Language Critique Quotes

The word 'right' should be excluded from political language, as the word 'cause' from the language of philosophy.

All philosophy is a 'critique of language' (though not in Mauthner's sense). It was Russell who performed the service of showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.

I think 'genius' is an overused word.

Unless we're talking about old-school, witchcraft-trial violence, can we please phase out the phrase 'girl crush?' While we're at it, if we can axe 'like, total girl crush' unless Total Girl Crush is the name of a fizzy soft drink, in which case I'll take two, thank you.

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

What is or is not the jargon is determined by whether the word is written in an intonation which places it transcendently in opposition to its own meaning; by whether the individual words are loaded at the expense of the sentence, its propositional force, and the thought content.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

Faced with the nonsense question 'What is the meaning of a word?' and perhaps dimly recognizing it to be nonsense, we are nevertheless not inclined to give it up.

I am sure," cried Catherine, "I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?" "Very true," said Henry, "and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.

Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

Social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

A philosopher is, no doubt, entitled to examine even those distinctions that are to be found in the structure of all languages... in that case, such a distinction may be imputed to a vulgar error, which ought to be corrected in philosophy.

Language is virtually always pathological; hence the solution is to move as fast and far as possible from language to experience, from linguistic to experimental or psychological philosophy. In order to know that we are not in the linguistic maze, we need to determine, according to Berkeley, whether the things we are talking about exist; hence we need to look for the relevant perceptions. For him, this usually means retiring into himself and trying to imagine whether x exists, having formed the best definition possible of x.

Once she read a book but found it distasteful because it contained adjectives.

The sentence must also contain its own apology for being spoken.

Christian' makes a poor adjective

When it comes to my vocabulary, I felt a responsibility when I was teaching to raise the bar of conversation in my classroom. And with my own students, I refused to let them use the phrase "I like" or "I don't like" when we were engaged in a critique.

We sometimes forget that human invention can also be a subject of human invention: that might seem a modern notion, or a postmodern one, but novelists have taken time - sometimes time out from their realist fixations - to source and satirise the speech and power we rely on.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

A lot of the language about Millennials is extremely gendered.

I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.

Words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness, and can relook at the world without blinkers.

I know that's the sort of thing people say and I really hate it when people say the sort of things people say. I always think, 'You don't mean that, you just think it sounds good.

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from "Disappearance of Literature