Linguistics Quotes

"It's kind of like back in the '80s when 'bad' meant 'good.'" "Communication: the thing humans forgot when we invented words." "The key test for an acronym is to ask whether it helps or hurts communication." "What's another word for Thesaurus?" "All language is but a poor translation" "Language is the house of Being." "Brevity is the soul of wit. " "To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery" "We inhabit a language rather than a country" "I want to see thirst inside the syllables" "By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth" "Translation is the art of failure" "Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation." "Speech and phenomena" "Ye knowe ek that in forme of speeche is change" "There is no language without deceit" "Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother’s womb" "Writing is itself but the representation of speech" "But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." "If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?"