Language Policing Quotes

Like much of the identitarian Left, feminists want to replace old etiquette rules with a new system of politically-driven language policing, controlled by them and predicated on nebulous hurt feelings and speculative "harm." Having long overturned the hectoring, socially-conservative establishment, they now want to assume its place. ~ Milo Yiannopoulos

It says a lot about Sandberg's brand of feminism that this campaign focuses on policing language rather than bringing attention to important issues that have real impact on women and girls ~ Jessica Roy

The Babel fish is small, yellow, leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centers of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish. ~ Douglas Adams

Despite the feeling that we're directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking. ~ David Eagleman

Our experience teaches us that there are indeed laws of nature, regularities in the way things behave, and that these laws are best expressed using the language of mathematics. This raises the interesting possibility that mathematical consistency might be used to guide us, along with experimental observation, to the laws that describe physical reality, and this has proved to be the case time and again throughout the history of science. We will see this happen during the course of this book, and it is truly one of the wonderful mysteries of our universe that it should be so. ~ Brian Cox

What works in a story is very different than what works in cinema. For example, dialogue in books: If you translate it too faithfully, it sounds a little stilted, because we often don't speak the way we speak in novels. Oral language is much punchier, shorter sentences. ~ Yann Martel

Ninety percent of how Ronan conveyed his feelings was through his body language, and a phone simply didn't care. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

This book is unlike any other prophecy book because most prophecy books rely on "man's best guess" on what the ancient prophets really wrote about. This book decodes the "mystery language"={152[of the]Lord almighty God]a secret language hidden in plain sight,within the bible that actual reveals the actual voice of Jesus explaining to Jonah=[43] the seer=[43] of the language=[43]of God=[43] how the endtimes will be like.The translation is infallible become it disregards any human component or opinion.Perfection is hard to explain but is to prove so to read free excerpts of this book upload www.the jonahprophecies.com hit "buy the book" section then hit the "excerpts from the book" section and nine free pagers will pop up appear.What is remarkable you will hear he voice of Christ as clear as day as you start reading.It's like a miracle. ~ Fred Paul Dello Iacono

How do you think policing is in places like China, or North Korea? Whatever we experience, in terms of our policing, I also wanted to make known that the rest of the world suffers ten times more because of that power dynamic; because of the fact that there is no Posse Comitatus in other places which is what prevents in our country, or what is supposed to prevent the military from taking on a policing role of its own people. ~ Immortal Technique

[English] fails me utterly when I attempt to describe what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side to fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end. ~ Donna Tartt

I went back to look for you.
Not understanding the language of hello,
I thought I'd speak it just the same. ~ Rod McKuen

You will tell me the quiet story of your day's work, without any object except to give me your thoughts and your life. You will speak of your childhood memories. I shall not understand them very well because You will be able to give me, perforce, only insufficient details, but I shall love your sweet strange language. ~ Henri Barbusse

I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I've tried to use sex in place of language, but no one yet has been capable of processing the imagery, references, and metaphors I imbue into my thrusts, so I've returned to common English. ~ Jacqueline Novak

Maitri can be translated as "love" or "loving kindness". Some Buddhist teachers prefer "loving kindness" as they find the word "love" too dangerous. But I prefer the word "love". Words sometimes get sick and we have to heal them. We have been using the word "love" to mean appetite or desire, as in "I love hamburgers". We have to use language more carefully. "Love" is a beautiful word; we have to restore its meaning. The word "maitri" has roots in the word mitra which means friend. In Buddhism, the primary meaning of love is friendship. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The key is that Jesus does want to speak to us-to you-today. In your own language, just as a friend would speak. We simply need to take the time to listen. ~ Wally Armstrong

My own task these past twenty years or so of living by words has been to try to find or make a language to describe the subtleties, the incalculables, the pleasures and meanings - impossible to categorize - at the heart of things My friend Chip Ward speaks of "the tyranny of the quantifiable," of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools. ~ Erik Qualman

