Language is a virus from outer space

But the language in the Fed comments and in Greenspan’s speeches of late has been pointing to rate hikes becoming more aggressive, … The word ‘measured’ is going to be dropped soon, maybe at this...

‘StrengthsFinder 2.0’ is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers –...

I could never see a book written in a foreign language without the most ardent desire to read it.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

On the basis of this information, it would be possible to argue that if everybody spoke English (or Chinese or Esperanto for that matter) everybody would be at war even more often.

Comedy is a universal language. I grew up watching Nagesh, Surilirajan, Thenga Srinivasan and S.V. Shekhar’s comedies. And, of course, Charlie Chaplin! These artists are so blessed: they can make other people happy.

Living like that utterly convinced me of the extreme limitations of language. I was just a child then, so I had only an intuitive understanding of the degree to which one losses control of words...

Clover[‘s] eyes are full of language.

He is the intermediary between us, his audience, the living, and they, the dolls, the undead, who cannot live at all and yet who mimic the living in every detail since, though they cannot speak...

Cussing doesn’t come from a lack of vocabulary – I know all the other words. None of them speak the same language that my fucking heart does.

Alex felt the words wash over him. He had the strange fantasy the things were seeking places within him to lay their young.

She didn’t know that all her life would be spent gambling with the stark rigidity of words, words that were coin: save, spend and all the time George with his own counter had found her...

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

The words sounded like a mournful incantation.

Words in the head are sticky and social creatures – when you finally pull one out, you’re liable to get lots of bits of meanings that have rubbed onto them as a result of their...

stressed out”.

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status...

When, then, I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not...

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

The history of prescriptions about English … is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance. But it is also...

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

He is employed by the Holland Group, which provides staffing for our substitute teachers, … He apparently used some inappropriate language and called a student ‘heathen.’

The Actor, noticing a closed bookshop, dismounted from the horse which he tied to a street lamp. He woke up the bookseller and bought a Spanish grammar and dictionary. He set out again across town...

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is “I...

The fact is, that for the Huichol, and for all those who refuse, who are in flight, words and things are precisely what language does not speak about. Language is a natural act which implies...

First of all, I want to start off with a profound abject apology for my language yesterday.

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops.

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

We recognised Urdu as the second official language and made it a medium of examination in all Bihar Public Service Commission tests.

[T]hat all seekers of knowledge should use the identical language to think and to read and write is not a development to which humanity can remain indifferent. Reality is constructed by languages, and the existence...

I’m really fascinated and you know I’ve been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Feelings or Emotions are the universal language and are to be honored. They are the authentic expression of who you are in your deepest place.

It says a lot about Sandberg’s brand of feminism that this campaign focuses on policing language rather than bringing attention to important issues that have real impact on women and girls

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.

Although Russia and China have resisted the strong language of the U.N. resolution, the vote is expected to pass,

…that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silver tongue affords enchantment enough.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things.

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...

(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....

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.

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...

Don’t, Sir, accustom yourself to use big words for little matters.

Words themselves are neutral. It’s the charge we add to them that matters

I am firmly of the opinion that people who can’t speak have nothing to say. It’s one more thing we do to the poor, the deprived: cut out their tongues … allow them a language...

The language of the heartIs the only languageThat everybody can understand.

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...