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If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

I found that gloss paint suited me entirely, and its qualities still intrigue me. It's viscous and fluid and feels like a pool. It's highly reflective, which means there are layers of looking. You look at the picture, and you look at the surface, then you look at the reflection in the surface behind you, then you look at yourself.

Words have not only a definition... but also the felt quality of their own kind of sound.

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a total coherent system of these integrating with each other, and with behavior, context, universe of discourse, and observer perspective.

I don't deal in terminology, I deal with expressions: colors, shapes, tones, characteristics.

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.

Language is a mixture of statement and evocation.

According to scholars of linguistics, the relation between a word and its meaning is arbitrary.