Vocabulary Quotes

So exiled have even basic questions of freedom become from the political vocabulary that they sound musty and ridiculous, and vulnerable to the ultimate badge of shame-'That's so 60's!'-the entire decade having been mocked so effectively that social protest seems outlandish and 'so last century,' just another style excess like love beads and Nehru jackets. No, rebellion won't pose a problem for this social order. ~ Laura Kipnis

They only trusted the wisdom of people brighter and more worldly than themselves when it was expressed in the vocabulary and style of rural idiots. In his guise as Brazenydol, he had once had a contract with DARPA to teach a team of physicists the basic terminology of tractor pulls so that they could give an acceptable explanation of omniwavelength stealth to a Congressional committee that didn't understand tractor pulls, either. ~ John Barnes

Erase the word "failure" from your vocabulary. No case is ever truly closed, and no challenge is ever over. ~ Mary Lou Retton

The young now approached love in the way they approached success and consumption and the future itself: with an underlying assumption of abundance. They expected more out of love than earlier generations did and were willing to fight to secure it, but when it failed they were equally at ease in walking away. It was one strike and you're out. They rejected the moral vocabulary of an older generation: patience, tolerance, adjustment. ~ Anand Giridharadas

One of the problems I see with these comics on television, particularly cable television, is, since you can say anything in terms of sex and scatological references and so on, therefore, you should do it. So they all limit themselves to these subjects and this vocabulary. My objection is that it is a lack of articulateness. Irreverence is easy, but what is hard is wit. Wit is what these comedians lack. ~ Tom Lehrer

Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to "cast spells" -- in our vocabulary, "psychoactive" plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skin of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based "flying ointment" that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the "broomstick" by which these women were said to travel. (119) ~ Michael Pollan

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next. ~ Thomas Bailey Aldrich

If' and 'only' are the two most useless words in the human vocabulary, ~ Harper Bliss

Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker. ~ John Mole

It's interesting to help someone find their vocabulary. There would not have been a De Niro without a Scorsese. ~ Jason Patric

Milton's learned vocabulary [ ... ] and his distant perspectives, represent the authoritative unintelligibility of the parents' speech as heard by the child. ~ John Broadbent

They say, 'Nothing can be done here!' I reply, 'I know no such word in the vocabulary I adopt!' ~ Dorothea Dix

The most common definition of [the word information] is: the action of informing; formation or molding of the mind or character, training, instruction, teaching; communication of instructive knowledge.
This definition remained fairly constant until the years immediately following World War II, when it came in vogue to use 'information' as a technological term to define anything that was sent over an electric or mechanical channel. 'Information' became part of the vocabulary of the science of messages. And, suddenly, the appellation could be applied to something that didn't necessarily have to inform. This definition was extrapolated to general usage as something told or communicated, whether or not it made sense to the receiver. Now, the freedom engendered by such an amorphous definition has, as you might expect, encouraged its liberal deployment. It has become the single most important word of our decade, the suspense of our lives and our work. ~ Richard Saul Wurman

One of the most common platitudes we heard was that "words failed." But words were not failing us at all. It was not true that there was no way to describe our experience. We had plenty of language to talk to each other about the horror of what was happening, and talk we did. If there was a communication problem it was that there were too many words; they were far too heavy and too specific to be inflicted upon others. If something was failing it was the functionality of routine, platitudinous language - the comforting clichés were now inapplicable and perfectly useless. We instinctively protected other people from the knowledge we possessed; we let them think that words failed, because we knew they didn't want to be familiar with the vocabulary we used daily. We were sure they didn't want to know what we did; we didn't want to know it either. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

We need to remove unworthy from our vocabulary and replace it with hope and work. ~ Marvin J. Ashton

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Ironic, is it not, that the great Divinicus Nex cowers in fear from that which should be her fated prey? A decidedly diametric circumstance.
What? It's irritating when the monster hunting you has a better vocabulary than your own. Maybe it could do my eulogy? ~ A&E Kirk

EVERYONE JOINS A BAND IN THIS LIFE. You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it. And, as is usually the fate with bands, most of them will break up - through distance, differences, divorce, or death. ~ Mitch Albom

The purpose of all of this is not to walk around with new vocabulary words, but to cause you to speculate on the marvel of your own being. ~ Frederick Lenz

I'm interested in visual vocabulary, like Warhol was interested in that vocabulary of advertisements and television and pop culture. ~ Damian Loeb

A Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin said that "the self is the gift of the other" It seems to me most true now. The genes I carry, the clothes I wear, the food I eat all have come through the hands of others. Even those words I write now, my vocabulary, are not only mine. They are an agreement, a social contract between the two of us. ~ Rhonda Riley

I always try to think of a vocabulary to match different musical situations. ~ Roscoe Mitchell

Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily. ~ Zig Ziglar

Women must find their own answer. That's the important thing. I'm no longer interested in books about women written by men. Even if I could believe in their objectivity, I just can't find their opinions relevant. Now I will only believe what a woman has to say about women, because even if it's not entirely true, it's her struggle and she's on the way to the answer.
Many of you seek masculine approval. Even though you have inside you your way of talking and writing, you have mountains of it inside you, and even though it is enough to begin expressing yourselves so long as it is with your vocabulary, your abstractions, and your own conceptualization, I think you are still afraid of the master: men. Of their judgment. As long as you have this fear, you will not progress. I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body. ~ Marguerite Duras

Every human occupation has it repertoire of stock phrases, within which every man twists and turn until his death. His vocabulary, which seems so lavish, reduces itself to a hundred routine formulas at most, which he repeats over and over. ~ Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

I've lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something - Being - having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether - if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There's a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence. ~ Marilynne Robinson

People that are much younger in areas that are much more, kind of, disenfranchised, I guess, as far as the gay movement goes, they still have a language that they've discovered around things. And they have a vocabulary to use, and they have a way to express themselves even when they're not accepted. ~ Amy Ray

Learning medicine consists in part of learning the language of medicine. A deeper understanding of judgments and choices also requires a richer vocabulary than is available in everyday language. ~ Daniel Kahneman

His brain cells had sunk to an area of his body that didn´t help his vocabulary skills. ~ Tracey Alvarez

You soft-skulled, marbel-balled motherf*cker. I´m going to kick your ass next time I see it." Cam laughed. "You know, my grandmother always said no woman with a decent vocabulary would resort to profanity."
Kori huffed. "My grandmother said, ´Get the hell out of my house, bitch, before I throw you out on your ass."
"Well, you did set the kitchen on fire. Twice. With her in it."
"I fail to see how the facts are relevant here. ~ Rachel Vincent

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it. ~ Bill Bryson

A boat, for all its complexity, is in fact a version of simplicity, but of a satisfyingly complex kind. Get to know the hundreds of ways in which a boat-at-sea works and you become its master and commander. A boat provides control in what looks like uncontrollable circumstances. It is the mirror image of the realities of life on land, which look easier but are, psychologically, far more difficult, more subtle, less visible, and less predictable. The boat, in other words, is the haven from the storms at home. And because a boat's workings are a mystery, in the old sense that it is an arcane art, with its own equipment and vocabulary, its nostrums and obscurities from which the vulgar are excluded, it is also a source of potency and seduction. ~ Adam Nicolson

I have a small vocabulary, which I move around fast. ~ Jerry Della Femina

Even though I had a great deal of respect for children's TV and theatre, it wasn't my intent to specialize solely in that area. I did indeed want to work on shows like "Sesame Street" and I am honored to be even a small part of that legacy, but I also wanted to do characters that had wider vocabulary and satirical humor. ~ Stephanie D'Abruzzo

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. ~ Aldous Huxley

Our choice of words often reveal the depth of our knowledge … or ignorance … or that of our desire to be deemed knowledgeable. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Luck, if it mean nothing more than an event of which the cause is not apparent, is a term that may be employed without error; but if it means, as it generally does, an event which has no cause at all, a mere chance, it is a bad word, a heathen term; drop it from your vocabulary; trust nothing to luck, nor expect anything from it; avoid all practical use or dependence upon this or its kindred words, fate, chance, fortune. ~ John Angell James

Symbol and metaphor are as much a part of the architectural vocabulary as stone and steel. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

A picture book is a motorcycle: small, loud, fun, and zippy.
An easy reader is a chartered bus: obliged to carry a rather dull passenger roster of sanctioned curriculum, plus the baggage of an approved, limited vocabulary. The trick is to design your chartered bus to be as cool and sexy as a motorcycle. ~ Mo Willems

