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Quotations about Language
Language, — human language, — after all, is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls and other utterances of brute nature, — sometimes not so adequate. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers... ~George Orwell
Because of language, man has access to the past and the future. He can express the true and the untrue. Language helps him understand both what is and what could be. ~Wesley Douglass Camp (1915–1991), Preface to What a Piece of Work Is Man: Camp's Unfamiliar Quotations from 2000 B.C. to the Present, 1989
...words are slippery and tricky creatures, whether they drop from the tip of the tongue or of the pen, and when used in important matters, cannot be too carefully watched or too strongly manacled. ~Lelia J. Robinson, 1886
No one means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous... ~Henry Adams, "The Grammar of Science (1903)," The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, 1918
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. ~Carl Sandburg, 1959
'There is correct English: that is not slang.'
'I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.'
~George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, Volume I, Book I—Miss Brooke, 1871
What words say does not last. The words last. Because words are always the same, and what they say is never the same. ~Antonio Porchia (1886–1968), Voces, 1943–1966, translated from the Spanish by W.S. Merwin (1927–2019), c.1968
Insufficient similarity
Is the curse of analogy.
~Dr. Idel Dreimer, lumpenbangenpiano.com
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide—that is, violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning, which is its life—are alike forbidden. Manslaughter, which is the meaning of the one, is the same as man's laughter, which is the end of the other. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894), The Autocrat of the Breakfast-table [Puns
Who learns another Language, wins command
Of all the Wisdom of another Land.
~Arthur Guiterman, "Of Knowledge," A Poet's Proverbs, 1924
Often it's just a short swim from the shipwreck of your life to the island paradise of your dreams, assuming you don't drown in the metaphor. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
SLANG
Language in overalls.
ORATORY
Language in a dress suit.
~Charles Wayland Towne, The Altogether New Foolish Dictionary, by Gideon Wurdz, 1914
When thoughts fail of words, they find imagination waiting at their elbow to teach a new language without words. ~Henry Stanley Haskins, "Imagination," Meditations in Wall Street, 1940
Gloria: Don't be ridic.
Don: Gloria, please, why imperil our friendship with these loathsome abbreviations?
~Charles Brackett & Billy Wilder, The Lost Weekend, 1945, based on the novel by Charles Jackson (1903–1968), 1944
Verbing weirds language. ~Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes
What is named
Is known.
By its disguises.
~Thomas McGrath, "The Need for Dictionaries II," Open Songs, 1977
The first time I ever read the dictionary, I thought it was a poem about everything. ~Steven Wright, A Steven Wright Special, 1985, stevenwright.com
Dictionary... a book with splendid vocabulary but poor plot... ~Leonard Louis Levinson, Webster's Unafraid Dictionary, 1967
"Seize the day" drains dignity from "Carpe diem." ~Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, 2010, about translation
A poem sings with a bad accent in any language not its own. ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
[The translator] has done his cleverest and best with this that follows, but you might as well seek to translate a violet into verse as seek to render in language other than its own the delicate sentiment, the exquisite rhythm, of the... original. ~William Cleaver Wilkinson, Classic German Course in English, 1887
Mrs. Howitt knew German and even Swedish much better than she knew Danish, and very often she commits ludicrous blunders which would be the ruin of the average translator nowadays, but nobody ever caught the spirit of Andersen as she has done, and she is loyally literal or fearlessly free according as the occasion demands it. ~R. Nisbet Bain, Appendix IV: "Andersen and His Translators," Hans Christian Andersen: A Biography, 1895
Some translators turn an author's words from stone to gold, others from gold to stone. ~Terri Guillemets
A translation of a poem is like a plastercast of a statue or a photograph of a painting; and the better the translation the poorer the original poem. ~Austin O'Malley (1858–1932), Thoughts of a Recluse, 1898
He hath studied her will, and translated her will, out of honesty into English. ~William Shakespeare, Merry Wives of Windsor, c.1600 [I, 3, Pistol]
The crucial test of a witticism is translation into another language. ~Charles Searle, Look Here!, 1885
Sentiments in a foreign language, which merely convey the sentiment without retaining to the reader any graces of style or harmony of sound, have somewhat of the charm of thoughts in one's own mind that have not yet been put into words. No possible words that we might adapt to them could realize the unshaped beauty that they appear to possess. This is the reason that translations are never satisfactory, — and less so, I should think, to one who cannot than to one who can pronounce the language. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
There's always something that you can't pin down with words. Words fall flat all the time — look at the word dust around you. ~
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes. ~Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900
Well that just shows how far you can trust a dictionary,
Because I never saw a definition that was more utterly fictionary...
