When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what’s left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Black men don’t like to be called ‚boys,‘ but women accept being called ‚girls.‘

Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.

I was terrible in English. I couldn’t stand the subject. It seemed to me ridiculous to worry about whether you spelled something wrong or not, because English spelling is just a human convention – it has nothing to do with anything real, anything from nature.

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

I grew up cursing a lot.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

I like the language in Proust but not the context.

I remain convinced that obstinate addiction to ordinary language in our private thoughts is one of the main obstacles to progress in philosophy.

I would say that jazz is my own language.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Substitute ‚damn‘ every time you’re inclined to write ‚very‘; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

It’s funny because I’ve made a living off of words, but words get in the way of what you really want to say.

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

‚I am‘ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‚I do‘ is the longest sentence?

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‚r‘, except at the beginning of a word.

I do not, in fact, use many puns. Certainly there are far fewer than people believe. But I suspect the ones I do occasionally use tend to hang around in people’s memories for a while.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it.

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish.

War is what happens when language fails.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Money has a language of its own.

The higher a man stands, the more the word vulgar becomes unintelligible to him.

Might, could, would – they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead: therefore we must learn both arts.

I ain’t never called nobody no redskin. I’ve never been mad, like, ‚Get out of this restaurant, you redskin.‘

I think we’re still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

I think perhaps the most important problem is that we are trying to understand the fundamental workings of the universe via a language devised for telling one another when the best fruit is.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is ‚naive‘ spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of ‚bonsai.‘

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

If a word in the dictionary were misspelled, how would we know?

I am most familiar with the Gujarati language.

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – ‚tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

If you can talk, you can write.

Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the devil; for which reason I have long since as good as renounced it.

The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.

And poets, in my view, and I think the view of most people, do speak God’s language – it’s better, it’s finer, it’s language on a higher plane than ordinary people speak in their daily lives.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn’t have connectives like ‚and‘ that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I feel impelled to speak today in a language that in a sense is new-one which I, who have spent so much of my life in the military profession, would have preferred never to use. That new language is the language of atomic warfare.

The way I talk is bizarre.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

But behavior in the human being is sometimes a defense, a way of concealing motives and thoughts, as language can be a way of hiding your thoughts and preventing communication.

In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.

As long as somebody finances you, can make a film and get it seen any place and in any language; then, hopefully, it’s a success.

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‚infinitely‘ when you mean ‚very‘; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

Many parents and teachers have become irritated to the point of distraction at the way the weed-style growth of ‚like‘ has spread through the idiom of the young. And it’s true that in some cases the term has become simultaneously a crutch and a tic, driving out the rest of the vocabulary as candy expels vegetables.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.