We are so impressed by scientific clank that we feel we ought not to say that the sunflower turns because it knows where the sun is. It is almost second nature to us to prefer explanations ... with a large vocabulary. We are much more comfortable when we are assured that the sunflower turns because it is heliotropic. The trouble with that kind of talk is that it tempts us to think that we know what the sunflower is up to. But we don't. The sunflower is a mystery, just as every single thing in the universe is. ~ Robert Farrar Capon

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: 'Einstein is a fool', or 'Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.' Everyone is ~ Paulo Coelho

I enjoy the kind of characters that allow you to write the dark stuff. I love Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, and when I'm writing for Dracula or Jekyll & Hyde, I get a chance to use that vocabulary. ~ Frank Wildhorn

How is it that you can read this book? An obvious answer is because you know English. An equally obvious answer is because the light is on. These two explanations for an apparently trivial ability can illuminate a fundamental dichotomy: the difference between our knowledge of language and our use of that knowledge; between our competence and our performance. Your knowledge of grammar and vocabulary of English, your competence as a speaker of English, is prerequisite to your understanding this sentence; the exercise of this competence is made possible by the fact, among many others, that the light is on. ~ Neilson Voyne Smith

Oddly, I've never heard of a church or denomination that asked people to affirm a doctrinal statement like this: The purpose of Scripture is to equip God's people for good works. Shouldn't a simple statement like this be far more important than statements with words foreign to the Bible's vocabulary about itself (inerrant, authoritative, literal, revelatory, objective, absolute, propositional, etc.)? ~ Brian D. McLaren

There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male ... The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Children read to learn - even when they are reading fantasy, nonsense, light verse, comics or the copy on cereal packets, they are expanding their minds all the time, enlarging their vocabulary, making discoveries - it is all new to them. ~ Joan Aiken

I am glad that the country world ... retains a power to use our English tongue. It is a part of its sense of reality, of its vocabulary of definite terms, and of its habit of earthly common sense. I find this country writing an excellent corrective of the urban vocabulary of abstractions and of the emotion disguised as thinking which abstractions and humbug have loosed upon the world. May there always be such things as a door, a milk pail, and a loaf of bread, and words to do them honor. ~ Henry Beston

In Udi's vocabulary, Jewish was equated with the ills of exile: rootless parasitic, superstitious. Yet here, in the Western Wall's solitary dignity, was beauty. In this world of stone, he felt softness; in this quarry of memory, peace. ~ Yossi Klein Halevi

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company. ~ Gaston Bachelard

I'm eradicating the word Protestant even out of my vocabulary.. I'm protesting anything.. it's time for Catholics and non-Catholics to come together as one in the Spirit and one in the Lord. ~ Paul Crouch

In his study of eighteenth-century feelings, John Mullan argues that sentimental passion and sympathy offered 'a more inclusive vocabulary of social coherence' than politics could provide. This ~ Francis Wheen

I don't know how else to tell the story except to utilise that vocabulary: the rain, the darkness, the mansions, the framing, etc, the lighting and that sort of thing. ~ Martin Scorsese

Dangerous knowledge is often hidden under ponderous grammar and obscurantist vocabulary. ~ Brent Weeks

Eventually, if you're experimenting with a sound that's unfamiliar, it gets absorbed, and somebody comes and does it better, and it becomes part of a vocabulary. ~ Beck

Fear is not a part of my vocabulary, actually, and I think that it's really made me a much smarter, braver for sure, person. ~ Alicia Keys

My dad didn't have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in 'Harvest,' I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can. ~ Jim Crace

One of the problems with watching TV is that you've got a fairly low level of language operating all the time. Quite a small vocabulary and really no conceptual or abstract thinking. That's an issue. If you've got a wide vocabulary, you can learn. The complexities of grammar, in themselves, force you to think about time in a particular way. Force you to widen your outlook on the world. ~ Jeanette Winterson

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language
this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible
despite its barbaric accretions ... or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

In the most basic way, writers are defined not by the stories they tell, or their politics, or their gender, or their race, but by the words they use. Writing begins with language, and it is in that initial choosing, as one sifts through the wayward lushness of our wonderful mongrel English, that choice of vocabulary and grammar and tone, the selection on the palette, that determines who's sitting at that desk. Language creates the writer's attitude toward the particular story he's decided to tell. ~ Donald E. Westlake

There are things without explanation, moments when life will become arranged in such odd ways that you imagine a whole vocabulary of meaning inside them. The breakfast smell struck me like that. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