~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "The Eight O'Clock Peril"
The dot-com mavens will not rest until every word has been mangled. ~Elementary, "The View from Olympus," 2015, teleplay by Bob Goodman [S3, E18, Sherlock Holmes to Detective Bell, of naming a ride sharing company Zooss rather than Zeus]
Wit clothed in dialect is wisdom masquerading as folly. ~"Poor Richard Junior's Philosophy," The Saturday Evening Post, 1903, George Horace Lorimer, editor
What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words... ~Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh, 1831
April: I thought you just said "honesty is the best policy."
Karen: A glib idiom that glosses over the complexities of the human experience.
Kate: Did she just call me an idiot?
~Mistresses, "Lean In" [S4, E5, 2016], written by Rina Mimoun
GLOAMING Something dark and mysterious used by poets to rhyme with "roaming." ~Charles Wayland Towne, The Altogether New Foolish Dictionary, by Gideon Wurdz, 1914
Any man who does not make himself proficient in at least two languages other than his own is a fool. Such men have the quaint habit of discovering things fifty years after all the world knows about them — because they read only their own language. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962) #bilingual #trilingual
If I could but entice you with sentences and tongue tie you with words. ~Jamie Lynn Morris
Words, however, even in the common meaning, are not, when used by a mastermind, the mere dress of thought. Such a definition degrades them below their sphere, and misconceives their importance.... Take the most beautiful and sincere poetry, which has ever been written, and its charm is broken as soon as the words are disturbed or altered.... A Thought embodied and embrained in fit words, walks the earth a living being. No part of its body can be stricken from it, or injured, without disfiguring the beauty of its form or spoiling its grace of motion. ~E.P. Whipple, "Words," in The American Review: A Whig Journal of Politics, Literature, Art, and Science, 1845 February
But ten years are a decade. And in a decade the ever moving kaleidoscope of American life "does things" to the language of the Americans. In ten years, new words have caught on, old words have been sloughed off. The activities of business, politics, society, athletics, drama and the professions have implanted and brought to full bloom a host of new nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs whose meanings clamor for attention. The meanings, too, that graced the forms of certain old favorites ten years ago have been irrevocably shed, along with the golf cape and starched shirt-waist of that period, and are now replaced by heaven-knows-what mysteries of be-bustled and slit-skirted verbiage. Such are the fearful and wonderful quick-changes of American vernacular! ~Charles Wayland Towne, The Altogether New Foolish Dictionary, by Gideon Wurdz, 1914
I take the music of language very seriously. Like a heartbeat, it exists right below consciousness — it animates and infuses your language with life.... A good sentence should sound good and feel good and roll comfortably off your tongue, not simply serve as a conveyor for ideas. ~Kent Nerburn
Do not despair, being few. You possess the supreme science and the supreme force of the world: the Word. An order of words can be more murderous than a chemical formula. ~Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863–1938), Le Vergini delle Rocce, 1896, translated from the Italian, The Maidens of the Rocks, 2023
Whenever ideas fail, men invent words. ~Martin H. Fischer (1879–1962)
But, you must have a name for everything, and when the noun is not overaccurate some latitude may surely be permitted in the way of adjectival limitation. ~William Ellis, 1904
For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me. ~A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh, 1926
All languages abound in gold. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
