Quotes & Sayings About Linguistics

Nor does linguistics need the nominal blessing of science. It is some sort of systematic, truth-seeking, knowledge-making enterprise, and as long as it brings home the epistemic bacon by turning up results about language, the label isn't terribly important. Etymology is helpful in this regard: science is a descendant of a Latin word for knowledge, and it is only the knowledge that matters. — Randy Allen Harris

If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong. — Noam Chomsky

It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not. — Neil Postman

The Devil fights from behind barricades of linguistic complexity, but the war of words will be won by those armed only with simplistic truths — Dean Cavanagh

Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it's the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it's a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot. — Stephen Fry

My partner and I were going to renew our vowels, but the consonants revolted. — Stewart Lee Beck

Language is a social art. — Willard Van Orman Quine

Sound is the hard currency; meaning is the network of cultural and formal conventions that turns it into a stick of gum at the
candy store. — Randy Allen Harris

A proof becomes a proof after the social act of accepting it as a proof. This is true of mathematics as it is of physics, linguistics, and biology. — Yuri Manin

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. — Frantz Fanon

In an instant he became aware that the tourist was about to try his own peculiar brand of linguistics, which meant that he would speak loudly and slowly in his own language. — Terry Pratchett

I had a linguistics professor who said that it's man's ability to use language that makes him the dominant species on the planet.That may be. But I think there's one other thing that separates us from animals. We aren't afraid of vaccuum cleaners. — Jeff Stilson

If you focus on literature through only one small element of it, like the more scientific element of linguistics, then where is the joy that brought us literature in the first place, which is to have a story? — T.C. Boyle

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome. — Mark Twain

Why do we say razzle-dazzle instead of dazzle-razzle? Why super-duper, helter-skelter, harum-scarum, hocus-pocus, willy-nilly, hully-gully, roly-poly, holy moly, herky-jerky, walkie-talkie, namby-pamby, mumbo-jumbo, loosey-goosey, wing-ding, wham-bam, hobnob, razza-matazz, and rub-a-dub-dub? I thought you'd never ask. Consonants differ in "obstruency" - the degree to which they impede the flow of air, ranging from merely making it resonate, to forcing it noisily past an obstruction, to stopping it up altogether. The word beginning with the less obstruent consonant always comes before the word beginning with the more obstruent consonant. Why ask why? — Steven Pinker

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent. — Ferdinand De Saussure

They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially, even apart from the necessities of life, since the mind would wing to the other pole and spread itself on the linguistics): yet always I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere: not of 'inventing'. — J.R.R. Tolkien

A religious phenomenon will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such phenomenon by means of physiology, psychology , sociology , economics , linguistics , art or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible element in it the element of the sacred . — Mircea Eliade

General editors' preface The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the twenty-first century. Translation studies brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. This series of books will reflect the breadth of work in translation studies and will enable readers to share in the exciting new developments that are taking place at the present time. — Lawrence Venuti

Before you judge me as some kind of 'anything goes' language heathen, let me just say that I'm not against usage standards. I don't violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don't wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful person. There are social conventions for the way we do lots of things, and it is to everyone's benefit to be familiar with them. But logic ain't got nothin' to do with it. — Arika Okrent

Language corresponds only to itself. Intellectuals suffer from that. And once you begin to question language, you cannot stop at studying linguistics. Analytical philosophy becomes insufficient, artificial grammar becomes insufficient. — Martin Walser

How many Lojbanists does it take to change a broken
light-bulb?" goes the old Lojban joke. "Two: one to decide
what to change it into and one to decide what kind of bulb
emits broken light. — Arika Okrent

In grammar, as in war, there is strength in numbers. — Martin Worthington

An entire mythology is stored within our language. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness. — Philip Zaleski

Dr. Karel Culik is an outstanding applied mathematician, a specialist in algebra, logic, computer sciences and mathematical linguistics. In 1965, he visited the linguistics research program at MIT, and we have worked together on several projects since. — Noam Chomsky

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. — Tristan Tzara

Conversations are like dances. Two people effortlessly move in step with one another, usually anticipating the other person's next move. If one of the dancers moves in an unexpected direction, the other typically adapts and builds on the new approach. As with dancing, it is often difficult to tell who is leading and who is following in that the two people are constantly affecting each other. And once the dance begins, it is almost impossible for one person to singly dictate the couple's movement. — James W. Pennebaker

