Znani o języku angielskim, cz. 2

Cała prawda o języku angielskim zawarta w zaskakujących i zabawnych wypowiedziach jego sławnych użytkowników.

• Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

• Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Walt Whitman

• Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

• We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.

Oscar Wilde
 

• England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

George Bernard Shaw

• ‘I am’ is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that ‘I do’ is the longest sentence?

George Carlin

• To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

George Orwell

Glossary:

• accretion – nagromadzenie
• compacted – sprasowany, ubity
• let up – ustawać, odpuszczać komuś
• vagueness – ogólnikowość, wieloznaczność
• obscurity – niejasność
• lure – urok
• encroachment – naruszenie
• worn-out – zużyty
• cluttered up – zaśmiecony

Zobacz także:
Znani o języku angielskim, cz. 1
Słynne cytaty – George Bernard Shaw