#linguistic

If words are not things, or maps are not the actual territory, then, obviously, the only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is found in structure, and structure alone. ↗

— Alfred Korzybski

#alone #between #found #linguistic #link

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations. ↗

— Edward Sapir

#art

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#writing #death

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings . . . but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#change

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#faith #linguistics #communication

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#linguistics #political-correctness #equality

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. ↗

— Frantz Fanon

#politics #psychology #culture

Devising a vocabulary for gardening is like devising a vocabulary for sex. There are the correct Latin names, but most people invent euphemisms. Those who refer to plants by Latin name are considered more expert, if a little pedantic. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#nature #nature

Death is a displaced name for a linguistic predicament. ↗

— Paul de Man

#displaced #linguistic #name #predicament

The marvelous thing is that even in studying linguistics, we find that the universe as a whole is patterned, ordered, and to some degree intelligible to us. ↗

— Kenneth L. Pike

#even #find #intelligible #linguistics #marvelous