“Language comes first. It s not that language grows out of consciousness, if you haven t got language, you can t be conscious.”
“Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she d invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words-- friend and real and story and change --words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like identity and search and cloud, had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had American become an ironic term? How had democracy come to be used in an arch, mocking way?”
“A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
“All translations are made up opined Vikram, Languages are different for a reason. You can t move ideas between them without losing something”
“My dear friend, clear your mind of cant [excessive thought]. You may talk as other people do: you may say to a man, Sir, I am your most humble servant. You are not his most humble servant. You may say, These are bad times; it is a melancholy thing to be reserved to such times. You don t mind the times ... You may talk in this manner; it is a mode of talking in Society; but don t think foolishly.”
“Language disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external form of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized.”
“What s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.”
“When I say or write something, there are actually a whole lot of different things I am communicating. The propositional content (i.e., the verbal information I m trying to convey) is only one part of it. Another part is stuff about me, the communicator. Everyone knows this. It s a function of the fact there are so many different well-formed ways to say the same basic thing, from e.g. I was attacked by a bear! to Goddamn bear tried to kill me! to That ursine juggernaut did essay to sup upon my person! and so on.”
“Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.”
“I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.”
“there is [...] a last even of last times of saying if you do not love me I shall not be loved if I do not love you I shall not love”
“Nothing is so easy as to deceive one’s self when one does not lack wit and is familiar with all the niceties of language. Language is a prostitute queen who descends and rises to all roles. Disguises herself, arrays herself in fine apparel, hides her head and effaces herself; an advocate who has an answer for everything, who has always foreseen everything, and who assumes a thousand forms in order to be right. The most honorable of men is he who thinks best and acts best, but the most powerful is he who is best able to talk and write”
“A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them”
“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”
“You don’t realise how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense.”
“I don t understand why people never say what they mean. It s like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn t a native English speaker get the picture, so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)”
“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that s why it flourishes.”