#lang

There was a family joke that Lucy's first words were, "Nicholas is bugging me! ↗

— Alyxandra Harvey

#lucy #solange #family

I went on a blind date last night. We watched a silent film. We stayed up all night talking in sign language. I fell asleep in the fetal position in her cat's litter box. Ah, 'twas a great night. I'll never forget dancing with an albino under the stars. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#blind-date #cats #dancing #date #dating

I like the sounds of words. Words are very enjoyable. I like words because they are... seductive. And I like words because they can contain... fantasies. ↗

— James Lusarde

#erotic-romance #erotica #fantasy #imagination #language

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#literature #reality #scotch #truth #values

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#linguistics #political-correctness #equality

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#humor #language #equality

Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness", "joy", or "regret". Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that is oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#language #patriarchal #words #experience

Even trained for years as we all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine. ↗

— Lois Lowry

#sunshine #wisdom #experience

My burden is my purpose. Without it, I wouldn't be. ↗

— Solange nicole

#determination #life-experience #overcoming #solange #experience

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