Language

“I don’t know what you mean by glory,” Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant — there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”
— Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) (1832 – 1898), Through the Looking-Glass, chapter VI.

A prominent evolutionist once seriously proposed to me that Slavic languages are full of consonants because mouths are best kept closed in cold weather, while Hawaiian has little but vowels because the salutary air of oceanic islands should be savoured and imbibed.
— Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002), The Flamingo’s Smile, Penguin 1991, 44.

For thousands of years wood has been a construction material, the ‘material’ par excellence, so much so that in some languages material and wood were referred to by the same word. There is no doubt that our ancestors, ten thousand, one hundred thousand years ago, long before learning how to melt bronze, had learned how to work with wood.
— Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), ‘Stable/Unstable’ in Other People’s Trades, 97.

The great precision with which rules of mathematical discourse are stated does not imply that a description of nature is necessarily more exact because the language used to describe it is mathematical.
— Lancelot Hogben (1895 – 1975), Mathematics for the Million.

From this view of the origin of language it follows that the use of simile and trope was not, as is generally believed, a poetic artifice, but was imposed on primitive man by the very conditions of his development and limits of his vocabulary. If we talk of the mouth of a river, for instance, we do not use the word ‘mouth’ because it seems a felicitous metaphor, but because the makers of the language could conceive of no possible alternative; indeed, unless we have recourse to scientific jargon, no better term has yet been invented.
— Stuart Gilbert (1883 – 1969), in ‘Prolegomena to Work in Progress’ in Our Exagmination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, Faber paperback, 1972, 56.

Medical men all over the world … merely entered into an agreement to call all sorts of maladies people are liable to in cold weather, by one name; so that one sort of treatment may serve for all, and their practice be thereby greatly simplified.
— Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866), letter to John Welsh, 1837.

Voulez vous apprendre les sciences avec facilité? Commencez par apprendre votre language. [Do you wish to learn science easily? Then start by learning your own language.]
— Etienne Bonnot de Mably de Condillac, (1715 – 1780).

Physicists often use ordinary words such as ‘work’ or ‘action’ or ‘energy’ or even, as you shall see, ‘light’ for some technical purpose. Thus, when I talk about ‘work’ in physics, I don’t mean the same thing as when I talk about ‘work’ on the street.
— Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988), QED, Penguin Books, 1990, 10.

The very fact that it was the word ‘virgin’ that was objected to in The Moon is Blue is today laughable, almost incredible.
— Otto Preminger (1905 – 1986), quoted in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Sphere Books, 1967, 333 (concerning the 1951 ‘battle’ to have the film, The Moon is Blue, released).

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