#language

[B]y reinterpreting Freudianism in terms of language, a pre-eminently social activity, Lacan permits us to explore the relations between the unconscious and human society. One way of describing his work is to say that he makes us recognize that the unconscious is not some kind of seething, tumultuous, private region ‘inside’ us, but an effect of our relations with one another. The unconscious is, so to speak, ‘outside’ rather than ‘within’ us — or rather it exists ‘between’ us, as our relationships do. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#language #psychoanalysis #social #unconscious #relationship

The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language. ↗

— William Lindsay Gresham

#carnival #carny #language #performance #religion

Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other men. ↗

— Karl Marx

#men

New concepts should be introduced by the power of imagery. ↗

— Douglas Coop

#charisma #civil-disobedience #loaded-language #power #propaganda

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#bbc #language #linguistics #writing #trust

Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control. ↗

— Robert Bringhurst

#literature #writing #economics

Over the years, I've trained myself to speak using the same language I would use if I were typing: meaning using full sentences in the way that paragraphs and scenes are arranged. ↗

— Kevin J. Anderson

#full #i #language #meaning #myself

Every legend, moreover, contains its residuum of truth, and the root function of language is to control the universe by describing it. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#control #describing #every #function #language

War is what happens when language fails. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#happens #language #war

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. ↗

— George Orwell

#english-language #insincerity #english