Linguistics Quotes

It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If...

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; realit...

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the diale...

Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to eng...

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Lat...

Teach me to speak the language of men.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

when a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.

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

An entire mythology is stored within our language.

Language disguises thought.

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in anothe...

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You wa...

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's ...

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complime...

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum,...

And at the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney on Sixty Minutes, have you ever wondered why we say fid...

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. S...

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate....

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to compute it.

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to a...

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its princip...

Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter o...

Language is a social art.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he...

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a...

Only by the aid of language does reason bring about its most important achievements, namely the harm...

If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the ...