If scientists could communicate more in their own voices – in a familiar tone, with a less specialized vocabulary – would a wide range of people understand them better? Would their work be better understood by the general public, policy-makers, funders, and, even in some cases, other scientists?
We live in a time when the words impossible and unsolvable are no longer part of the scientific community’s vocabulary. Each day we move closer to trials that will not just minimize the symptoms of disease and injury but eliminate them.
I was on ‘SVU’ for 11 years. I developed a muscle in my brain that could memorize things much more easily than people who don’t do it every day. I got used to the language, and some of it got to be repetitive language, so you build your vocabulary.
Photographs don’t ‘reveal’ much at all but instead help us generate a kind of visual vocabulary that we can use to make sense of the world and direct our attention to certain things around us. In other words, they help us learn how to see.
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
I’m always fighting with profanity and Christian comedy. I’m telling you, it’s always a fight. Because my father said to me, he said, ‘Well, Kym, I feel like comics and people that use profanity, you have a lack of vocabulary, actually, a whole lot.’
Words are not even within me. They’re not in my vocabulary to really express the kind of feeling that I had.
Indeed, artists, particularly modern artists, have intentionally limited the scope and vocabulary of their expression to convey, as Mark Rothko and Ad Reinhardt do, the most essential, even spiritual, ideas of their art.
When you have no idea what to do or how to do it, you just need to see and absorb as much as you possibly can and just fill your vocabulary and your brain with as much as humanly possible.
Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It’s as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.
My dad didn’t have a formal education, but he had a wonderful vocabulary. So in ‘Harvest,’ I wanted my main character to be an innately intelligent man who would have the vocabulary to say whatever he wanted in the same way as lots of working-class people can.
The larger your audience, the smaller your vocabulary and range of referents – the fewer your means of expression. You can’t rely on the luxury of intimacy.
I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.
After 14 years of running DonorsChoose.org as someone who had never written a line of code, I did do a three-month night school course. After all these years, I could at least speak some of the same vocabulary and have a first-hand appreciation for what my colleagues on the engineering team are doing.
There were two very distinct voices going on in my head and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life and establishing myself as a male… The other voice, the one I had from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.
We live in a world where terror has become a too familiar part of our vocabulary. The terror of 9/11, in which al-Qaeda’s attacks on America launched the nation into three wars – against Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Islamic State.
We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.
I find my vocabulary is quite a lot better when I’m hungover. I feel like I unlock a key of words that I don’t usually use in day-to-day life.
The word ‘suffering’ is not in my vocabulary.
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
With a very few exceptions, every word in the French vocabulary comes straight from the Latin.
Most of us don’t think about miracles that we could possibly do. We don’t have a vocabulary of how God works with the specific things that He does, and we don’t know how to align ourselves with what He is doing so that we can be His vehicle on the earth to deliver a miracle.
Architecture is restricted to such a limited vocabulary. A building is either a high-rise or a perimeter block or a town house.
I’m not a great reader, believe it or not. It’s not the vocabulary – my father made me read the dictionary when I was little – but my attention span is poor. Takes me months to read one book.
Sound is the vocabulary of nature.
Your understanding of what you read and hear is, to a very large degree, determined by your vocabulary, so improve your vocabulary daily.
I always had a great appreciation for jazz, but I’m a very pedestrian musician. I get by. I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.
You stand with the least likely to succeed until success is succeeded by something more valuable: kinship. You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear.
The words ‘give up,’ ‘raise the white flag’ do not exist in my vocabulary.
Arthur Young’s Reflexive Universe – fascinating but too schematic to fit into my scheme. The most I could hope for was a sense of the vocabulary and some possible images.
Sound is the vocabulary of nature.
I was always an avid reader of books. My vocabulary, my English are all thanks to that reading habit. Reading keeps me grounded. I came from a very middle class family – poor, in fact.
It might interest you to know that the 1828 Noah Webster Dictionary identifies the optimist in complimentary terms, but says nothing about the pessimist. The word ‘pessimist’ was not in our vocabulary at that time. It’s a modern ‘invention’ which I believe we should ‘dis-invent.’
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
I’ve always been very wordy; I’ve got a great vocabulary.
To me, the job of the artist is to provide a useful and intelligent vocabulary for the world to be able to articulate feelings they experience everyday, and otherwise wouldn’t have the means to express in a meaningful and useful way.
When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I’m more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often.
I feel a vocabulary in my music that is coming from popular music. Popular music is like the mother of all languages.
Some of the ways I write my raps is from my vocabulary I learned in school.
Playing nice isn’t really something that’s in my vocabulary. I just do what I think is right.
I love ballet. Ballet is its own being. It has its own vocabulary. I feel as if I am in a different world when I am in the ballet studio.
People are complex. You can be smart and still look hot. You can be a punk rocker yet have a refined vocabulary. It’s all about this mashup that makes us who we are and I think that’s a beautiful thing.
Poetry is meant to inspire readers and listeners, to connect them more deeply to themselves even as it links them more fully to others. But many people feel put off by the terms of poetry, its odd vocabulary, its notorious difficulty.
When my family fell apart, it was such a troubled part of my life… I think I could understand what I was going through, but I didn’t have the vocabulary for it.
So long as we use a certain language, all questions that we can ask will have to be formulated in it and will thereby confirm the theory of the universe which is implied in the vocabulary and structure of the language.
You adjust what you do depending on the actor. You evolve a vocabulary and a way of language and talking with each actor.
My emoji vocabulary is pretty limited to, like, the smiling poop and the rainbow and a unicorn or something.
I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.
Boxers don’t tend to come from Cambridge or Oxford. Sometimes the things we say don’t come out well. We are not known for our vocabulary.
All my life, people have made fun of the way I speak. I guess because a lot of my vocabulary is made up of things that other people say. I started making fun of them and imitating them and now that’s how I speak.
Banish the words ‘I can’t’ from your vocabulary. Remember: If ‘can’t’ equals ‘won’t’, ‘can’ equals ‘will.’
I suppose that I inherited the same vocabulary and world view as most black Christians do, most Christians in general, to be sure. It was heterosexist in the sense that it took the heterosexual orientation as the norm from which to start as the given. And everything that fell outside of that was not acceptable.
The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship. A true friend would die for you, so when you start trying to count them on one hand, you don’t need any fingers.
Read, read, read. Read good books. You will strengthen your understanding of story. Your vocabulary will be the richer for it.
