#vocabulary

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this. ↗

— José Saramago

#vocabulary #communication

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#metaphor #vocabulary #experience

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend. ↗

— Alan Bradley

#humor #vocabulary #friendship

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#vocabulary #words #technology

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate. ↗

— Mos Def

#art #articulate #good #good art #people

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way. ↗

— Mos Def

#articulate #artist #everyday #experience #express

By the time they are 4 years old, children from poor families have heard 32 million fewer words than children with professional parents. ↗

— Betty Hart

#stimulation #vocabulary #education

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island. ↗

— Derek Walcott

#biography #body #individual #island #joins

I've actually become much, much dumber through being married and having these children. I find that I'm not half as sharp that I once was. I can't even help them with their 4th and 5th grade vocabulary and math work at this point. ↗

— Patrick Warburton

#become #being #children #dumber #even

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die. ↗

— Evelyn Waugh

#die #forgets #names #needs #vocabulary