Language Boundaries Quotes

A nation is not a linguistic unit. The English-speaking peoples, whether under the Union Jack or not, are, with one exception, not English; neither are the German-speaking Swiss and Austrians German, nor the French-speaking Swiss and Belgians and Canadians French.

Language cannot say everything, fortunately.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Nobody speaks German outside of Germany.

My dad said that if it's part of the character, I'm allowed to say bad words, but if it's not part of the character, and I say it at home when I'm not acting, that I won't be acting anymore.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

English poetry begins whenever we decide to say the modern English language begins, and it extends as far as we decide to say that the English language extends.

Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.

My mother, who grew up in Pennsylvania, literally washed my mouth out with soap once for saying, 'Shut up!' to my sister. She would have washed my mouth out with gasoline if she knew how foul my mouth was racially when she wasn't around.

English is capable of defining sentiments that the human nervous system is quite incapable of experiencing.

There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.