There is one thing I like about the Poles - their language. Polish, when it is spoken by intelligent people, puts me in ecstasy. The sound of the language evokes strange images in which there is always a greensward of fine spiked grass in which hornets and snakes play a great part. I remember days long back when Stanley would invite me to visit his relatives; he used to make me carry a roll of music because he wanted to show me off to these rich relatives. I remember this atmosphere well because in the presence of these smooth−tongued, overly polite, pretentious and thoroughly false Poles I always felt miserably uncomfortable. But when they spoke to one another, sometimes in French, sometimes in Polish, I sat back and watched them fascinatedly. They made strange Polish grimaces, altogether unlike our relatives who were stupid barbarians at bottom. The Poles were like standing snakes fitted up with collars of hornets. I never knew what they were talking about but it always seemed to me as if they were politely assassinating some one. They were all fitted up with sabres and broad−swords which they held in their teeth or brandished fiercely in a thundering charge. They never swerved from the path but rode rough−shod over women and children, spiking them with long pikes beribboned with blood−red pennants. All this, of course, in the drawing−room over a glass of strong tea, the men in butter−colored gloves, the women dangling their silly lorgnettes. The women were always ravishing ~ Henry Miller

I have a disease; I see language. ~ Roland Barthes

I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought. ~ Bernard Malamud

Because you cannot study the acquisition or use of language in an intelligent manner without having some idea about this language which is acquired or utilized. ~ Noam Chomsky

It happens all too often - people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them. ~ Andrew Dalby

Christians often equate holiness with activism and spiritual disciplines. And while it's true that activism is often the outgrowth of holiness and spiritual disciplines are necessary for the cultivation of holiness, the pattern of piety in the Scripture is more explicitly about our character. We put off sin and put on righteousness. We put to death the deeds of the flesh and put on Christ. To use the older language, we pursue mortification of the old man and the vivification of the new. ~ Kevin DeYoung

And we live in a kind of realm of language and words and so forth. So we can sort of relate to them. They don't exist without us. We create words. ~ Robert Barry

The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively, as almost every American learns on his first day in Britain. ~ Bill Bryson

Who, for example, would have ever predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that the poet who overuses the word I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide? Or that a certain world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he'd lead his country into war? By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others. ~ James W. Pennebaker

Genie

In 1970 a child called Genie was admitted to a children's hospital in Los Angeles. She was thirteen years old and had spent most of her life tied to a chair in a small closed room. Her father was intolerant of any kind of noise and had beaten the child whenever she made a sound. There had been no radio or television, and Genie's only other human contact was with her mother who was forbidden to spend more than a few minutes with the child to feed her. Genie had spent her whole life in a state of physical, sensory, social and emotional deprivation.
As might be expected, Genie was unable to use language when she was first brought into care. However, within a short period of time, she began to respond to the speech of others, to try to imitate sound and to communicate. Her syntax remained very simple. However, the fact that she went on to develop an ability to speak and understand a fairly large number of English words provides some evidence against the notion that language cannot be acquired at all after the critical period. ~ George Yule

My sister's disposition was not naturally gregarious; circumstances favoured and fostered her tendency to seclusion; except to go to church or take a walk on the hills, she rarely crossed the threshold of home. Though her feeling for the people round was benevolent, intercourse with them she never sought; nor, with very few exceptions, ever experienced. And yet she knew them: knew their ways, their language, their family histories; she could hear of them with interest, and talk of them with detail, minute, graphic, and accurate; but with them, she rarely exchanged a word.

