#vocabulary

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

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend. ↗

— Alan Bradley

#humor #vocabulary #friendship

I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually. The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity. ↗

— Vera Wang

#book #both #creativity #define #dresses

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer. ↗

— Mary Wesley

#eighties #especially #fifties #friends #i

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. ↗

— William Labov

#african american #america #american #any #continental

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images. ↗

— James Merrill

#could #fascinating #fit #hope #i

I always try to think of a vocabulary to match different musical situations. ↗

— Roscoe Mitchell

#different #i #i always #match #musical

There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring. ↗

— Marilyn Hacker

#connected #example #for example #language #liberate

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues. ↗

— Alberto Manguel

#vocabulary #words #technology

Words are not even within me. They're not in my vocabulary to really express the kind of feeling that I had. ↗

— Tanya Tucker

#express #feeling #had #i #kind