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4512c64
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"Then you should say what you mean," the March Hare went on.
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word-choice
writing
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Lewis Carroll |
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a2f6e86
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Well,' said Can o' Beans, a bit hesitantly,' imprecise speech is one of the major causes of mental illness in human beings.' Huh?' Quite so. The inability to correctly perceive reality is often responsible for humans' insane behavior. And every time they substitute an all-purpose, sloppy slang word for the words that would accurately describe an emotion or a situation, it lowers their reality orientations, pushes them farther from shore, out onto the foggy waters of alienation and confusion.' The manner in which the other were regarding him/her made Can O' Beans feel compelled to continue. 'The word neat, for example, has precise connotations. Neat means tidy, orderly, well-groomed. It's a valuable tool for describing the appearance of a room, a hairdo, or a manuscript. When it's generically and inappropriately applied, though, as it is in the slang aspect, it only obscures the true nature of the thing or feeling that it's supposed to be representing. It's turned into a sponge word. You can wring meanings out of it by the bucketful--and never know which one is right. When a person says a movie is 'neat,' does he mean that it's funny or tragic or thrilling or romantic, does he mean that the cinematography is beautiful, the acting heartfelt, the script intelligent, the direction deft, or the leading lady has cleavage to die for? Slang possesses an economy, an immediacy that's attractive, all right, but it devalues experience by standardizing and fuzzing it. It hangs between humanity and the real world like a . . . a veil. Slang just makes people more stupid, that's all, and stupidity eventually makes them crazy. I'd hate to ever see that kind of craziness rub off onto objects.
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language
mental-illness
slang
word-choice
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Tom Robbins |
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811ea3e
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One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength.
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word-choice
writing
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Harold Bloom |
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975545e
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Emily Dickinson sublimely unnames even the blanks.
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conformity
conventional-wisdom
innovation
word-choice
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Harold Bloom |
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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
linguistics
motivation
rhetoric
word-choice
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Philip Zaleski |
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b141f4d
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A good ruler has to learn his world's language, and that's different for every world, the language you don't hear just with your ears.
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persuasion
rhetoric
vocabulary
word-choice
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Frank Herbert |
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35e3673
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You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it.
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meaning
power-of-language
power-of-words
word-choice
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Rebecca Solnit |
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767590c
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"Samuel Johnson said Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad, "tuned the English tongue."
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inspiration
maturation
reading
rhetoric
vocabulary
word-choice
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Harold Bloom |
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8ce353c
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His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
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conspiracy
tone
word-choice
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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d4bb376
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House Speaker Thomas Reed could destroy an argument or expose a fallacy in fewer words than anyone else. His language was vivid and picturesque. He had a way of phrasing things which was peculiarly apt and peculiarly his own.
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motivation
rhetoric
word-choice
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Barbara W. Tuchman |
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16eabf3
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Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of Deep Church more accessible.
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discipleship
evangelism
language
word-choice
worship
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Alister E. McGrath |