Linguistic Inadequacy Quotes

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of color. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this color.

We are armed with language adequate to describe each leaf of the filed, but not to describe human character.

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

My English is not very good-looking.

Our expression and our words never coincide, which is why the animals don't understand us.

Words are finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it.

How do we describe the fact of human existence? At a certain point, perhaps, style fails us. Language, even and in particular at its most evocative, becomes less of an aid and more of a difficulty.

Words strain, crack, and sometime break, under the burden.

People probably perceive me as a bit boring because I am a little slow in the humor department, but it's just hard for me to get jokes when they're told in English. I am always the last one to get it.

Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.

How to explain? How to describe? Even the omniscient viewpoint quails.

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.

But this thing, whatever it was, this mistlike something, hung there inside my body like a certain kind of potential. I wanted to give it a name, but the word refused to come to mind. I’m terrible at finding the right words for things. I’m sure Tolstoy would have been able to come up with exactly the right word

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

However well equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all possible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer than diction.

Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.