Language

This is our page for snippets of language, literature, poetry and philosophy...any latin translations found on this site almost certainly contain errors of our own making...

"History is where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable."

    - Philip Milton Roth

"What saddens me most is how we've allowed technology to advance beyond our ability to command it...we have wholeheartedly accepted corporate homogenization and the concomitant loss of our dear customs and the meaning underlying their origins...we have corporately abandoned ouselves."

    - Brian.

"Bring me a normal man, and I'll cure him."

    - Carl Jung

"I have a disease: I SEE language."

    - Roland Barthes, 1977.

"It was chust sublime!"

    -Captain Para Handy, 1955.

"...Even the English language proves to be dualistic and inconsistent. 'The hound ran along quickly behind the wagon' is a sentence all of whose words come straight from the Anglo-Saxon or Old English of a thousand years past.  Yet one can also say this in words - real English words - taken from Latin: 'The domestic canine quadruped progressed at a superior velocity in a position anterior to the vehicle motivated by dual equine traction.'"

    - Charles Thomas, Celtic Britain, Thames and Hudson, 1986, p. 13.

"Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, sub-aqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers."

    - George Orwell, Essay on Politics and the English Language

"But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone."

    - Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time, 1962, p. 256.

"...'It's making toward four,' he thought, wondering if it were actually dawn which he felt, or that anyway the dark globe on which people lived had passed the dead point at which the ill and the weary were supposed to be prone to die and now it was beginning to turn again, soon beginning to spin again out of the last laggard reluctance of darkness - the garblement which was the city: the scabby hoppoles which elevated the ragged palmcrests like the monstrous broomsage out of an old country thought, the spent stage of last night's clatterfalque Nilebarge supine now beneath today's white wings treading, the hydrantgouts gutterplaited with the trodden tinseldung of stars..."

    - William Faulkner, Pylon, 1935, p. 209.

"Chuimhnich e air na labhair gruagach an fhuilt oir"

    - "He remembered all that the golden-haired lady had taught him"