Language Issues Quotes & Sayings

Objections to Christianity ... are phrased in words, but that does not mean that they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defense of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper in the caverns of volition, of commitment. Perhaps this is why Saint Francis, so the story goes, instructed his followers to "preach the Gospel always, using words if necessary." It is not simply and straightforwardly wrong to make arguments in the defense of the Christian faith, but it is a relatively superficial activity: it fails to address the core issues. — Alan Jacobs

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing. — John McWhorter

My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation. — Niklaus Wirth

Simply because you're a Democrat doesn't mean you can't speak to these issues in language that appeals to voters, particularly independent voters. — Dannel Malloy

Design is just language and the real issue is what you use that language to do. — Tibor Kalman

For a pragmatist like me, the important issues concern the words we might deploy to achieve our purposes, rather than the language we actually use. — Philip Kitcher

People who write about issues like poverty or terrorism are a part of the elite, and the distance between the elite and nonelite is growing very fast. You can move around the world but meet only people who speak your language, who share the same ideas, the same beliefs, and in doing so you can lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the world does not think or believe in or speak the everyday discourse of the elite. — Pankaj Mishra

The language 'It's too late' is very unsuitable for most environmental issues. It's too late for the dodo and for people who've starved to death already, but it's not too late to prevent an even bigger crisis. The sooner we act on the environment, the better. — Jeremy Grantham

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways. — Reza Aslan

Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing. — Aldo Leopold

I had all this anxiety about what it meant to be a minority. My professors - the same men who taught me the intricacies of language - just shied away from the issue. They didn't want to talk about it, other than to suggest I could be a "role model" to other Hispanics - when I went back to my barrio, I suppose. — Richard Rodriguez

Unlike the issue of messiahhood, which arose when Jews and Christians were members of the same religio-political community and spoke the same conceptual language, the issues of the incarnation and the Trinity divide people who are no longer members of the same community and who no longer speak the same language. — David Novak

Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity of cultural influences which the author had at his disposal. Literature, with Chaucer, has taken on a new role: as well as affirming a developing language, it is a mirror of its times - but a mirror which teases as it reveals, which questions while it narrates, and which opens up a range of issues and questions, instead of providing simple, easy answers. — Ronald Carter

Americans are interesting creatures. They criticize those who speak their language with a slight accent but have no issues with butchering most other languages, my name included. — Santino Hassell

The language I learned was pretty, full of passivity and silence. I had no proper language for the issues of blood and anger, yet much of what went on when I was a child made me angry. There were no words a nice girl could use to describe anger; her options were to remain silent or to use indiscreet language, the kind that curls in a room like smoke and soon disappears. We girls were taught to speak safely and to bandage our anger with polite, pretty words. We might talk about the anger only in questions and sighs, unable to curse, yell or break windows in the beautiful garden. — Beth Bagley

That means presenting the issues in certain ways that will appeal to those people and then becoming a prisoner of your own language and thought process. That has always happened - it's just been intensified. — Robert Scheer

Ezra Pound was a crackpot on social and political issues, but he knew what he was talking about in matters of the written language. — Pete Hamill

It says a lot about Sandberg's brand of feminism that this campaign focuses on policing language rather than bringing attention to important issues that have real impact on women and girls — Jessica Roy

Our two party platforms were emphatic about Jerusalem being the capital of Israel. For the Obama administration to remove this language from the Democratic Party platform drives a wedge into one of the few issues that our two parties agreed on. — Paul Ryan

She considered him to be a good person, possibly with a Practical Pig complex that was sometimes a little too apparent. And he was unbearably naive with regard to certain elementary moral issues. He had an indulgent and forgiving personality that looked for explanations and excuses for the way people behaved, and he would never get it that the raptors of the world only understood only one language. She almost felt awkwardly protective whenever she thought of him. — Stieg Larsson

The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with. I'd see how true they often were. Here they were, banding together in packs, so I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn't even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy. — George Carlin

I think that there are non-physical laws all right: genuine (if not strict) laws written in the language of biology, economics, and so on. But I don't regard that as a contentious issue. Even reductionists about chemistry will think that there are special chemical laws whose formulation makes essential use of chemical terminology. — David Papineau

Look at the coded language the Right is using against President Barack Obama. Openly calling him a liar in Congress, saying he is 'not a Christian, he was not born here, he is not one of us.' That makes addressing such issues trickier for the first African-American in the White House. — Jesse Jackson

While self-interest arising from the enjoyment of meat eating is obviously one reason for its entrenchment, and inertia another, a process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed. Language distances us from the reality of meat eating, thus reinforcing the symbolic meaning of meat eating, a symbolic meaning that is intrinsically patriarchal and male-oriented. Meat becomes a symbol for what is not seen but is always there
patriarchal control of animals and of language. — Carol J. Adams

In general, the philological movement opened up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance, the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in the spirit of linguistics. — Ferdinand De Saussure

