ca9254b
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All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
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faith
linguistics
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Terry Eagleton |
34681bb
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Teach me to speak the language of men.
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humanity
linguistics
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Edgar Rice Burroughs |
900aadb
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If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be.
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lingodiversity
linguistics
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Bill Bryson |
232941c
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Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.
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leadership
motivation
word-choice
linguistics
rhetoric
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Philip Zaleski |
44b2c15
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All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.
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indo-european-languages
linguistics
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Bill Bryson |
bb39ab4
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Colorless green ideas sleep furiously three old owls on a chest of drawers were screwing the daughter of the doctor. But then the mother called them, colorless green ideas slepp furiously.
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irony
poetry
sestina
linguistics
semantics
pastiche
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Umberto Eco |
7033a60
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Language is more fashion than science
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linguistics
language
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Bill Bryson |