#language

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write. ↗

— William Labov

#african american #against #american #american children #aspect

I do that in whatever language of the country I'm in, because the audience appreciate it. ↗

— Phil Collins

#audience #because #country #i #i do

If our language, our programs, our creations are not strongly present in the new media, the young generation of our country will be economically and culturally marginalized. ↗

— Jacques Chirac

#creations #culturally #economically #generation #language

Language is a weapon of politicians, but language is a weapon in much of human affairs. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#human #human affairs #language #much #politicians

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything! ↗

— Maria Montessori

#ever #language #learn #men #only

My favorite language for maintainability is Python. It has simple, clean syntax, object encapsulation, good library support, and optional named parameters. ↗

— Bram Cohen

#favorite #good #language #library #named

Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to be plain. ↗

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

#imaginative #language #more #necessary #plain

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#freud #horses #lacan #language #post-structuralism

"Let God be true but every man a liar" is the language of true faith. ↗

— Aiden Wilson Tozer

#every #every man #faith #god #language

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions. ↗

— Michael Cunningham

#again #along #behave #closely #constantly