But confidence bred confidence, that's what her dad had always told her back in the days when she'd been a skinny, flat-chested nerd girl with a boy-intimidating vocabulary and no hope of being asked to the prom. ~ Megan Hart

I want you to let go. i want you to submit. I want to make you lose your mind. I want you to be so far gone that the only word left in your vocabulary is my name. ~ R.K. Lilley

Vocabulary for aggravation is large. Vocabulary for transcendence is elusive. ~ Jennifer Senior

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using. ~ David Crystal

PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Here was opportunity to make an audience walk and move, be sociable in a way never dreamed of by the rigors of cinema-watching, in circumstances where many different perspectives could be brought to bear on a series of phenomena associated with the topics under consideration. Yet all the time it was a subjective creation under the auspices of light and sound, dealing with a large slice of cinema's vocabulary. ~ Peter Greenaway

Human language is too poor to express the real nature of the Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality which is Nirvana. Language is created and used by masses of human beings to express things and ideas experienced by their sense organs and their mind. A supramundane experience like that of the Absolute Truth is not of such a category. Therefore there cannot be words to express that experience, just as the fish had no words in his vocabulary to express the nature of the solid land. ~ Walpola Rahula

It's when I'm around some people that my entire vocabulary goes on vacation. Like now, when Dave's walking next to me wearing an old black singlet and board shorts and the tattoo of a bird on his wrist, every single word in my head except "no" and "huh" is lying somewhere on a beack getting a suntan ~ Cath Crowley

When I speak in Christian terms or Buddhist terms I'm simply selecting for the moment a dialect. Christian words for me represent the comforting vocabulary of the place I came from hometown voices saying more than the language itself can convey about how welcome and safe I am what the expectations are and where to find food. Buddhist words come from another dialect from the people over the mountain. I've become pretty fluent in Buddhist it helps me to see my home country differently but it will never be speech I can feel completely at home in. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

Shortcoming shouldn't be in Longman's vocabulary. ~ Natalya Vorobyova

I need to get a greater vocabulary than what I have and when I get mad and my brain searches for a word. I have to find different words and to do that you need to have more of an education. ~ Duane Chapman

So many young decorators are trying to reinvent the wheel, and the results are sometimes very dubious. They're striving to do things that have never been done before. Quite often it is done without authority, without knowledge, and without a background in taste. They need to be educated about the past, and they need a richer vocabulary. ~ Albert Hadley

Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The Canadian dialect of English ... seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary. ~ Lister Sinclair

Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is to use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colourful. If you hesitate, and cogitate, you will come up with another word...but it probably won't be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean. ~ Stephen King

It's a language I've come to hate, because it admits no mystery and no ambiguity into its smug vocabulary, which arrogantly suggests that everything can be known. ~ Siri Hustvedt

One barrier ... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving. ~ David Perkins

It entered the visual vocabulary of photographers, painters and sculptors and focused on what pictures and words look like and what they can mean. ~ Barbara Kruger

Let me simplify my take on intervention. To me it is mostly about having a systematic protocol to determine when to intervene and when to leave systems alone. And we may need to intervene to control the iatrogenics of modernity - particularly the large-scale harm to the environment and the concentration of potential (though not yet manifested) damage, the kind of thing we only notice when it is too late. The ideas advanced here are not political, but risk-management based. I do not have a political affiliation or allegiance to a specific party; rather, I am introducing the idea of harm and fragility into the vocabulary so we can formulate appropriate policies to ensure we don't end up blowing up the planet and ourselves. ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

For three years, all through junior high, my social death was grossly overdetermined. I had a large vocabulary, a giddily squeaking voice, horn-rimmed glasses, poor arm strength, too-obvious approval from my teachers, irresistible urges to shout unfunny puns, a near-eidetic acquaintance with J.R.R. Tolkien, a big chemistry lab in my basement, a penchant for intimately insulting any unfamiliar girl unwise enough to speak to me, and so on. ~ Jonathan Franzen

Intelligence isn't just about how many levels of math courses you've taken, how fast you can solve an algorithm, or how many vocabulary words you know that are over 6 characters. It's about being able to approach a new problem, recognize its important components, and solve it - then take that knowledge gained and put it towards solving the next, more complex problem. It's about innovation and imagination, and about being able to put that to use to make the world a better place. This is the kind of intelligence that is valuable, and this is the type of intelligence we should be striving for and encouraging. ~ Andrea Kuszewsk

