Vocabulary Quotes

If you're not ready to die for it, put the word freedom out of your vocabulary.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One's vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Pressure is a word that is misused in our vocabulary.

When you start thinking of pressure, it's because you've started to think of failure.

Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.

I work in a strange business, and trust is a word that's not even in the vocabulary.

Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt.

The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST.

If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.

Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can't articulate.

Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.

Try to eliminate the word SHOULD from your vocabulary.

And try doing so without replacing it with OUGHT or YOU BETTER.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints --the rules that run us.

Language is using us to talk --we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents.

Language is a field of battle, the media is the artillery, and vocabulary is the ammunition. The NWO has taken the field by storm, and is proceeding with coordinated attacks on several fronts, using all the latest high-tech vocabulary ammunition. They've laid a bed of land mines that cripple us when we try to stand on them: 'liberalism', conservatism', prosperity', 'democracy'.

The vocabulary of pleasure depends on the imagery of pain.

I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather underprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary.

Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition.

All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

Thinkers think and doers do. But until the thinkers do and the doers think, progress will be just another word in the already overburdened vocabulary of the talkers who talk.

The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary.

An average English word is four letters and a half.

By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.

A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules.

... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

[My work] challenges our assumptions of what kind of visual vocabulary belongs in the world of art, versus science.

To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn't have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.

The term 'too big to fail' must be excised from our vocabulary.

Men make angry music and it's called rock-and-roll;

women include anger in their vocabulary and suddenly they're angry and militant.

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.

"Stay" is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.

Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.

We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community's vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.

I think the most overused words in our vocabulary in the South are black and white.

The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep.

It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.

In the critic's vocabulary, the word precursor is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. -- Essay: Kafka and his Precursors

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.

Words are not even within me. They're not in my vocabulary to really express the kind of feeling that I had.

In my eighties, my best friends are in their fifties, and I have many friends at university. It keeps one young, and up with the vocabulary. That's terribly important, especially for a writer.

The ambiguities of language, both in terms of vocabulary and syntax, are fascinating: how important connotation is, what is lost and what is gained in the linguistic transition.

There is a way in which all writing is connected.

In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.

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

Of course there are big differences in length and character and vocabulary, but each level has its particular pleasures when it comes to the words one can use and the way one uses them.

I wanted to define the vocabulary of a wedding both visually and intellectually.

The book is about more than weddings or wedding dresses. It's a metaphor for women's lives, their creativity.

In fact, eloquence in English will inevitably make use of the Latin element in our vocabulary.

We use the word 'hope' perhaps more often than any other word in the vocabulary: 'I hope it's a nice day.' 'Hopefully, you're doing well.' 'So how are things going along? Pretty good. Going to be good tomorrow? Hope so.'

Science gives us a powerful vocabulary, and it is impossible to produce a vocabulary with which one can only say nice things.

Arthur Young's Reflexive Universe - fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.

Your comportment, manners, vocabulary, diction and presentation all communicate your essential message.

To even have a conversation about uncommon brilliance you must develop a new vocabulary of freedom, which is mostly foreign in corporate cultures.

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

It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word 'pessimist' was not in our vocabulary at that time. It's a modern 'invention' which I believe we should 'dis-invent.'

An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible.

For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes.