The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble and from babble to confusion.
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
I have an acquired taste for language, yet it is seldom an actual focus of mine.
Language is one component of the human cognitive capacity which happens to be fairly amenable to enquiry. So we know a good deal about that.
Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.