Common Vocabulary Quotes

So far as the advocates of a constructed international language are concerned, it is rather to be wondered at how much in common their proposals actually have, both in vocabulary and in general spirit of procedure.

I've been lucky with the circle of people I'm playing with. We've played enough that there's a language we talk with each other when we play.

Absent a national church, Christianity has frequently provided an invisible mortar for our culture and a common vocabulary for our great debates.

Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

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.

Don't use big words. They mean so little.

The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.

If the academic community gets its way, we will soon all be speaking with a single voice.

We must use words as they are used, or stand aside from life.