated them in experimental accents, as if learning a tune. He sounded like an Eighteenth Street Mexican when he said cuate, like a Logan Square cubano when he said comemierda.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don’t notice the threshold has been crossed.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that’s true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same – even if they don’t change.

Academics love the semicolon; their hankering after logic demands a division which is more emphatic than a comma, but not quite as absolute a demarcation as a full stop.

Well, what if you are wrong? What if the world doesn’t work the way you think? What would that mean?

Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs.

Cine mută vorbele dintr-o limbă într-alta își lasă sufletul pe m na diavolului (…) Că p nă tu te g ndești și la o vorbă, și la cealaltă, duhul tău stă, nehotăr t, pe deasupra vorbelor, mut și neterminat, și nu știe de-i albă ori neagră. Iar cine știe o limbă cu sufletul n-o poate...

Let us dedicate this new era to mothers around the world, and also to the mother of all mothers — Mother Earth. It is up to us to keep building bridges to bring the world closer together, and not destroy them to divide us further apart. We can pave new roads towards peace simply by...

Mind in language are inseparable. If we violate our language we violate ourselves.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

(on the word “fuck”)’Oh, come on, Mum,’ I sighed at her protest. ‘It’s just an old Anglo-Saxon word for the female organ which has been adopted by an inherently misogynist language as a negative epithet. It’s the same as “fuck”, it basically means the same as copulate, but the latter is perfectly acceptable. Why? Because...

The language, feminine desires to speak, and her first phrase to express her love to him – *blush*

The themes Poe used were universal and timeless. As long as the English language exists at all, we will be able to appreciate what he did. It will not age! It will not become dated!

Some people us language to describe the lives they lead, and other people use language to create the lives they lead.

slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

One of the characteristics of New Labour – and Miliband is irredeemably of that species – is that, in the guise of a new liberal language, it has adopted the age-old default mode of British foreign policy, namely military intervention.

Her accent’s funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown’s. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they’re swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they’re sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations – admitted to...

All language is an aspiration to music.

The Armenian language cannot be worn out; its boots are stone. Well, certainly, the thick-walled word, the layers of air in the semi-vowels.

…only very few – only humans, as far as we know – achieve the second level of transcendent movement. Through this, the environment is de-restricted to become the world as an integral whole of manifest and latent elements. The second step is the work of language. This not only builds the ‘house of being’ –...

For us, being married to each other is the most valuable thing in the world. It’s the only language people understand.

There’s just no explicit language in that statute that says … it is illegal for a john to pay a prostitute for sex in a room or in a spa or in a motel or something,

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

But doesn’t add something to what has come before; but takes something away. At its most daring, it can feel like a Bat Turn, a 180-degree spin int the Batmobile. Make that a But Turn.

During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak...

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters.

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be...

Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean.But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they...

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I...

Fie, fie upon her! There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip, Nay, her foot speaks; her wanton spirits look out at every joint and motive of her body.

If Japanese companies don’t reform drastically and implement English as their daily business language, the economy will only continue to contract.

Kas nicina un plicina savu valodu, tas neciena arī sevi.

Day starting with a smile leads you to that place where even imagination is quite hard. Smile and make your day bright since the beauty of smile is priceless and its a language that all the people around world can understand.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even non-fiction.

Language in the filing seems to suggest that a deal is not imminent and may not happen at all. Since the company appears to have suggested to the rating agencies that it expects resolution by the end of first quarter, we perceive elevated risk [surrounding] the sale.

The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end. And on the contrary, Metaphors, and senslesse and ambiguous words, are like ignes fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst...

Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city,’ for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents...

Earlier 18th-century literary language was not supple enough to connect the life of the imagination to that of the street.

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect...

Without a constant misuse of language there cannot be any discovery, any progress

He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out.

I was not born with English in my pocket.

He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He...