#vocabulary

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate. ↗

— Mos Def

#art #articulate #good #good art #people

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way. ↗

— Mos Def

#articulate #artist #everyday #experience #express

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

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

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that human beings are basically made of clay, which, as the encyclopedias helpfully explain, is a detrital sedimentary rock made up of tiny mineral fragments measuring one two hundred and fifty-sixths of a millimeter. Until now, despite long linguistic study, no one has managed to come up with a name for this. ↗

— José Saramago

#vocabulary #communication

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 understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory. ↗

— Jack Vance

#humor #vocabulary #humor

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

— Alan Bradley

#humor #vocabulary #friendship

...he remembered his uncle saying once how little vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only in the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple cliches served his few simple passions and needs and lusts. ↗

— William Faulkner

#vocabulary #life

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