language & writing8 quotes

“Nomos is Greek for ‘pasture’, and ‘the Nomad’ is a chief or clan elder who presides over the allocation of pastures. Nomos thus came to mean ‘law’, ‘fair distribution’, ‘that which is allotted by custom’ - and so the basis of all Western law.

The verb nemein - to ‘graze’, ‘to pasture’, ‘to range’, or ‘to spread’ - has a second sense as early as Homer: ‘to deal’, ‘to apportion’ or ‘to dispense’ - especially of land, honour, meat or drink. Nemesis is the ‘distribution of justice’ and so of ‘divine justice’. Nomisma means ‘current coin’: hence ‘numismatics’.”

“Language is the product of synergism between values of the society, communication theory, biology, physiology, physics (of the inherit limitations of our brains as well as our phonetics), and human thought. I believe this is also true of the engine of language, grammar.

Both modern linguistics and the bulk of the philosophy of language have chosen to separate language from culture in their quests to understand human communication. By this move they fail to come to grips with language as a “natural phenomenon,” to use the words the philosopher John Searle. Many linguists and philosophers since the 1950s have characterized language almost exclusively in terms of mathematical logic. It is almost as if the fact that language has meaning and is spoke by human beings is irrelevant to the enterprise of understanding it.”

“Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.”

“Nothing is more damaging to an argument than the words without hesitation, without doubt, undoubtedly, certainly, and the like. They are used only when proof is wanting.”

“The inflation of specialized vocabularies, far from giving us the means for a more refined and rigorous understanding, multiplies the crutches with which we try in vain to make up for the loss of confidence in our capacity to understand and to speak.”

“Just as we would be inestimably poor to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity. We will never encounter a stegosaur, but we can be thankful that fossils allow us to know what it was like. In the same way, if we cannot enjoy all 6000 of the worlds languages alive for much longer, let us at least make sure to afford them high quality preservation…The world’s riffs on basic materials that emerged in East Africa around 148,000 B.C. represent 6000 ways of being human.”

“A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”