Colorless green ideas sleep furiouslythree old owls on a chest of drawerswere screwingthe daughter of the doctor.But then the mother called them,colorless green ideas slepp furiously.

~ Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco Chomsky Irony Linguistics Pastiche Poetry Semantics Sestina

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism.

~ Donna J. Haraway

Donna J. Haraway Epistemology Feminism Irony Linguistics Ontology Politcs

My partner and I were going to renew our vowels, but the consonants revolted.

~ Stewart Lee Beck

Stewart Lee Beck Humor Humorous Quotations Humorous Quotes Linguistics

Oh, but to reach silence, what a huge effort of voice. My voice is the way I go seek reality; reality prior to my language exists as an unthinkable thought, but I was and am fatefully impelled to have to know what thought thinks. Reality precedes the voice that seeks it, but like the earth precedes the tree, but like the world precedes the man, but like the sea precedes the view of the sea, life precedes love, bodily matter precedes the body, and one day in its turn language shall have preceded possession of silence. - Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

~ Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector Existentialism Identity Crisis Linguistics Philosophy

Grammar is politics by other means.

~ Donna J. Haraway

Donna J. Haraway Feminism Gender Grammar Linguistics Politics

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

~ Ferdinand De Saussure

Ferdinand De Saussure Linguistics Philosophy Speech

The itchy reality of these places is that they are no place at all, they are nowhere. There’s a sleeping monster in nowhere, and it is older and bigger than you, it is island-sized, and it has never known happiness. If you’re ever nowhere at all, and you do think about it, and you can hardly think about anything else, and you can hardly breathe, and oh, God, it is awake, it is that grand realisation which nobody can speak. Don’t speak it! What would you say?But all is not lost, because in our language we have this phrase. We never have to be nowhere at all, we only ever have to be in the middle of nowhere, which is a softer, funnier place to be. Do you see? The phrase makes nowhere a place, with boundaries and a centre, and if there are boundaries then you can leave this place, you can travel in any direction and “nowhere” will cease to be, and this whole experience will be something you can laugh about.

~ Quintin Smith

Quintin Smith Humor Linguistics Prose