Imprecise Language Quotes

The common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts; they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial; if anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

Few things give rise to imprecise rhetoric like the issue of race. It's understandable, but damaging.

Usually it is uses of words, not words in themselves, that are properly called vague.

If we communicated with something like music, we would never be misunderstood, because there is nothing in music to understand...... But until we find this new way of speaking, until we can find a nonapproximate vocabulary, nonsense words are the best thing we've got. Ifactifice is one such word.

We feel something, and reach out for the nearest phrase or hum with which to communicate, but which fails to do justice to what has induced us to do so....We stay on the outside of our impressions, as if staring at them through a frosted window, superficially related to them, yet estranged from whatever has eluded casual definition.

The ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding.

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

That was the thing about words, they were clear and specific-chair, eye, stone- but when you talked about feelings, words were too stiff, they were this and not that, they couldn't include all the meanings. In defining, they always left something out.

We use important words too frequently and they lose value; for instance, charm and great. An actor or musician often is proclaimedgreat when we really mean he is outstanding.

Most men think indistinctly, and therefore cannot speak with exactness . . .

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

The weapons an author has at her disposal are flawed. There are words that feel shapeless and overused. Love, for example. I could write the word love a thousand times and it would mean a thousand different things to different readers.

Words are a pretty fuzzy substitute for mathematical equations.

I had thought that words were instruments of precision. Now I know that they devour the world, leaving nothing in its place.

A laxity pervades the popular use of words.