Our language is like a mine in which gold is only found at certain depths. ~Joseph Joubert, translated by George H. Calvert
Alliteration is like showing up late, or playing the accordion. If you do it often enough people begin to despise you. ~Lemony Snicket, answer to "There seemed to be a significant lack of alliteration in your latest book compared to ASOUE. Any particular reason for this?" during a live Facebook chat hosted by Scholastic Reading Club, 2013 January 16th
Some so speak in exaggerations and superlatives, that we need to make a large discount from their statements, before we can come at their real meaning. ~Tryon Edwards, The World's Laconics, 1853
Superlatively weak people always speak in superlatives. ~Charles Searle, Look Here!, 1885
I have a huge pile of letters to answer, so I must gird up the loins of my mind and hoe in. Excuse my mixed metaphors. I'm fearfully sleepy. ~L. M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island, 1915
You don't mind my mixing metaphors, do you, as long as there is a period between? ~Laura L. Livingstone (Herbert Dickinson Ward), Lauriel: The Love Letters of an American Girl, 1901
The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity, and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence. ~Rudyard Kipling
These go a great way in assisting me to make up my mind; and, if I were called upon now, to give an opinion, as to the views and intentions of
Sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold;
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., 1833
The prior's simple and homely language came from the heart, entered the heart and was remembered, whereas Mathias spoke from his brain. The heart is simple and always the same, but the brain is complex and various; and therefore it was natural that Mathias should hold, as if in fee, a great store of verbal felicities, and that he should translate all shades of thought at once into words. ~George Moore, The Brook Kerith: A Syrian Story, 1916
...new words reborn out of an old time... like new seeds from an old harvest... ~Thomas Merton
COMROGUE. A jocular perversion of the word comrade, by way of calling a man rogue. ~Robert Nares, A Glossary; or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names, and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs, &c. Which Have Been Thought to Require Illustration, in the Works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare, and His Contemporaries, 1822 [What a neat word from the 1600s, I think I'll start calling my friends by this.
I draw my chair beside the gr8
And dreamily I medit8
Upon my present single st8
I wonder if relentless F8
Ordains for me a living m8—
Such dreams have haunted me of l8.
This year, which I would celebr8,
Is leap year; but its precious fr8
Of lawful days to fascin8
Decreases at a rapid r8...
~“8TEEN 8T 8” (An Ancient Maiden's Twilight Reverie), in America, 1889 September 5th, contributed by "Pan" [an early example of textspeak, way before texting even existed
Far far away, behind the word mountains, there live the blind texts. They live at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean. It is a paradisematic country, in which roasted parts of sentences fly into your mouth. One day a small line of blind text by the name of Lorem Ipsum decided to leave for the far World of Grammar. The Big Oxmox advised her not to do so because there were thousands of bad Commas, wild Question Marks and devious Semikoli, but the Little Blind Text didn't listen. ~BlindTextGenerator.com
Dementia slowly loosens the sufferer's grip on those unique tokens of humanity, words. ~George Will, "A Mother's Love, Clarified," The Washington Post, 2006 July 13th
Ibid A famous Latin poet. ~Leonard Louis Levinson, Webster's Unafraid Dictionary, 1967
"Slight momentum — what's that?" Pee-wee shouted. "It's Latin for going slow," I told him... ~Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen, 1921
Said the Idiot, "If ten commandments make a decalogue, one commandment makes a monologue, doesn't it?"
"You're a philologist and a half," said the Bibliomaniac, with a laugh.