Language has everything to do with oppression and liberation. When the word "victory" means conquer vs. harmony and the word "equality" means homogenization vs. unity in/through diversity, then the liberation of a people from a "minority" class to "communal stakeholders" becomes much more difficult. Oppression has deep linguistic roots. We see it in conversations which interchange the idea of struggle with suffering in order to normalize abuse. We are the creators of our language, and our definitions shape the perceptions we have of the world. The first step to ending oppression is finding a better method of communication which is not solely dependent on a language rooted in the ideology of oppressive structures. — Cristina Marrero

Pharoahe Monch is like an eloquent linguistics professor moonlighting as a rhyme serial killer terrorist, challenging the listeners' I.Q. while daring him or her to keep up. — Kool Moe Dee

Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation. — Lidia Yuknavitch

Take what the British call the "greengrocer's apostrophe," named for aberrant signs advertising cauliflower's or carrot's in local fruit and vegetable shops. — Naomi S. Baron

To my mind this makes psychedelics central to any political reconstruction, because these are the only force in nature that actually dissolve linguistics structures; lets the mechanics of syntax to be visible, allows the possibility for rapid introduction and spread of new concepts; gives permission for new ways of seeing; and this is what we have to do, we have to change our minds. — Terence McKenna

Definitions, contrary to popular opinion, tell us nothing about things. They only describe people's linguistic habits; that is, they tell us what noises people make under what conditions. — S.I. Hayakawa

But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her. — David Nicholls

We mathematicians are used to the fact that our subject is widely misunderstood, perhaps more than any other subject (except perhaps linguistics). — Keith Devlin

What the survival of threatened languages means, perhaps, is the endurance of dozens, hundreds, thousands of subtly different notions of truth. — Mark Abley

Moving in the conventional direction, phonetics concerns the acoustic dimensions of linguistic sound. Phonology studies the clustering of those acoustic properties into significant cues. Morphology studies the clustering of those cues into meaningful units. Syntax studies the arrangement of those meaningful units into expressive sequences. Semantics studies the composite meaning of those sequences. — Randy Allen Harris

(...) this first-approximation reification of language very easily passes over unnoticed into a harder idealization, especially in everyday parlance. It is this idealization that, for instance, leads people to say that "the language" is degenerating because teenagers don't know how to talk anymore (they were saying that in the eighteenth century too!). It is also behind seeing the dictionary as an authority on the "correct meanings" of words rather than as an attempt to record how words are understood in the speech community. Even linguists adopt this stance all the time in everyday life (especially as teachers of students who can't write a decent paragraph). But once we go inside the heads of speakers to study their own individual cognitive structure, the stance must be dropped. — Ray S. Jackendoff

In order for such integration to succeed [i.e. integration of all subdisciplines], probably everyone will have to endure some discomfort and give a little. We cannot afford the strategy that regrettably seems endemic in the cognitive sciences: one discovers a new tool, decides it is the only tool needed, and, in an act of academic (and funding) territoriality, loudly proclaims the superiority of this tool over all others. My own attitude is that we are in this together. It is going to take us lots of tools to understand language. We should try to appreciate exactly what each of the tools we have is good for, and to recognize when new and as yet undiscovered tools are necessary. — Ray S. Jackendoff

What's "right" in language comprehension: ERPs reveal right hemisphere language capabilities" published in Language and Linguistics Compass (2008; Volume 2, pages 1-17). — Anonymous

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds. — Ben Lerner

The study of universal grammar is a joint venture between globetrotting theoreticians who worry about impossible grammars and laboratory experimentalists who put young children through these impossible grammars. Perhaps, as in physics, one of these days there will be a grand unified theory of universal grammar. Linguistics today is where physics was in the age of Galileo and Kepler. The collection of principles may one day be replaced by one powerful principle - perhaps just the principle of recursion. that underlies them all. Universal grammar is still waiting for its Newton and Einstein. Whatever it turns out to be, its job its to keep children on the right track to their language. — Charles Yang

That which is alike will be called same. That which is not same is different. — Leonard Bloomfield

The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our inner experience, which in its very nature transcends linguistics. — D.T. Suzuki

The audible signals people can produce are not a series of crisp beeps like on a touch-tone phone. Speech is a river of breath, bent into hisses and hums by the soft flesh of the mouth and throat. — Steven Pinker

Astronomy is not the science of all objects with mass and weight and velocity. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Biology is not the science of all objects that consume and excrete and have inherited characteristics. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. Linguistics is not the study of all possible symbols or symbol systems. The objects it describes do not include '56 Chevies. — Randy Allen Harris

A metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression (a form of words) used for artistic or rhetorical purposes; instead, it is a process of human understanding by which we achieve meaningful experience that we can make sense of. A metaphor, in this "experiential" sense, is a process by which we understand and structure one domain of experience in terms of another domain of a different kind. — Mark Johnson

Suppose a top politician, entertainment figure, or sports star said it didn't really matter who shot Lincoln or why, who attacked Pearl Harbor, the Alamo or the USS Liberty. Imagine the derision. Imagine the ridicule. Imagine the loss in credibility and marketing revenue. Now imagine if a well-respected academic 'who should know better' said exactly the same thing. It doesn't really matter who committed a great crime; history had nothing to teach us; we should never waste precious time trying to apprehend the perpetrators, nor understand their motives but focus only on the outcome of their foul deeds.

Well, that is exactly what Noam Chomsky appears to believe. Do not focus on the plot or the plotters or the clever planning of any crime but only the aftermath. Strangely, I had always thought linguistics was the scientific study of language rather than a lame attempt at disinformation. — Douglas Herman

Linguistics is a good way of defining the culture of a brand. The vocabulary used by sports and lifestyle brands - running, fitness, training, motorsports - is all about functionality, whereas the vocabulary of the luxury business - handbags, ready-to-wear - is all about the product. — Francois-Henri Pinault

Psychology, the talking cure, linguistics, and semantics - they're all like dogs poking around and sniffing their own vomit. There might be some gems in there, you never know. For certain you will at the very least know what you had for lunch. And you can ascertain what not to eat again. — David Byrne

I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics. — Daniel Everett

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? — Frank R. Wilson

In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary. — Steven Pinker

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. — Mark Twain

Remember that lettuce doesn't grow on a spruce; and it also doesn't rhyme with it. — Jakub Marian

Poetry translation is like playing a piano sonata on a trombone. — Nataly Kelly

In the world "out there," there are no verbs, no speech events, and no adjacency pairs. There are particles of matter moving around in certain recurrent and yet not fully predictable patterns. We interpret such experiences as and through symbolic means, including linguistic expressions. That's what it means to be human. — Duranti A Alessandro

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family. — William Jones

Immediately on my arrival at the Project I began studying linguistics, because that seemed imperative to me. I was soon amazed to learn that, when it came to the primary, most fundamental concepts in this field - a field supposedly precise, quantified, mathematized - there was absolutely no agreement. Why, the authorities could not come together on so basic and preliminary a question as what exactly morphemes and phonemes were. But when I asked the appropriate people, in all sincerity, how in the world they could accomplish anything, given this state of affairs, my naive question was taken as a sneering insinuation. I — Stanislaw Lem

Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself. — Anthony Burgess

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. — Bill Bryson

The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life. — Simon S. Tam

The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the 'external' elements of linguistics from the 'internal' elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects. — Pierre Bourdieu

It is possible to be a great novelist - that is, to render a veracious account of your times - and a bad writer - that is, an incompetent practitioner of applied linguistics. — Angela Carter

Because everyone uses language to talk, everyone thinks they can talk about language. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two. — Steven Pinker

The rules of syntax and intonation and words matured over time into the system we have today because they were progressively refined by use and the forge of survival and reproduction - not because the brain got big and complicated for some other reason, and all of a sudden we discovered we could now manipulate symbols as well. — Christine Kenneally

No satisfactory historical linguistic study was carried out before the beginning of the nineteenth century, and accordingly linguists had to develop appropriate methods for the new field. Like other new sciences, historical linguistics then looked to those that had developed useful methods. The greatest help came from comparative anatomy. — Winfred P. Lehmann

All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all. — Terry Eagleton

Don't you find it odd that two of the foremost symptoms of insanity are the hearing voices and talking to oneself? Is it any wonder that language is an area of such interest in psychology?
(attrib: F.L. Vanderson) — Mort W. Lumsden

Lies, fictions and untrue suppositions can create new human truths which build technology, art, language, everything that is distinctly of Man. The word "stone" for instance is not a stone, it is an oral pattern of vocal, dental and labial sounds or a scriptive arrangement of ink on a white surface, but man pretends that it is actually the thing it refers to. Every time he wishes to tell another man about a stone he can use the word instead of the thing itself. The word bodies forth the object in the mind of the listener and both speaker and listener are able to imagine a stone without seeing one. All the qualities of stone can be metaphorically and metonymically expressed. "I was stoned, stony broke, stone blind, stone cold sober, stonily silent," oh, whatever occurs. More than that, a man can look at a stone and call it a weapon, a paperweight, a doorstep, a jewel, an idol. He can give it function, he can possess it. — Stephen Fry

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary. — Roy Blount Jr.

