Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The hardest portion of English, I must say it: Idioms.
You can't buy time or save it, common idioms notwithstanding. You can only spend it.
To make the bloody thing talk the way I do when I'm on a verbal roll, in my idioms and rhythms.
The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music.
I do not believe in pure idioms. I think there is naturally a desire, for whoever speaks or writes, to sign in an idiomatic, irreplaceable manner.
Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.
Since at least the Middle Ages, philosophers and philologists have dreamed of curing natural languages of their flaws by constructing entirely new idioms according to orderly, logical principles.
God has to speak to each person in their own language, in their own idioms. Take Spanish, Chinese. You can express the same thought, but to different people you have to use a different language. It's the same in religion.
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.