"No credit to me. A ten years' residence in this boarding-house has resulted practically in my having enjoyed a diet of words. I have literally eaten syllables—" ~John Kendrick Bangs, "On Short Courses at College," The Genial Idiot, 1908
The way creatures contact one another can change. Let me try and explain what I am getting at in that. How does a dog contact its fellows? Touch, not very accurate achromatic sight, rich abundant smell, sex as a transient storm; what else is there that reaches from dog to dog? Our contacts are fuller than that. And they are becoming subtler and more abundant. Ages ago man began to elaborate life by using definite words. Also he began to clothe and elaborate love. He became more companionable. By words especially. Lovers talk and weave a thousand fancies. Words become the mechanism of a vast abundance of suggestion and enrichment. We smell each other's minds in conversation. And man's eyes also become more exact. We see with a new precision and discover beauty. We harmonize. We recede a little from the elementary contacts in order to achieve other and wider and lovelier ones. We are reluctant to recede from those elementary contacts, because of the extravagant expectations with which they allure us, but we must. We love the mind that speaks to us in music, we find beauty in pictures, we respond to the wisdom or to the caress in a poem. We love the woman Leonardo loved and writers who were bodily dead centuries ago live on to stir us. Our contacts stretch out more and more beyond the here and the now.
When it was done, I felt sleepy/tired and went to bed. (Another way of dodging that "laid" or "lay" that I never learned. It's time that I got over that.) I laid down. If it's the wrong word, still it's perfectly clear to everyone what I did. ~Barry Fox Stevens (1902–1985), Don't Push the River (it flows by itself), 1970
To chart the life of each word... to offer its biography... Trench insisted, it is important to know just when the word was born, to have a record of the register of its birth... when it was first written down... And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings — the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as the public mood dictates. "A Dictionary," Trench said, "is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view, and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered… may be nearly as instructive as the right ones."
Johnson's dictionary may have been among the pioneers in presenting quotations... but they were there only to illustrate meaning. The new venture that Richard Chenevix Trench seemed now to be proposing would demonstrate not merely meaning but the history of meaning, the life story of each word. ~Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, 1998
Along with everything else today, words are getting a terrible kicking around... Conversation is edging toward verbal shorthand. ~Leonard Louis Levinson, Webster's Unafraid Dictionary, 1967
For I was lulled in old sweet songs: rhymes were like lullabies in my brain…
And I remember in adolescence away with my sister by a little wild lake
My one-volume Shakespeare, and the dream of magic that swept me away…
I could not have told what I was reading…
I could not grasp the plot, the thought, the people…
I was riding the cataracts of sheer sound, of the spheral music…
I wept, exulted, despaired over the drip of tones…
~James Oppenheim, The Mystic Warrior, 1921
The word adventurer finds something to fascinate and enlighten him on every page. ~Louise Pound, Foreword to L. V. Berrey and M. Van den Bark, The American Thesaurus of Slang, 1947 edition
Since best sounded rather weak, she called him the bestest... ~Rupert Hughes, "Baby Talk," In a Little Town, 1917
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wade;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
~Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky," Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, 1872
Youngsters and adults simply don't speak the same language. Slang, of course, is part of it. Any intelligent adult can with reasonable application learn enough slang to make himself sound ridiculous. The problem is that it keeps changing. If you don't keep up, you make it plain that you have spent the last decade alone on a desert island. ~Gerald Raftery, "Translations from the Teen Age," in New Jersey Education Association Review, May 1959 [a little altered
...slang is nothing but a vestibule in which language, having some wicked action to commit, disguises itself. It puts on these masks of words and rags of metaphors. ~Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, 1862, translated by Lascelles Wraxall and Alphonse Esquiros, 1879
Slang is the illegitimate sister of Poetry. ~Gelett Burgess
Slang has curious interest for those who concern themselves with the mother tongue, an interest that is psychological and sociological as well as linguistic. ~Louise Pound
View'd freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies. It involves so much; is indeed a sort of universal absorber, combiner, and conqueror. The scope of its etymologies is the scope not only of man and civilization, but the history of Nature in all departments, and of the organic Universe, brought up to date; for all are comprehended in words, and their backgrounds. This is when words become vitaliz'd, and stand for things, as they unerringly and soon come to do, in the mind that enters on their study with fitting spirit, grasp, and appreciation.
