Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

'Shkoff' is to eat. 'Shkiaff' is to slap. Like, 'Gettouttahere I'm gonna give you a couple of shkiaffs,' or, 'Forget presentation, just shkiaff the food onto the plate.'

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.

I really like language - and slang in particular, and just the shorthand we use when we communicate with people.

You can get far in North America with laconic grunts. "Huh," "hun," and "hi!" in their various modulations, together with "sure," "guess so," "that so?" and "nuts!" will meet almost any contingency.

I write in American slang.

People love to drop in 'you betcha' as often as they can.

I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.

I've always been a bro, and I've used the word 'bro' a lot.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

Slang has different functions: many of the words we use are playful and a lot are tribal - we speak the same way as the groups we are part of. A great deal are also euphemistic, so it's no surprise that a third of us are perplexed by their meanings and origins.

At home we always converse in Oriya.

Dialogue is generally the worst choice for exposition. When you're writing lines you need to focus on the way people actually talk. And when we talk to each other we never actually explain our terms. We don't say 'Sweetheart, would you pass me the sugar bowl, which we picked up for a song at that antique stall in Munich.'

Write the way you talk. Naturally.

Dude, my hair is like an architectural structure. It’s like… a building.

The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

The Americans, who are the most efficient people on the earth, have carried [phrase-making] to such a height of perfection and have invented so wide a range of pithy and hackneyed phrases that they can carry on an amusing and animated conversation without giving a moment’s reflection to what they are saying and so leave their minds free to consider the more important matters of big business and fornication.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

The fact that slang is apt and forceful makes its use irresistibly tempting. Coarse or profane slang is beside the mark, but "flivver," "taxi," the "movies," "deadly" (meaning dull), "feeling fit," "feeling blue," "grafter," a "fake," "grouch," "hunch" and "right o!" are typical of words that it would make our spoken language stilted to exclude.

The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth

Where you need to make fast decisions, people have to work in an open space where I can just walk to somebody's cube, so we don't need to schedule meetings for absolutely everything.

Management by Walking Around

Theres a very fine line between not listening and not caring. I like to think I walk that line everyday of my life.

That Yes, I know what you mean-that is the technical definition of Best Friend Forever.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.