Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
Mark TwainRead
What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?
Interpretation
The quote questions the complexity of language, suggesting it should focus on clarity and efficiency in conveying ideas and emotions.
In this quote, Mark Twain challenges the traditional views of language by asking about its primary purpose. He argues that language should serve the essential function of conveying thoughts and feelings in a clear and concise manner. If simpler, more efficient words can achieve this, then there is little reason to cling to more complicated forms of expression. This reflection on language encourages efficiency and clarity over verbosity.
In practice
During a speech about the importance of effective communication in business.
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
There is no God, cry the masses more and more vociferously; and with the loss of God man loses his sense of values — is, as it were, massacred because he feels himself of no account.
How impossible it is for us to imagine ourselves victims of disaster. We suffer for the poor people who were thrown into the sea from their cruise ship off the coast of Tuscany, some losing their lives. Imagine a world of accelerating natural disasters, one after the other so that nobody can help anyone else.
Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.
Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.
This practice of yoga is to remove the weeds from the body so that the garden can grow.
Stay at the center and let all things take their course.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.