#language

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#imagination

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible ↗

— Arthur Schopenhauer

#pessimism #philosophy #rhetoric #intelligence

The worst of this sorry bunch of semi-educated losers are those who seem to glory in being irritated by nouns becoming verbs. How dense and deaf to language development do you have to be? If you don’t like nouns becoming verbs, then for heaven’s sake avoid Shakespeare who made a doing-word out of a thing-word every chance he got. He TABLED the motion and CHAIRED the meeting in which nouns were made verbs ↗

— Stephen Fry

#education

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered. ↗

— Louise Erdrich

#story #life

I'm made mute by the virtue of decision And I choose most of your life goes on without me Oh the fear I've known That I might reap the praise of strangers and end up on my own All I've sown was a song But maybe I was wrong ↗

— Emily Saliers

#kiss #language #life

Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute. The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute. ↗

— Robert Herrick

#love #tears #tomgue #true #words

...there are no sweeter words in the English language (or any other) than husband and wife. ↗

— Lanier Ivester

#language #marriage #wife #marriage

Verily, for nine hundred years have I lost. Everyone I knew is dead, the empire gone, and who knows in what state the world is left. Should what thy sister reports prove true, much hath changed in the world." "By the way", Royce mentioned, "no one uses the words 'tis or hath any ore and certainly not thou, thy, or verily. ↗

— Michael J. Sullivan

#humerous #humor #language #ririya #change

No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need. ↗

— Simon Winchester

#lexicology #words #change

I’m learning sign language to be a better communicator and masturbator.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#communicator #funny #humor #improvement #language