language

Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing - turn out your toes as you walk - and remember who you are!

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.'

They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs...

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

We think because we have words, not the other way around. The more words we have, the better able we are to think conceptually.

Like and equal are two entirely different things.

Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth.  It's worth it.  What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being!

Beware the writer who always encloses the word "reality" in quotation marks: He's trying to slip something over on you. Or into you.

Credo is the word with which the great creeds of early Chistendom begin.  “I believe. . .” we say.  The Latin credo means literally, “I give my heart.”  The word believe is a problematic one today in part because it has gradually changed its meaning from being the language of certainty so deep that I could give my heart to it, to the language of uncertainty so shallow that only the “credulous” would rely on it.  Faith, as we have seen, is not about propositions, but about commitment.  It does not mean that I intellectually subscribe to the following list of statements, but that I give my heart to this reality.  Believe, indeed, comes to us from the Old English belove, making clear that this too is meant to be heart language.  To say “I believe in Jesus Christ” is not to subscribe to an uncertain proposition.  It is a confession of commitment, of love.

God's first language is Silence. Everything else is a translation.