Slang, profoundly consider'd, is the lawless germinal element, below all words and sentences, and behind all poetry, and proves a certain perennial rankness and protestantism in speech... an attempt of common humanity to escape from bald literalism, and express itself illimitably, which in highest walks produces poets and poems, and doubtless in pre-historic times gave the start to, and perfected, the whole immense tangle of the old mythologies. For, curious as it may appear, it is strictly the same impulse-source, the same thing. Slang, too, is the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language, by which froth and specks are thrown up, mostly to pass away; though occasionally to settle and permanently chrystallize.
To make it plainer, it is certain that many of the oldest and solidest words we use, were originally generated from the daring and license of slang... Language, be it remember'd, is not an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground... Certainly philologists have not given enough attention to this element... the wit — the rich flashes of humor and genius and poetry — darting out often from a gang of laborers, railroad-men, miners, drivers or boatmen!...
The science of language has large and close analogies in geological science, with its ceaseless evolution, its fossils, and its numberless submerged layers and hidden strata, the infinite go-before of the present. ~Walt Whitman, "Slang in America," 1885
Words are plastic these days. ~Dean Koontz, Odd Hours, 2008
"Dr. Leete," I said, "has told me something of the way in which the universality of culture, combined with your scientific appliances, has made physically possible this leadership of the best; but, I beg your pardon, how could a speaker address numbers so vast as you speak of unless the pentecostal miracle were repeated? Surely the audience must be limited at least by the number of those understanding one language."
"Is it possible that Dr. Leete has not told you of our universal language?"
"I have heard no language but English."
"Of course, everybody talks the language of his own country with his countrymen, but with the rest of the world he talks the general language — that is to say, we have nowadays to acquire but two languages to talk to all peoples — our own, and the universal. We may learn as many more as we please, and usually please to learn many, but these two are alone needful to go all over the world or to speak across it without an interpreter..." ~Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), "What the Revolution Did for Women," Equality, 1897 [Esperanto, the public domain universal language, was developed from 1873–1885 and published in 1887 by L.L. Zamenhof, with the first decent English translation published in 1889, but the movement didn't become popular until about the 1920s, so I'm not sure whether Bellamy would've known of it. His popular 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward was translated into Esperanto in 1937.
Volapük, Esperanto, Idiom Neutral, Ido — are these names milestones on the road which is to lead us to the perfect international language and the end of international misunderstanding, or are they so many skeletons on a track that is destined to lose itself in a wilderness of failure?
The writer holds, for reasons which he believes to be unanswerable and which have never to his knowledge been fully developed, that an artificial language cannot succeed. The question we have to answer is this: when you give a man a grammar and a vocabulary do you give him a language? Evidently, if the whole of language were comprised in grammar and vocabulary, the answer would be Yes. However, language contains a third and equally important element, namely, idiom. It is in idiom that the fundamental difference between languages is to be found. And grammar hardly knows idiom.
Are we never, then, to escape from the confusion of tongues? Only one solution remains, a solution already rejected by the experts, but which I submit is worth reconsidering. Take a living language — Spanish — and by international agreement adopt it as a compulsory second language in all the schools. Its spelling is simple, its pronunciation easy, and it possesses an already existing body of idiom. To ensure success we would need to enlist a worldwide deployment of native Spanish speakers to teach, and it would require the entire resources of the press, the radio, and the gramophone. We would have to send the whole world to school. It might be doomed to failure, but the experiment is worth the making. ~T. C. Macaulay, "Interlanguage," 1929, abridged [¡La neta, esa es una idea bien padre! El español es un «idioma» muy bueno. Jaja. Soy «idiotismo». Muerto de risa.
My life is — in a word — words. ~Terri Guillemets, "Literary life," 1998
Words are just obfuscations of reality. ~@AnonymousVoyeur, "Strangers on a Train," 2011
Gas — they call a liquid "gas." ~Jeremy Clarkson [on Americans not calling gasoline "petrol"
Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy. ~Author unknown, 1950
His English accent is delicious. ~Laura L. Livingstone (Herbert Dickinson Ward), Lauriel: The Love Letters of an American Girl, 1901
The Italians have voices like peacocks...
