Language Abuse Quotes

POLONIUS: What do you read, my lord? HAMLET: Words, words, words.

Some facts in life are immutable. One is, trust no-one who uses the word 'trope'.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

Words are the money of fools.

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name? ~Jack or The Submission

The most incomprehensible talk comes from people who have no other use for language than to make themselves understood.

I have abused language. I love it, and I abuse it... I don't write just to be clever. But sometimes I do. And if you don't have an understanding of the language, then the way in which it's bent doesn't actually register.

The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.

Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.

Perhaps like the many and various meanings of the word "we," liberals use the word "unsubstantiated" to mean "tested repeatedly and proved true."

Conversations I have had with school principals and students lead me to the same conclusion-that...there is an evil and growing habit of profanity and the use of foul and filthy language.

Among the many evils which prevail under the sun, the abuse of words is not the least considerable. By the influence of time, and the perversion of fashion, the plainest and most unequivocal may be so altered, as to have a meaning assigned them almost diametrically opposite to their original signification.

... ideals, standards, aspirations,--those are chameleon words, and take color from their speakers,--often false tints. A scholarly man of my acquaintance once told me that he traveled a thousand miles into the desert to get away from the word uplift, and it was the first word he heard after he reached his destination.

Donald Trump's language has been atrocious, his behavior toward women.

If lawyers are disbarred and clergymen defrocked, doesn't it follow that electricians can be delighted, musicians denoted?

It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

You taught me language, and my profit on't / Is, I know how to curse

RIBALDRY, n. Censorious language by another concerning oneself.

Our language has become a tired and inefficient thing in the hands of journalists and writers who have nothing to say.

The affectation of some late authors to introduce and multiply cant words is the most ruinous corruption in any language.

I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it's been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.

Words should have the power to inform and to move, not the power to send people scurrying away. But if you attach that much emotional energy to a word, it gives people the power to hurt each other.

Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

And the betrayers of language ...... n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; The perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who have set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses; howling, as of a hen-yard in a printing-house, the clatter of presses, the blowing of dry dust and stray paper, foetor, sweat, the stench of stale oranges.