#lang

I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind. ↗

— Teresa Jordan

#words #family

Cat's friends seemed like very sweet girls," Dad says. "They were the bomb," I say fervently, and he looks back at me with raised eyebrows. "'The bomb' is a good thing? Like 'sick'? "Duh," I reply, and Dad lets out a sigh. "Thirteen-year-olds should come with subtitles," he says, turning onto our street. ↗

— Maya Gold

#language #oldies #sick #subtitles #youngsters

Jokes are many things. 'Funny' is only one of them. ↗

— Melinda Chapman

#humor #language #politics #funny

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind. ↗

— Patrick Ness

#dialect #language #funny

I was impressed with Jack [Kerouac]’s commitment to serious writing at the expense of everything else in his life. At a time when the middle class was burgeoning with new homes, two-tone American cars, and black-and-white TVs, when American happiness was defined by upwardly mobile consumerism, Kerouac etched a different existence and he wrote in an original language. ↗

— Sterling Lord

#language #writing #home

Humor is a universal lanuage. ↗

— Joel Goodman

#language #universal #humor

We have our own language. Christianese... We don't say 'He's out of his mind,' no, we say 'That's our youth pastor. ↗

— Tim Hawkins

#humor #language #humor

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess. ↗

— Marcel Duchamp

#chess #god #language #life #religion

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. ↗

— Siri Hustvedt

#language #memory #words #imagination

Individual words, sounds, squiggles on paper with no meanings other than those with which our imagination can clothe them. ↗

— Jasper Fforde

#imagination