German gives me a cold in the head, sets me wheezing
And coughing; and Russian is nothing but sneezing;
But, by Belus and Babel! I never have heard,
And I never shall hear (I well know it), one word
Of that delicate idiom of Paris without
Feeling... myself quietly falling in love.
~Owen Meredith (Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st earl of Lytton, 1831–1891), Lucile, 1860
In English we are forced to eke out our vocabulary of social intercourse with many French words... ~Logan Pearsall Smith, "Needed Words," 1928
"If you can't say something nice, say it in French," my mother advised... ~Vicki Linder, "In Praise of Gossip," Cosmopolitan, 1982
When she bong-joured me I bong-joured her back.
If I had a phrase-book of a really satisfactory sort I would study it, and not give all my free time to undictionarial readings, but there is no such work on the market. The existing phrase-books are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say. ~Mark Twain, "Italian Without a Master"
Dictionary... Lingo Bingo... ~Leonard Louis Levinson, Webster's Unafraid Dictionary, 1967
Shame on you, you old lexicographers, I shall call you laxicographers because you have grown very lax... ~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "The Eight O'Clock Peril"
It seems to me that the soul, when alone with itself and speaking to itself, uses only a small number of words, none of them extraordinary. ~Ann Beattie, Picturing Will, 1989
Certainly not quite oddly enough, a very great many prophets, cranks, busybodies, snobs, opportunists, simple folks (and other nonartists) do not know that they do not know precisely what the word Apocalypse means. By God, a good dictionary ought to get up on its hind legs and tell them, sometime. ~E.E. Cummings, 1935
"The Ancient Mariner" — This poem would not have taken so well if it had been called "The Old Sailor"... ~Samuel Butler
JIGGY JIGGY or JIKI JIKI: Japanese equivalent for "make haste!" ~Herbert A. Giles, A Glossary of Reference on Subjects Connected with the Far East, 1878
If a language is corruptible, then a constitution written in that language is corruptible. ~Robert Brault, rbrault.blogspot.com
I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; now-a-days whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth. ~Mark Twain, "The Holy Fountain," A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, 1889
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. ~James D. Nicoll (b.1961), "The King's English," rec.arts.sf-lovers, 1990 May 15th
Conversation is the slowest form of human communication. ~Judge, 1919
One afternoon Professor Litton, having dismissed his class... fell to remembering his last communion with Martha, the things he had said — and heard! He wondered, as a philologist, at the strange prevalence of the "oo" sound in his lovemaking. It was plainly an onomatopœic word representing the soul's delight. Oo! was what Ah! is to the soul in exaltation and Oh! to the soul in surprise. If the hyacinths babbled
Tutivillus. — An old name for a celebrated demon, who is said to have collected all the fragments of words which the priests had skipped over or mutilated in the performance of the service, and carried them to hell. ~Slang and its Analogues: A Dictionary of Heterodox Speech, John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, 1890s
Learn a new language and get a new soul. ~Czech proverb, as quoted by The Reader's Digest, 1980
Tzing-tzing. — Excellent. ~Slang and its Analogues: A Dictionary of Heterodox Speech, John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, 1890s
"Well," said Mr. Hobbs, "I'll be — jiggered!" This was an exclamation he always used when he was very much astonished or excited. He could think of nothing else to say just at that puzzling moment... Mr. Hobbs was not quite conventional. ~Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy 1885
"Well—I'll—be—jiggered!" Hunt Manners shouted...
I said, "Oh, don't be jiggered so early in the morning..."
~Percy Keese Fitzhugh, Roy Blakeley: Lost, Strayed or Stolen, 1921
I'll be jitterbugged... ~Claude McKay (1889–1948), Harlem Glory: A Fragment of Aframerican Life, written in the 1940s, published 1990
Jeff Van Gundy: And I've never seen this supersized lineup... I guarantee this
Mike Breen: You can't say 'guarantee' and
Van Gundy: Yah, you're right.
~NBA Finals Game 5, Phoenix Suns vs Milwaukee Bucks, ABC, 2021
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better. ~George Orwell
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