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. — George Orwell

With the insight that genuine literacy involves "reading the word and the world," renowned educator Paulo Freire helped open the door to a broader understanding of the term, one that moves from a strict decoding and reproducing of language into issues of economics, health, and sustainable development — Paulo Freire

Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it. — David Crystal

Each character requires different language, and these issues become inseparable. You have all these balls in the air: language, character, narrative. For me, the primary focus must be words, sentences, paragraphs. — Dana Spiotta

The Government honoring our treaties and sovereignty is first and foremost. These issues are still the top priority which [Barak] Obama, if elected, has promised us. For us, we should implement the most impor-tant programs right now: they are programs to teach the children a positive sense of dignity, self-worth, and the importance of sustaining their culture, history, language and honor as a people. — Leonard Peltier

I think that language matters. I think that people who are in public life have an opportunity to help the public understand issues and understand the urgency of issues. And to that extent, I think it is important how issues are talked about. — Maya Harris

One of the first issues I dealt with was the struggle to find a language, to find my own words. — Rirkrit Tiravanija

Deutsch and her colleagues, in their 2006 paper, suggested that their work not only has "implications for the issues of modularity in the processing of speech and music ... [but] of the evolutionary origin" of both. In particular, they see absolute pitch, whatever its subsequent vicissitudes, as having been crucial to the origins of both speech and music. In his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, Steven Mithen takes this idea further, suggesting that music and language have a common origin, and that a sort of combined protomusic-cum-protolanguage was characteristic of the Neanderthal mind. — Oliver Sacks

I am glad that Zimbabwe and China speak the same language on many issues. We share the same conviction that only a fair, just, and non-prescriptive world order, based on the principles of the charter of the United Nations, can deliver the development we all need. — Robert Mugabe

For strictly scientific or technological purposes all this is irrelevant. On a pragmatic view, as on a religious view, theory and concepts are held in faith. On the pragmatic view the only thing that matters is that the theory is efficacious, that it 'works' and that the necessary preliminaries and side issues do not cost too much in time and effort. Beyond that, theory and concepts go to constitute a language in which the scientistic matters at issue can be formulated and discussed. — Bertram Brockhouse

An abusive man who is adept in the language of feelings can make his partner feel crazy by turning each argument into a therapy session in which he puts her reactions under a microscope and assigns himself the role of "helping" her. He may, for example, "explain" to her the emotional issues she needs to work through, or analyze her reasons for "mistakenly" believing that he is mistreating her. — Lundy Bancroft

A lot of times, if you watch sign language interpreters, there can be some lag time issues. When that happens, I think you lose the hearing audience. — Jack Jason

In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name? — Salman Rushdie

At its best, SF cinema is an allegorical site that invites the audience to safely examine and reflect on long-standing social issues in an unfamiliar setting, providing the possibility of viewing them in a new light. At its worst, the process of allegorical displacement invites audiences to affirm racist ideas, confirm racial fears, and reinforce dubious generalizations about race and the place of African Americans in U.S. society without employing overt racial language or explicit imagery. — Adilifu Nama

There are a lot of reasons people don't talk about climate change. One of them has to do with the language of science, and people feeling not competent about this issue. — Margaret D. Klein

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. — Jeanette Winterson

In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn't in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat. — James Ellroy

[Barack] Obama has a grasp of language and the presentation of language, particularly in times of crisis. And he did this over the race issue. He did this early on in his administration, when the country was polarized. That was unprecedented. — Frank Luntz

The Constitution gives us a standard to follow. We cannot define impeachable offenses to a greater degree than the language of the Constitution. But we all agree the issue is the public trust. Our duty is not to punish anyone. And our challenge is to avoid pettiness. — Asa Hutchinson

It's clear by now that the problem of language evolution is completely intractable when you approach it from the perspective of a single discipline. For all the salient questions to be answered, the multidisciplinary nature of the field will have to become even more so. So far, it has taken years for individuals in different departments to start talking, to develop research questions that make sense for more than one narrow line of inquiry, and to start to understand one another's points of view. The field of language evolution needs students who can synthesize information from neuroscience, psychology, computer modeling, genetics, and linguistics. The more this happens, the richer and wider the field will become, instead of devolving around one or two theoretical issues. — Christine Kenneally

Neo-Darwinian language and conceptual structure itself ensures scientific failure: Major questions posed by zoologists cannot be answered from inside the neo-Darwinian straitjacket. Such questions include, for example, 'How do new structures arise in evolution?' 'Why, given so much environmental change, is stasis so prevalent in evolution as seen in the fossil record?' 'How did one group of organisms or set of macromolecules evolve from another?' The importance of these questions is not at issue; it is just that neo-Darwinians, restricted by their resuppositions, cannot answer them. — Lynn Margulis

Are you having performance issues?" I asked in surprise. "Bite your tongue," Vlad said, with a snort. "I was seeing if Dermot understood sign language, but from the look on his face, it seems not. — Jeaniene Frost