Language Complexity Quotes

It depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

The English talked with inflected phrases. One phrase to mean everything.

every word calls up far more of a picture than its actual meaning is supposed to do, and the writer has to deal with all these silent associations as well as with the uttered significance.

If we do away with semi-colons, parentheses and much else, we will lose all music, nuance and subtlety in communication - and end up shouting at one another in block capitals.

I was struck by the way in which meanings are historically attached to words: it is so accidental, so remote, so twisted. A word is like a schoolgirl's room--a complete mess--so the great thing is to make out a way of seeing it all as ordered, as right, as inferred and following.

They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

Words," he said, "is oh such a twitch-tickling problem to me all my life.

I hated teaching Shakespeare. In order for the students to understand what was going on, you had to tell them the story of 'Macbeth' or whatever. Shakespeare is about character and language, and they didn't get any of that.

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

Language is too complex for a computer to understand. It's not going to be able to make sense of what people are saying en masse. We need a new type of discipline that puts together computer scientists and social scientists, who can add context to the situation.

I think we're still in a muddle with our language, because once you get words and a spoken language it gets harder to communicate.

I looked up 'standard' in the dictionary. There are eleven different definitions.

I would guess that the decision to create a small special purpose language or use an existing general purpose language is one of the toughest decisions that anyone facing the need for a new language must make.

And of course the word love has many shades of meaning, as do many, many of the words in our living, breathing language

Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, "OK, we'll do them both". So the language is too baroque for my taste.

I have hated words and I have loved them, and I hope I have made them right.

I don't do Shakespeare. I don't talk in that kind of broken English.

Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.

Programmers are always surrounded by complexity; we cannot avoid it.... If our basic tool, the language in which we design and code our programs, is also complicated, the language itself becomes part of the problem rather than part of its solution.

A dictionary can embrace only a small part of the vast tapestry of a language.

I never knew words could be so confusing," Milo said to Tock as he bent down to scratch the dog's ear. "Only when you use a lot to say a little," answered Tock. Milo thought this was quite the wisest thing he'd heard all day.

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.

I get really flowery and verbose in my adult books, but I don't think I dumb down my Y.A. It's just cleaner and more snappy. And the adult books have multiple points-of-view. In my Y.A., it's always third person from the main character's perspective.

As problems have grown more complex, leaders have struggled to find the language to discuss them clearly, credibly and at the right emotional amplitude. Nonplussed and tongue-tied, politicians give themselves over to message gurus … who peddle the notion that poll-tested words — honed and targeted with scientific precision — can pick the lock of public opinion.