Language Nuances Quotes

I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.

They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs, they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs.

What Americans call cross-ventilation, the English call draughts.

Every word wants to be taken literally, else it decays into a lie. But one mustn't take any word literally, else the world becomes a madhouse.

What is said determines who listens and who understands. Graphic design is a language, but graphic designers are so busy worrying about the nuances - accents, punctuation and so on - that they spend little time thinking about what the words add up to. I’m interested in using our communication skills to change the way things are.

The hardest portion of English, I must say it: Idioms.

Things on the whole are faster in America; people don't stand for election, they run for office. If a person says he's sick, it doesn't mean regurgitating, it means ill. Mad means angry, not insane. Don't ask for the left-luggage; it's called a checkroom.

English may be the fastest moving language in the world, but there are plenty of concepts, sensations and everyday occurrences which lack a pithy word to describe them. Take the clunkiness of 'the day before yesterday' and 'the day after tomorrow': German provides single words for both.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

Two nations divided by a common language.

Coming from the Malayalam sets, when I went to Telugu, people told me that I wasn't acting and that it felt dead. It was very subtle in Malayalam, while it is slightly dramatic in Telugu. It is quite fascinating to understand what each industry expects of you and work according to that.

Americans do seem to say things which make the English notice England.

I have not been able to discover whether there exists a precise French equivalent for the common Anglo-American expression 'killing time.' It's a very crass and breezy expression, when you ponder it for a moment, considering that time, after all, is killing us.

Amazing what the British do with language; the nuances of politeness. The world's great diplomats, surely.

I learned this one growing up in Texas and, subsequently, living in Los Angeles: always use the 'usted' form when speaking to a Spanish official. Mexican border patrol cops don't like it when you call them 'amigo,' give them a hardy pat on the back, slip a $20 in their pocket. No bueno, it doesn't fly. By the way, those of you not laughing at that obviously took French in high school, and that was a gay choice.

Neither you nor I speak English, but there are some things that can be said only in English.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.

I have some English words on the first album, but any time I try to do it, you miss something. You think it's just a simple translation from French to English, but it's so different as far as the understanding.

Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language.

The human language, as precise as it is with its thousands of words, can still be so wonderfully vague.

I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.

I think the most overused words in our vocabulary in the South are black and white.

If you travel to the States... they have a lot of different words than like what we use. For instance: they say 'elevator', we say 'lift'; they say 'drapes', we say 'curtains'; they say 'president', we say 'seriously deranged git.'