#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

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

There is a continuum of values between the churches and the general community. What distinguishes the handling of these values in the churches is mainly the heavier dosage of religious vocabulary involved. ↗

— Peter L. Berger

#churches #community #continuum #distinguishes #dosage

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island. ↗

— Derek Walcott

#biography #body #individual #island #joins

Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called. 
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#aquatic #bizarre #creatures #fins #fish

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary. ↗

— Jamie Dimon

#fail #must #our #term #too

Being a mother gives you an incredible feeling of empowerment, you think if I can go through such pain and that level of sleep and still operate and not be grumpy you can do anything. It can be quite scary, you can't function your brain, forget your vocabulary. ↗

— Anna Friel

#being #brain #empowerment #feeling #forget

I've created a vocabulary of different styles. I draw from many different ways to take a picture. Sometimes I go back to reportage, to journalism. ↗

— Annie Leibovitz

#created #different #different styles #different ways #draw

According to my wife, my use of vocabulary is wide and varied. ↗

— Christopher Monckton

#use #varied #vocabulary #wide #wife