#linguistic

Grammar is politics by other means. ↗

— Donna J. Haraway

#gender #grammar #linguistics #politics #nature

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour an serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. ↗

— Donna J. Haraway

#feminism #irony #linguistics #ontology #politcs

It seemed to a number of philosophers of language, myself included, that we should attempt to achieve a unification of Chomsky's syntax, with the results of the researches that were going on in semantics and pragmatics. I believe that this effort has proven to be a failure. Though Chomsky did indeed revolutionize the subject of linguistics, it is not at all clear, at the end the century, what the solid results of this revolution are. As far as I can tell there is not a single rule of syntax that all, or even most, competent linguists are prepared to agree is a rule. ↗

— John Searle

#linguistics #philosophy #science #science

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

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops. ↗

— Nataly Kelly

#language #linguistics #translation #iraq

If we ask a vague question, such as, 'What is poetry?' we expect a vague answer, such as, 'Poetry is the music of words,' or 'Poetry is the linguistic correction of disorder.' ↗

— A. R. Ammons

#ask #correction #disorder #expect #linguistic

Why does everyone cling to the masculine imagery and pronouns even though they are a mere linguistic device that has never meant that God is male? ↗

— Carol P. Christ

#device #does #even #everyone #god

Linguistic philosophers continue to argue that probably music is not a language, that is in the philosophical debate. Another point of view is to say that music is a very profound language. ↗

— Robert Fripp

#argue #continue #debate #language #linguistic

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#both #connotation #fascinating #gained #how

Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award. ↗

— Elfriede Jelinek

#deserving #draft #employing #exposing #expression