“ The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. ”
- George Orwell- Copy
- 2.3K
“ Jargon is the verbal sleight of hand that makes the old hat seem newly fashionable; it gives an air of novelty and specious profundity to ideas that, if stated directly, would seem superficial, stale, frivolous, or false. The line between serious and spurious scholarship is an easy one to blur, with jargon on your side. ”
- David Lehman- Copy
- 1.8K
“ We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary. ”
- Booker T. Washington- Copy
- 3.1K
“ There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living… a way in which life itself is sheer knowing. ”
- Laurens Van der Post- Copy
- 37
“ By such innovations are languages enriched: when the words are adopted by the multitude and naturalized by custom. ”
- Miguel de Cervantes- Copy
- 3.3K
“ Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work. ”
- Carl Sandburg- Copy
- 179
“ As advertising blather becomes the nation's normal idiom, language becomes printed noise. ”
- George F. Will- Copy
- 1.4K
“ Jargon allows us to camouflage intellectual poverty with verbal extravagance. ”
- David Pratt- Copy
- 2.4K
“ I prefer the honest jargon of reality to the outright lies of books. ”
- Jean Rostand- Copy
- 579
“ Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon. ”
- William Zinsser- Copy
- 2.8K
“ The Language of the Dream/Night is contrary to that of Waking/Day. It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations. ”
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge- Copy
- 1.4K
“ Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smo. ”
- Mark Twain- Copy
- 689
“ So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language. ”
- Michael Polanyi- Copy
- 1.5K
“ The enterprise of describing something in language that has never been described before is a very difficult thing to do. When you decide to do away with old cliches or old phraseologies, and to come up with a new way of saying something, it's extremely difficult. ”
- Gao Xingjian- Copy
- 998
“ Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised — and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy. ”
- Doris Lessing- Copy
- 3.3K
“ Psychobabble is… a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It's an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations, that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems. ”
- Richard D. Rosen- Copy
- 4K
“ Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints — the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk — we think we're using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we're its slavish agents. ”
- Harry Mathews- Copy
- 2.4K
“ You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence. ”
- Katherine Anne Porter- Copy
- 2.8K
“ While wading through the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? ”
- Thomas Jefferson- Copy
- 290
“ The world of the 90s and beyond will belong to managers or those who make the numbers dance, as we used to say, or those who are conversant with all the business jargon we used to sound smart. The world will belong to passionate, driven leaders — people who not only have an enormous amount of energy but who can energize those whom they lead. ”
- John Welch- Copy
- 742
“ Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis… ”
- Harold Rosenberg- Copy
- 131
- 1