#vocabulary

One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. ↗

— Stephen King

#dress-up #embarrassing #style #vocabulary #writing

As you can appreciate over my lifetime I've developed a large vocabulary of sounds each requiring certain physical techniques often combined with a specific effect box. ↗

— Adrian Belew

#box #certain #combined #developed #each

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar. ↗

— Fred Frith

#does #find #fluently #grammar #language

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. ↗

— Booker T. Washington

#borrow #down #english #just #languages

In the younger days of the Republic there lived in the county of - two men, who were admitted on all hands to be the very best men In the county; which, in the Georgia vocabulary, means they could flog any other two men in the county. ↗

— Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

#any #best #could #county #days

Losing is not in my vocabulary. ↗

— Ruud van Nistelrooy

#vocabulary

I'm very educated and can give you somewhat of a vocabulary, but I don't get to the philosophical side. ↗

— Shaquille O'Neal

#get #give #i #philosophical #side

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace. ↗

— David Ogilvy

#consumers #important #marketplace #most #product

Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with extra expense (having to sense or feel more). I don't share that opinion. Why reduce life to a monotone? Is that truer to the experience of being alive? I don't think so. It robs us of life's many textures. Language provides an abundance of words to keep us company on our travels. But we're losing words at a reckless pace, the national vocabulary is shrinking. Most Americans use only several hundred words or so. Frugality has its place, but not in the larder of language. We rely on words to help us detail how we feel, what we once felt, what we can feel. When the blood drains out of language, one's experience of life weakens and grows pale. It's not simply a dumbing down, but a numbing. ↗

— Diane Ackerman

#metaphor #vocabulary #experience

I was probably just trying to be Dennis Miller, but without the vocabulary to actually be Dennis Miller. I guess I was just less interesting than I am now, if I am interesting at all. ↗

— Todd Barry

#am #dennis #dennis miller #guess #i