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“We have too many
high sounding words
high sounding words
and too few actions
that correspond with them.”
―
that correspond with them.”
―
“A man with a scant vocabulary
will almost certainly
be a weak thinker.
be a weak thinker.
The richer and more copious
one's vocabulary
one's vocabulary
and the greater one's
awareness of
awareness of
fine distinctions
and subtle nuances of meaning,
and subtle nuances of meaning,
the more
fertile and precise
is likely to be one's thinking.
is likely to be one's thinking.
Knowledge of things
and
knowledge of the words
for them grow together.
for them grow together.
If you do not know
the words,
you can hardly know the thing.”
―
One of the really bad things
you can do to your writing
is to dress up
the vocabulary,
looking for long words
because you're maybe
a little bit
ashamed
of your short ones.
This is like dressing up
a household pet
in
evening clothes.
The pet is embarrassed
and the person who committed
this act
of premeditated cuteness
should be even
more embarrassed.”
―
―
“The limits of my language
are the limits of my universe.”
―
―
I dressed my cat up in bunny ears but that's as far as I'm pushing it.
ReplyDeleteMidnight would become Jack the Ripper if I tried to dress him up! :-)
DeleteI like the Goethe quote. And yet I agree with King about unnecessarily dressing up your language... I'll lose a hand -- or a limb! -- if I try to dress Callum up: he knows that he is gorgeous without even trying :-)
ReplyDeleteRonel visiting with the A-Z Challenge music and writing: Various Artists