#language

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

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 it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#disappointment #emotions #english #excitement #fail

I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. ↗

— David Sedaris

#language #words #gender

I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language. ↗

— Malcolm X

#humanity #language #snoring #tolerance #diversity

Body language is a very powerful tool. We had body language before we had speech, and apparently, 80% of what you understand in a conversation is read through the body, not the words. ↗

— Deborah Bull

#before #body #body language #conversation #had

Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon: instead of principles, slogans: and, instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas. ↗

— Eric Bentley

#bright #genuine #ideas #instead #jargon

The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#power #nature

When you work in a different language you are not so attached to the words. ↗

— Antonio Banderas

#different #different language #language #words #work

It is time for dead languages to be quiet. ↗

— Natalie Clifford Barney

#languages #quiet #time

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands. ↗

— Alexander McCall Smith

#german #irish #landscape #language #imagination