Trey Jones > Trey's Quotes

“Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians”
― Russ Rymer

“How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?”
― E.M. Forster

“Linguists are no different from any other people who spend more than nineteen hours a day pondering the complexities of grammar and its relationship to practically everything else in order to prove that language is so inordinately complicated that it is impossible in principle for people to talk.”
― Ronald Langacker

“Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.”
― William Gibson

“The tongue of man is a twisty thing.”
― Homer

“Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“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 Maurier

“Language is conceived in sin and science is its redemption. ”
― W.V. Quine

“If language had been the creation, not of poetry, but of logic, we should only have one.”
― Friedrich Hebbel

“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 Lawler

“Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”
― Robert Benchley

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.”
― Samuel Johnson

“If the Romans had been obliged to learn Latin, they would never have found the time to conquer the world.”
― Heinrich Heine

“Children, don’t speak so coarsely,’ said Mr. Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters’ speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.”
― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

“He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”
― George Bernard Shaw

“There is no such thing as the Queen’s English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”
― Mark Twain

“English is what you get from Normans trying to pick up Saxon girls.”
― Bryan Maloney

“Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.”
― Samuel Johnson

“There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.”
― Mark Twain

“The etymologist finds the deadest words to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Dictionary, n. A malevolent literacy device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic.”
― Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary

“Language is the light of the mind.”
― John Stuart Mill

“Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge
With-inne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so,
And spedde as wel in love as men now do.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer

“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.”
― E.B. White

“Thou whoreson zed! Thou unnecessary letter! My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of a jakes with him. *all cheer for Shakespearean insults*”
― William Shakespeare

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling