English is a very expressive language.
The Yiddish language is so rich and unusual that I've always been hooked on its sounds, although I don't speak it.
It used to be that phrases and lines would come into my head, often many of them in a period of five days or a week, and maybe I didn't know what I was talking about, but the words had a kind of heaviness or deliciousness to them.
I’ll always marvel at the liveliness of southern speech-so full of metaphor and hyperbole, quirks and vividness.
One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them.
What can she possibly teach you, twenty seven names for tears?
That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.
I learn immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.
The dictionary contains thousands of words on Tamil music. I am not familiar with most of the words, but it shows the rich past of Tamil music.
The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane.
If our language is watered down, then mankind becomes less human, and less free.
