“Speaker: "Please retract that unparliamentary language."”
Misattributed
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Dennis Skinner 25
British politician 1932Related quotes
“The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks”
Word Play (1974)
Context: The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.
“Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.”
Word Play (1974)
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns.
Source: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity] (1964), p. 7
Source: 1970s and later, Explorations in the functions of language, 1973, p. 41 cited in: Sin-wai Chan (2004) A dictionary of translation technology. p. 113.
Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)