(On her sister, Emily) ~ Charlotte Bronte

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life ... ~ Jane Hirshfield

Mock you!" repeated he earnestly, "no I revere you! I esteem and I admire you above all human beings! you are the friend to whom my soul is attached as to its better half! you are the most amiable, the most perfect of women! and you are dearer to me than language has the power of telling. ~ Fanny Burney

With the motto "do what you will," Rabelais gave himself permission to do anything he damn well pleased with the language and the form of the novel; as a result, every author of an innovative novel mixing literary forms and genres in an extravagant style is indebted to Rabelais, directly or indirectly. Out of his codpiece came Aneau's Alector, Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, López de Úbeda's Justina, Cervantes' Don Quixote, Béroalde de Verville's Fantastic Tales, Sorel's Francion, Burton's Anatomy, Swift's Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, Fielding's Tom Jones, Amory's John Buncle, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the novels of Diderot and maybe Voltaire (a late convert), Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, Hoffmann's Tomcat Murr, Hugo's Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Southey's Doctor, Melville's Moby-Dick, Flaubert's Temptation of Saint Anthony and Bouvard and Pecuchet, Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frederick Rolfe's ornate novels, Bely's Petersburg, Joyce's Ulysses, Witkiewicz's Polish jokes, Flann O'Brien's Irish farces, Philip Wylie's Finnley Wren, Patchen's tender novels, Burroughs's and Kerouac's mad ones, Nabokov's later works, Schmidt's fiction, the novels of Durrell, Burgess (especially A Clockwork Orange and Earthly Powers), Gaddis and Pynchon, Barth, Coover, Sorrentino, Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, Brossard's later works, the masterpieces of Latin American magic realism (Paradiso, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Three Trapped Tigers, I the Supreme, Avalovara, Terra Nostra, Palin ~ Steven Moore

To touch a person ... to sleep with a person ... is to become a pioneer," she whispered then, "a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. ~ Catherynne M Valente

You're trying to write about something that's sacred. You're trying to bring the seriousness of life and death to it, and you're trying to find a way to dramatize it, and you're trying to give language to it, which is inadequate. But it's important to try. ~ Edward Hirsch

A painting was a translation of the language of my heart. ~ Amy Tan

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The truth of the matter is that - by an exorbitant paradox - I never stop believing that I am loved. I hallucinate what I desire. Each wound proceeds less from a doubt than from a betrayal: for only the one who loves can betray, only the one who believes himself loved can be jealous: that the other, episodically, should fail in his being, which is to love me - that is the origin of all my woes. A delirium, however, does not exist unless one wakens from it(there are only retrospective deliriums): one day, I realize what has happened to me: I thought I was suffering from not being loved, and yet it is because I thought I was loved that I was suffering; I lived in the complication of supposing myself simultaneously loved and abandoned. Anyone hearing my intimate language would have had to exclaim, as of a difficult child: But after all, what does he want? ~ Roland Barthes

As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue. ~ Guy Deutscher

I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications. ~ Adrian Tomine

If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering ... then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing? ~ Carole Maso

Tone policing takes priority over listening to the pain inflicted on people of color. People of color are told they should be nicer, kinder, more gracious, less angry in their delivery, or that white people's needs, feelings, and the thoughts should be given equal weight. ~ Austin Channing Brown

All translations are made up" opined Vikram, "Languages are different for a reason. You can't move ideas between them without losing something ~ G. Willow Wilson

The language of academic discourse, which is crucial to academic progress beyond grade 3 is learned by all children through literacy: there are no native speakers of academic language! ~ L. W. Fillmore

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language. ~ Zadie Smith

I thought English is a strange language. Now I think French is even more strange. In France, their fish is poisson, their bread is pain, and their pancake is crepe. Pain and poison and crap. That's what they have every day. ~ Xiaolu Guo

This is an example of why the humanists have always insisted that you don't learn to think wholly from one language: you learn to think better from linguistic conflict, from bouncing one language off another. ~ Northrop Frye

I learned to interpret the ancient pictograph codices and read Nahuatl, the Aztec language. ~ Gary Jennings

You can get lost in you own mind, like you gone to another country. All you thoughts in another language and you can't read the signs even though they everywhere all around you. ~ Nicola Yoon

Yet why must grammar be like a prison for the mind? Might not language be as a closet full of gowns? Of a generally similar cut, with a hole for the head and neck to pass, but filled with difference and a variety of trimmings so that we don't grow bored? ~ Danielle Dutton

He comments on how amazing it is that everything in the universe can be described by the twenty-six written characters with which they have been working. ~ Robert M. Pirsig