Vocabularies Quotes

Though teachers pride themselves on having developed bionic hearing (the phrase "I heard that" is a common part of many teachers' vocabularies), sometimes it is better to conceal such super-human powers. ~ Gary Rubinstein

Enriched vocabularies someone had (and used) are produced by a boundless wondrous mind. Sometime with a non mediocre experience also. ~ Nin

As Christian workers have understood that the gospel can be translated into various cultural forms and that all of the "Pillars of Islam" (except the references to Muhammad and Mecca) were used previously by Jews and/or Christians, they have found greater freedom to use vocabularies and forms of worship that felt indigenous. This has resulted in significant growth in the number of Muslims following Christ in many regions. ~ David H. Greenlee

There's a theory that if we don't have the right words in our vocabularies, we can't even see the things that are right in front of our faces. If we can't describe our reality accurately, we can't see it. Not the other way around. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now. ~ Milan Kundera

If they [the mothers] use different vocabularies, they may share a postmodern feminist "body politics" - in this instance an awareness that maternal breastfeeding carries no inherent, "natural" meaning, that it is always located where historically specific, culturally articulated interests and power relations collide with the recalcitrance of the body. ~ Linda Blum

The tree man eulogized them by screaming, 'And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards.'
Francie had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, 'Good-bye
God bless you. ~ Betty Smith

Make something new, and define territory that's never been. I fall in love with shows because I've never see that before. I fall in love with new vocabularies. ~ Kevin McCollum

Personally, I like to surround myself with people who have extensive vocabularies but nevertheless choose to say "fuck" a lot. ~ Nitya Prakash

In addition to depoliticization as a mode of dispossessing the constitutive histories and powers organizing contemporary problems and contemporary political subjects - that is, depoliticization of sources of political problems - there is a second and related meaning of depoliticization with which this book is concerned: namely, that which substitutes emotional and personal vocabularies for political ones in formulating solutions to political problems. When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to "difference" or to a medium of "offense," when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioral, attitudinal, and emotional practices. While such practices often have their value, substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusions not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training, or what Richard Rorty has called an "improvement in manners." A justice project is replaced with a therapeutic or behavioral one. ~ Wendy Brown

Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime's projects is to lim ~ Timothy Snyder

Science and technology contribute to the fast-expanding vocabularies of all living civilized tongues at a faster rate than all other fields of human endeavor put together. ~ Mario Pei

Scientists and spiritualists often use different vocabularies to describe the exact same mysteries of the universe. The conflicts are frequently over semantics, not substance. - Robert Langdon ~ Dan Brown

If the humanities were science, the vocabularies of the world's languages would add up, not overlap. ~ Thorsten J. Pattberg

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

Most Western journalists in China prefer a Chinese-free international language, and thus bend over backwards to replace important Chinese terms with Western vocabularies. ~ Thorsten J. Pattberg

Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse. ~ Saul Bellow

Love for trees pours out of her - the grace of them, their supple experimentation, the constant variety and surprise. These slow, deliberate creatures with their elaborate vocabularies, each distinctive, shaping each other, breeding birds, sinking carbon, purifying water, filtering poisons from the ground, stabilizing the micro-climate. Join enough living things together, through the air and underground, and you wind up with something that has intentions. ~ Richard Powers

If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. ~ Gregory Peck

When we talk it's not merely idle chatter
We discuss things that really don't matter
We talk of love and god and pain
To life's never-ending song
We add yet one more refrain
And as the pace gets more and more frantic
The words get more and more pedantic
We leave no sophistry unturned
As our rhetoric becomes more intense
Using our very large vocabularies
To disguise our very common sense.
The words get longer and the plot gets thinner
Another discourse to discuss at dinner
There is no feeling we can't analyze
Seizing each chance to intellectualize
Talking in the past and present tense
We're making a lot more noise
And a lot less sense. ~ Carrie Fisher

What we call fiction is the ancient way of knowing, the total discourse that antedates all the special vocabularies ... Fiction is democratic, it reasserts the authority of the single mind to make and remake the world. ~ E.L. Doctorow

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

I hold Petrarch at leastly partly responsible for the disconcerting gap between Italian's written and spoken vocabularies. The ~ Dianne Hales

The people I know who SWEAR THE MOST tend to have the widest vocabularies. ~ Stephen Fry

Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible. ~ Rhonda Riley

When you have so many projects to nurture, one or two get real excited and raise their hands. The reaction from it tells when it's time and where to go. I usually have about a half a dozen titles in development; researchers researching and people doing cover. I'm exploring musical vocabularies I want to explore, different genres, and constantly reading things. ~ Frank Wildhorn

I want to create a kind of new monster language for kids to play with, pick up, and incorporate into their own vocabularies. ~ Harry Knowles

'To die is gain!' That kind of talk is absolutely foreign to our modern, spiritual vocabularies. We have become such life worshippers, we have very little desire to depart to be with the Lord. ~ David Wilkerson

If "holy" was ever a pious, pastel-tinted word in our vocabularies, the Isaiah-preaching quickly turns it into something blazing. Holiness ~ Anonymous

New vocabularies can make old beliefs possible. ~ David Perez

But even we, with our supposed mastery of the English language, were not immune to the shortcoming of our vocabularies.
Words can only help you if you speak them. ~ Bianca Phipps

Trout sat back and thought about the conversation. He shaped it into a story, which he never got around to writing until he was an old, old man. It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cares what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The school-boy doesn't force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that be must impress them again in the morning. ~ Hermann Ebbinghaus

Men seek for vocabularies that are reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. ~ Kenneth Burke