Language Humor Quotes

Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

I had no idea what they were saying in Italian as a child, they spoke too quickly on the radio. But I realized that language was very funny.

At least when it's in French, I won't know what the heck they're saying.

Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

How do Polish people spell farm? E-I-E-I-O

You know they call corn-on-the-cob, "corn-on-the-cob", but that's how it comes out of the ground. They should just call it corn, and every other type of corn, corn-off-the-cob. It's not like if someone cut off my arm they would call it "Mitch", but then re-attached it, and call it "Mitch-all-together".

A German joke is no laughing matter.

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.

I was saying on the air: "Victorino used the Twitter and he sent a twit to tell the fans he was coming." Well, the city went hysterical. The sky nearly fell down from laughter. I always thought that if you are going to use Twitter, it's going to be a twit. Why would it be a tweet?

When I was in high school, I took French. I barely passed and didn't learn anything at all. There was a joke among me and my friends in the class that nothing sounded more ridiculous than a guy with a country accent speaking French.

What exactly is "midair"? Is there some other part of air besides the "mid" part?

I think 'lunch' is one of the funniest words in the world.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after 'semicolons,' and another one after 'now.

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

I am thankful that my name in obnoxious to no pun.

I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

If "pro" is the opposite of "con", is "progress" the opposite of "Congress"?

Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them.

DEJEUNER, n. The breakfast of an American who has been in Paris. Variously pronounced.

The term "trash talk" is such an American thing. I still laugh at it.

In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.

Pronunciation has made many an innocent word sound like a doctor's orders for a stomach pump.