#language

Try telling the boy who’s just had his girlfriend’s name cut into his arm that there’s slippage between the signifier and the signified. Or better yet explain to the girl who watched in the mirror as the tattoo artist stitched the word for her father’s name (on earth as in heaven) across her back that words aren’t made of flesh and blood, that they don’t bite the skin. Language is the animal we’ve trained to pick up the scent of meaning. It’s why when the boy hears his father yelling at the door he sends the dog that he’s kept hungry, that he’s kicked, then loved, to attack the man, to show him that every word has a consequence, that language, when used right, hurts. ↗

— Todd Davis

#language #power #words #inspirational

The arithmetic of love defied intuition: only when given away did it multiply. ↗

— Barbara Wright

#love

...there are no sweeter words in the English language (or any other) than husband and wife. ↗

— Lanier Ivester

#language #marriage #wife #marriage

Music is a language that doesn’t speak in particular words. It speaks in emotions, and if it’s in the bones, it’s in the bones. ↗

— Keith Richards

#emotions #keith-richards #language #music #the-rolling-stones

[Y]ou possess all the attributes of a demagogue; a screeching, horrible voice, a perverse, crossgrained nature and the language of the market-place. In you all is united which is needful for governing. ↗

— Aristophanes

#attributes #barter #character #demagoguery #government

Language by its very nature is naive,we make it complex and naughty. We make it look and sound like what it is not. ↗

— Nahiyan bin Asadullah

#nature

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing. ↗

— Henry Hazlitt

#power-of-words #vocabulary #words #science

لا توجد أي دولة في العالم انطلقت في المجال التكنولوجي دون الاعتماد على اللغة الأم. ↗

— Mahdi Elmandjra

#science #science

She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#lies #mouth #native-tongue #remembered #speak

So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays. ↗

— N.H. Kleinbaum

#laziness #morose #tired #very #women