#language

If this constant sliding and hiding of meaning were true of conscious life, then we would of course never be able to speak coherently at all. If the whole of language were present to me when I spoke, then I would not be able to articulate anything at all. The ego, or consciousness, can therefore only work by repressing this turbulent activity, provisionally nailing down words on to meanings. Every now and then a word from the unconscious which I do not want insinuates itself into my discourse, and this is the famous Freudian slip of the tongue or parapraxis. But for Lacan all our discourse is in a sense a slip of the tongue: if the process of language is as slippery and ambiguous as he suggests, we can never mean precisely what we say and never say precisely what we mean. Meaning is always in some sense an approximation, a near-miss, a part-failure, mixing non-sense and non-communication into sense and dialogue. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#consciousness #discourse #failure #freudian-slips #lacan

On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990] ↗

— Peter O'Donnell

#language #pop-culture #setting #slang #time

Users of clichés frequently have more sinister intentions beyond laziness and conventional thinking. Relabelling events often entails subtle changes of meaning. War produces many euphemisms, downplaying or giving verbal respectability to savagery and slaughter. ↗

— Patrick Cockburn

#conventional-thinking #euphemism #language #laziness #savagery

There's no doubt in my mind that 'Slam' is going to be huge. It's a film about the power of language. People are going to see this and get blown away. ↗

— Saul Williams

#away #blown #blown away #doubt #film

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. ↗

— Robert Bringhurst

#language #typography #design

Screw technicolor, red, and foreign languages. I dream in status updates. ↗

— Fierce Dolan

#dreams #foreign-language #status-updates #technicolor #dreams

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#humor #language #equality

In the grammar of the phallus -- the I, I, I -- [woman] can't utter female experience. ↗

— Nancy Mairs

#gender #language #experience

Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies? ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#lightning #nature #rain #thunder #wind

Life doesn't exist inside language: too bad for me. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#life