language

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

What is truly arresting about our kind is better captured in the story of the Tower of Babel, in which humanity, speaking a single language, came so close to reaching heaven that God himself felt threatened.

Class was what formed you, but didn__ travel to other cultures _ it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He__ learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent _ class was too.

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name.

From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning "what gay clothes you wear" - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win the war and escape hanging- Congress quite extraordinarily found time to debate business for a motto for the new nation. (Their choice, E Pluribus Unum, "One from Many", was taken from, of all places, a recipe for salad in an early poem by Virgil.)

I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.

What other species now require of us is our attention. Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.

Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.

When you__e in love, you want to live forever. You want the emotion, the excitement you feel to last. Reading in Italian arouses a similar longing in me. I don__ want to die, because my death would mean the end of my discovery of the language. Because every day there will be a new word to learn. Thus true love can represent eternity.

The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I__e had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.

I was a reader before I was a writer, and when I started putting together my first collection of short stories, Fairytales For Lost Children, I drew on my rich history as a reader to try and create my voice. I wanted this voice to reflect my Somali background, my Kenyan upbringing and my London home. This voice would be a mashup of all the elements that formed my youth; the sticky-sweet Jamaican patois, the Kenyan street slang, my Somali and Italian linguistic tics, my love of jazz poetics and nineties hip-hop slanguistics. This language would form the bed on which my narratives of love, loss, identity and hope would rest.

I found that reading gave me a certain relief _ one form of escapism that seemed safe, and maybe more than safe. I felt saner _ less fragmented- after reading for an hour.location 3234

Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.

With the sound of gusting wind in the branches of the language trees of Babel, the words gave way like leaves, and every reader glimpsed another reality hidden in the foilage.