75 Vernacular Quotes

Following is our list of vernacular quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about vernacular architecture.

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Famous Vernacular Quotes

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. — Carl Sandburg

Our native language is like a second skin, so much a part of us we resist the idea that it is constantly changing, constantly being renewed. — Casey Miller

Being that can be understood is language. - Hans-Georg Gadamer

Being that can be understood is language. — Hans-Georg Gadamer

until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing. — C. S. Lewis

The language of truth is unadorned and always simple. — Ammianus Marcellinus

The language of truth is simple. — Euripides

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all. — Walt Whitman

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words. — Hippocrates

What is lofty can be said in any language. What is mean should be said in none. — Maimonides

We have this wonderful language and we don't appreciate it. That's old-fashioned me, but when I went to school, everyone had elocution lessons, not to sound posh but so you could be understood. — Penelope Keith

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. — David Crystal

What we speak becomes the house we live in. - Hafez

What we speak becomes the house we live in. — Hafez

The accent implies your language and the manner implies your clan. — Thai Proverbs

Elegance of language must give way before simplicity in preaching sound doctrine. — Girolamo Savonarola

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations. — Edward Sapir

Short Vernacular Quotes

  • Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur. — Joanna Russ
  • I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. — David Antin
  • Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy. — John Adams
  • Music is the vernacular of the human soul. — Geoffrey Latham
  • What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place. — Calvin Trillin
  • Second, we also got a more authentic liturgy of the people of God, in the vernacular language. — Hans Kung
  • In the vernacular of my grandfather, 'I does not care.' — Herman Cain
  • Oh, this I have to see. I love it when you go for the vernacular. Jugular. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Vernacular Image Quotes

The Vernacular Language Quotes

I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. — David Ogilvy

The architect who combines in his being the powers of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in a language vernacular and time--- is he who shall create poems in stone. — Louis Sullivan

The Catholic Church has a dignity far surpassing that of every merely human society, for it was founded by Christ the Lord. It is altogether fitting, therefore, that the language it uses should be noble, majestic, and non-vernacular. — Pope John XXIII

Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular. — Buddha

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me. — Barbara Kruger

Working with the Latin language is pretty powerful. Working with a language that is not spoken vernacularly is intense. — Eyvind Kang

What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing! — Pete La Roca

People Writing About Vernacular

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg
quotes on life, nature and poetry

272 2881
Read quotes by Hans-Georg Gadamer

Hans-Georg Gadamer
quotes on education, life and friendship

22 185
Read quotes by C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis
quotes on purpose, faith and love

1957 19120
Read quotes by Ammianus Marcellinus

Ammianus Marcellinus

9 74
Read quotes by Euripides

Euripides
quotes on love, death and wisdom

430 4140
Read quotes by Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman
quotes on love, life and nature

490 8628

More Vernacular Quotes

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. — William Labov

Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. Theyre all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. Theyre tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky. — Andrew Bird

You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news. — Adlai E. Stevenson

The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century. — Harold Innis

We want a vernacular in art. No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity but that comprehensive and harmonizing unity with individual variety which can be developed among people politically and socially free. — Walter Crane

I’m interested in vernacular cultures, where people lived a little closer to the source of materials and the making of objects for use. And for me, not to rely strictly on the history of art has always been an interesting process, to be looking into areas that we call craft and trades. — Martin Puryear

I'm not saying that there weren't other inherent problems with the score that couldn't have been overcome with a bit of remixing, but why did they ask me to do it, and why did Griffin ask me to do it this way, for a film that had nothing to do with American vernacular? — Michael Nyman

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions. — Michael Tilson Thomas

The Color Purple really floored me. That book was just incredible because I loved the language. The biggest deal of that book was that I loved the poetry of broken English. Broken English and vernacular. It just floored me that you can actually capture the way people really talked. And I also really connected to the social class element. — Matt de la Pena

The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ? — Christopher Hitchens

I do know that for all the artists it's very important to speak in a vernacular that can be understood by everyone. — Aaron Rose

Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. — Martin Filler

I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term. — Pete Seeger

It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. "Miss March" is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages. — Stephanie Zacharek

However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects. — William Labov

Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. — Charles McGrath

What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds. — Carlisle Floyd

I read a lot - surveys of vernacular music. A lot of it is the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I've loved since I was in high school. They had it at the library and I always thought that was interesting, even when I was into punk and stuff. Just the history of storytelling and the amount of melancholy a lot of old music has. — Bradford Cox

There are tools that help sharpen freestyle skills like having a diverse vernacular, some sense of music theory, being outspoken, phrasing, spacing, cross word puzzles, thesauruses, the ability to expand on an issue and embellish that with more descriptive terminology. — Myka 9

I've always been obsessed with electronics and using computers and software. It's always been part of my vernacular. — Sufjan Stevens

I'm motivated by injustice, which is embedded and constant and wrong - not by a vernacular soundboard. — Amy Richards

I wanted to get away from the Mexican vernacular and do more 'nuevo Latino.' Americans are starting to understand regionality in Mexican food. It is very regional in terms of ingredients. — Aaron Sanchez

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed but attentive. — Raymond Chandler

It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. — Thomas Babington Macaulay

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light. — Donna Tartt

I have to apologize with one of my album because I called it Unleash the Dragon but I didn't really unleash - I kind of stayed in the Dru Hill vernacular, and that's why the album was so ballad-heavy. — Sisqo

Doesn't matter if you're fourteen or if you're eight, there's an incredible vernacular that I do believe has become more and more plausible to talk this way in the public sphere, I think because we live in such a coarse and pornographic era. Years of this has produced a certain amount of misogyny that is just a given of life in America at this point. — David Simon

Every director should take an acting class. At least one. You know, you panic with actors. It's like, "Okay, this is back in college, I know how to talk to these guys. I know their vocabulary, and I get what they're saying back to me." So basically to learn the vernacular of acting, that's very important. — Shane Black

It's nice for me to have a ballet as a kind of platform for creativity, because unlike modern dance or contemporary dance or downtown dance, ballet is formalized, and there's something orthodox about it that I like. I like that there's less emphasis on subversion and innovation. I actually think that my musical vernacular or my musical voice is also less inclined toward innovation and subversion. I think I'm a traditionalist. — Sufjan Stevens

The funny thing is, nationalism only could have come about in Europe after the invention of printing. You could have this thing that was a book in a vernacular language, and you could imagine there were other readers of this book who you couldn't see, but they were a theoretical union of readers who all use the same language. That is kind of a prerequisite for a national fantasy. You need that thing, and it's a strange thing. — Ben Katchor

You know what the left has succeeded in doing, they have succeeded, in terms of the vernacular, the lexicon, they've redefined the word "immigration" and to tell everyone we're anti-immigrant. — Rush Limbaugh

Mrs. James, my fifth-grade teacher, introduced us to some of the great literature of African American culture. I won my first blue ribbon reciting the vernacular poems of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, in particular "Little Brown Baby." — Michael Eric Dyson

I think one of the things helping Donald Trump is, he hasn't known what he can't do. It's not in his vernacular. It's not in his vocabulary. It's not in his way of thinking what he can't do, what you're not supposed to do. — Rush Limbaugh

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