Notes and chords have become my second language and, more often than not, that vocabulary expresses what I feel when language fails me. The guitar is my conscience, too - whenever I've lost my way, it's brought me back to center; whenever I forget, it reminds me why I'm here. ~ Slash, Anthony Bozza

I am finding I like my new vocabulary. Cock, pussy, and fuck. My three new favorite English words. I want to shove my cock in her pussy and fuck her hard. ~ Sawyer Bennett

What happened?" I asked quietly.
"I lost some people," [Rogan] said. There was an awful finality in his voice.
I hadn't thought he cared. I'd thought he viewed his people as tools and took care of them because tools had to be kept in good repair, but this sounded like genuine grief - that complicated cocktail of guilt, regret, and overwhelming sadness you felt when someone close to you died. It broke you and made you feel helpess. Helpless wasn't even in Rogan's vocabulary. ~ Ilona Andrews

To feel the soul without explaining it, without vocabulary, and to represent this sensation. ~ Yves Klein

I was in the car with Trace and heard his side of the conversation with you. Sounded clear enough to me."
"Apparently not, cuz I'm not sweet on her. What kind of dumb-ass thing is that to say? I like her, sure, even though she's not the easiest lady to be around."
"No?"
Jackson didn't seem to hear her. He continued on as he pulled food from the tiny fridge and piled it on the counter. "She has her reasons for being prickly, and I know it."
"Those reasons are?"
"And there isn't a man alive who wouldn't want her. She's about the sexiest thing I've ever seen." He shook his head. "But I'm not sweet> about anything." He scoffed. "That sounds like some adolescent bullshit or something."
"You have a very limited vocabulary."
"My balls still hurt. It's affecting my brain."
"Your brain is located a little low, isn't it?"
He paused, then laughed. Shaking a loaf of bread at her, he said, "Good one. I'll have to try to remember this sharp wit of yours. ~ Lori Foster

A sailor was stranded on a desert island and managed to survive by making friends with the local natives - such good friends, in fact, that one day the chief offered him his daughter for an evening's entertainment. Late that night, while they made love, the chief's daughter kept shouting, "Oga, boga! Oga, boga!" The arrogant sailor assumed this must be how the natives express their appreciation when something is fantastic. A few days later the chief invites the sailor for a game of golf. On his first stroke, the chief hit a hole in one. Eager to try out his new vocabulary, the sailor enthusiastically shouted "Oga boga! Oga boga!" The chief turned around with a puzzled look on his face and asked, "What you mean, 'wrong hole'? ~ Osho

The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don't need any fingers. ~ Larry Flynt

I now knew a method of speaking and writing that - by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn't supposed to fail - sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object. ~ Elena Ferrante

Unlike sciences, literature as art relies on societal acceptance of a certain vocabulary. ~ Jimenez Lai

Good!" the creature echoed. "Doctor Nelson will be along in a minute. Feel like some breakfast?" All four symbols in the query were in Smith's vocabulary but he had trouble believing that he had heard them rightly. He knew that he was food, but he did not "feel like" food. Nor had he had any warning that he might be selected for such an honor. He had not known that the food supply was such that it was necessary to reduce the corporate group. He was filled with mild regret, since there was still so much to grok of these new events, but no reluctance. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

He who would enrich and enlarge his stock of words must soak and tan his mind constantly in the vats of literature. ~ Dale Carnegie

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I didn't have a vocabulary for what he did to me, but then no one had been able to define the man himself. An enigma, an abomination, a wish on a star. He consumed me, and I drifted inside him, blissed out on the ride. ~ Skye Warren

Sincerity is not part of the political vocabulary. If it is used or implied bells should ring ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

At grief so deep the tongue must wag in vain; the language of our sense and memory lacks the vocabulary of such pain. ~ Dante Alighieri

You can't build a vocabulary without reading. You can't meet friends if you ... stay at home by yourself all the time. In the same way, you can't build up a vocabulary if you never meet any new words. And to meet them you must read. The more you read the better. ~ Rudolf Flesch

Style is a continuum. Style never changes. It's a straight line. It's a refinement of the same vocabulary. Style takes you from day to evening, season to season. ~ Ralph Rucci

Compassion is not a dirty word.. it's time we rehabilitated compassion into the national political vocabulary of this great nation of ours. ~ Kevin Rudd