John Maynard Smith Quotes

People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

Buzzwords and cliches - those are stock in trade. There's nothing wrong with them.

Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.

I really like language - and slang in particular, and just the shorthand we use when we communicate with people.

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Language is fun; it's fun to try.

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

A friend of mine tells that I talk in shorthand and then smudge it.

What language are you talking in now? It appears to be bollocks.

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

We are surrounded by hundreds of 'tribes,' each speaking their own distinct slanguage of colourful words, jokes and phrases that together form an idiosyncratic phrasebook, years in the making.

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

I use a lot of old-fashioned expressions.

The military never uses a full word if they can create an abbreviation.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

Slang is really coded talk. I can say a few things, in front of somebody, that only people who know what I'm saying are going to pick up on.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

I have this little thing that people call Keegan-ese, where I don't speak English words at all. I just say stuff like, "You gotta toish the doish and you gotta maloish the hoish."

An expert is someone who takes something you already know and makes it sound confusing.

Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task.

One of the things I was taught was how you deal with language. It's important, very important in comedy.

Whenever I write lyrics and an Americanism slips in, I always cut it straight out. I can't use the word 'babe,' for instance. It makes me cringe.

I love how humans talk.