A theory of reality must not only explain reality, but also knowledge about that reality because knowing reality is part of reality. — Ashish Dalela

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other. — Ferdinand De Saussure

The only languages which do not change are dead ones. — David Crystal

Possible explanations for talented language learning fall into two general areas. One view says: What matters is a person's sense of mission and dedication to language learning. You don't need to describe high performers as biologically exceptional, because what they do is a product of practice. Anyone can become a foreign-language expert - even an adult. (...) The other view says: Something neurological is going on. We may not know exactly what the mechanisms are, but we can't explain exceptional outcomes fully through training or motivation. — Michael Erard

Welsh mutates initial consonants. Actually all languages do, but most of them take centuries, while Welsh does it while your mouth is still open. — Jo Walton

Linguine linguistics that left my verbal essence saucy,
Send a message, leave you sleepin' next to headless horsey. — Action Bronson

Not everyone who knows how to write can be a writer. Not everyone who knows two languages can be a translator. — Nataly Kelly

Some have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorism approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. — Willard Van Orman Quine

People's sense of how they talk tends to differ from the reality. — John McWhorter

In Iraq, interpreters were ten times more likely to be killed than were U.S. troops. — Nataly Kelly

[Philosophers] have come to envy the philologist and the mathematician, and they have taken over all the inessential elements in those studies - with the result that they know more about devoting care and attention to their speech than about devoting such attention to their lives. — Seneca.

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

Structural linguistics is a bitterly divided and unhappy profession, and a large number of its practitioners spend many nights drowning their sorrows in Ouisghian Zodahs. — Douglas Adams

If the Mentalese story about the content of thought is true, then there couldn't be a private language argument. Good. That explains why there isn't one. (In Critical Condition, p. 68) — Jerry A. Fodor

Our vocabulary may become a real time algorithmic word bank.
Could you imagine having a conversation like that?
Where the meaning of words constantly adapts? — Natasha Tsakos

Other approaches to studying language, and there are many, go by names like poetics, philology, and rhetoric, but as long as we have had the word in English, linguistics has been associated with the methods, goals, and results of science.1 When William Whewell (who is also responsible for the coinage, scientist) first proposed the term, it was in his History of the Inductive Sciences (1837.1:cxiv; he was borrowing it from the Germans, who, Teutonically
enough, later came to prefer Sprachwissenschaft). — Randy Allen Harris

I tell ya, if I hadn't chosen the career of being a performer, I think linguistics would have been a natural area that I'd have loved - to teach it, probably, Language has always fascinated me. There's a genetic inheritance there a good language gene, which I inherited [from my mother and grandfather] and she fostered that in me as he fostered that in her. — George Carlin

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. — Donna J. Haraway

The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines. — Michael Eric Dyson

Long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings ... but short words were slippery, unpredictable, changing their meanings without any pattern. — Robert A. Heinlein

It may well be that individuals who are attracted into linguistics have a certain talent for metalinguistic reflection - a delight in constructing ungrammatical sentences, finding curious ambiguities and implicatures, hearing and imitating accents, and the like - and that professional training as a linguist only amplifies this proclivity. It would then be no surprise that linguists' sense of what is interesting in language is different from that of our friends in biology, economics, and dentistry. It is just that we linguists have made the mistake of assuming everyone else is like us. — Ray S. Jackendoff

The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life. One of his linguistics professors, a man named Samuel Goldstein, had helped him understand the consequences of that simple fact. Sam was Korean by birth, so if you knew his name, you knew he was adopted. "What got me when I was a kid was that people knew something fundamental about me and my family just by looking at us. I felt like I had a big neon sign over my head flashing ADOPTEE," Sam told him. "It's not that I was ashamed of being adopted. I just wished that I had the option of revealing it myself. — Mary Doria Russell

We live in an era of terrible preoccupation with presentation and interpretation, one in which relations between who someone is and what he believes and how he "expresses himself" have been thrown into big time flux. — David Foster Wallace

Home means always here... — Will Advise

I should think a dead language would be rather boring, socially
speaking. — Sol Luckman

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say "God." This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time. — Carl Sagan

The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over. — Hakim Bey