Noam Chomsky Quotes

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

In every culture, in every language, there is expressive play, expressive word play; there's language use to different purposes that we would call poetry.

Now the point of comedy is not just looking funny, it's use of language. We have at our disposal a great language... and the imaginative, creative use of that language can be at the service of humour.

The strangest thing that human speech and human writing can do is create a metaphor. That is an amazing leap, is it not?

Everyone is not able, or inclined, to write poetry in the narrower sense any more than everyone is qualified to take part in a walking race. But just as all of us can and do walk, so all of us can and do use language poetically.

I appreciate people who try and use language in an interesting way.

I've found the world's most versatile word - 'cheeky.' The amount of ways you guys can use the word 'cheeky' is quite impressive.

I always thought of words as art supplies.

Playing with words is like combining different notes in music.

I make up many words but we can go on for forever about slang words that E-40 created. That has always been one of my things since was youngster. I have always being creative with my words.

I am a consummate metaphor addict.

....Worthy would-be worlds of words, whorls of working wonder.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite.

People say to me, ‘How do I know if a word is real?’ You know, anybody who’s read a children’s book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real.

Somebody once said that the Irish derived the greatest benefit from the English language. They court it like a beautiful woman. They make it bray with donkey laughter, they fling it at the sky like paint pots full of rainbow colors.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

In conversation the game is, to say something new with old words. And you shall observe a man of the people picking his way along, step by step, using every time an old boulder, yet never setting his foot on an old place.

Any language is necessarily a finite system applied with different degrees of creativity to an infinite variety of situations, and most of the words and phrases we use are "prefabricated" in the sense that we don't coin new ones every time we speak.

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos.

The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the 'creativity of language,' that is, the speaker's ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately UNDERSTOOD by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are 'familiar.

You don't have to know the whole language to use it usefully, you can do baby talk, you can do grown up talk, you can cuss in it, you can write poetry, you can be a playwright, is sort of the idea.

And what is wrong with playing with words? Words love to be played with, just like children or kittens do!

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

I enjoy wording. Words for me are tangible bodies, visible sirens, incarnate sensualities.

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