#language

profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#power #profanity #information

As with . . . even the written word, the remote overview is one more wrenched perspective that developing civilization has glued, collagelike, to the once unified experience of life. ↗

— Bruce Berger

#myth #experience

Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together. ↗

— Andrés Neuman

#language #love #lovers #relationships #translation

Joke exchanges are carried on in deadly earnest, like a verbal duel-mouth-to-mouth combat. Bang, bang: you’re (linguistically) dead. ↗

— David Crystal

#jokes #language-play #humor

To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse - German. ↗

— Emperor Charles V

#humorous-quotes #languages #humor

My Japanese isn’t much better today, but at least now I appreciate my duality more than when I was a punk kid. ↗

— Gil Asakawa

#japan #japanese-american #language #japan

Then I speak to her in a language she has never heard, I speak to her in Spanish, in the tongue of the long, crepuscular verses of Díaz Casanueva; in that language in which Joaquín Edwards preaches nationalism. My discourse is profound; I speak with eloquence and seduction; my words, more than from me, issue from the warm nights, from the many solitary nights on the Red Sea, and when the tiny dancer puts her arm around my neck, I understand that she understands. Magnificent language! ↗

— Pablo Neruda

#romance #spanish #seduction

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Dieu! Misplace a single le or la and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge. ↗

— Douglas Coupland

#grammar #language #syntax #words #grammar

A schoolchild should be taught grammar--for the same reason that a medical student should study anatomy. Having learned about the exciting mysteries of an English sentence, the child can then go forth and speak and write any damn way he pleases. ↗

— E.B. White

#grammar

As you can see, the hyphen is a nasty, tricky, evil little mark that gets its kicks igniting arguments in newsrooms and trying to make everyone in the English-speaking world look like an idiot - it's the Bill Maher of punctuation. ↗

— June Casagrande

#language #grammar