Quotes about Language

As a child, when I came across a word I didn't know, I didn't stop reading the story to look it up, I just went on reading. And after I had come across the word in several books, I knew what it meant; it had been added to my vocabulary. This still happens.

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I

What a child doesn't realize until he is grown is that in responding to fantasy, fairy tale, and myth he is responding to what Erich Fromm calls the one universal language, the one and only language in the world that cuts across all barriers of time, place, race, and culture.

The more limited our language is, the more limited we are; the more limited the literature we give to our children, the more limited their capacity to respond, and therefore, in their turn, to create. The more our vocabulary is controlled, the less we will be able to think for ourselves. We do think in words, and the fewer words we know, the more restricted our thoughts. As our vocabulary expands, so does our power to think.

The language of logical argument, of proofs,is the language of the limited self we know and can manipulate. But the language of parable and poetry, of storytelling,moves from the imprisoned language of the provable into the free language of what I must, for lack of another word, continue to call faith.

Apt words have power to suage the tumors of a troubled mind.

His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy for the greater part by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.

I found our speech copious without order, and energetic without rules

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.

Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.

ACATALECTIC  (ACATALE'CTIC)   n.s.[  Gr.]A verse which has the compleat number of syllables, without defect or superfluity.

ALKALI  (A'LKALI)   n.s.[The word alkali comes from an herb, called by the Egyptians kali; by us glasswort.] This