Give me hunger, pain and want, Shut me out with shame and failure From your doors of gold and fame, Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger! But leave me a little love.
Carl SandburgRead
Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Slang embodies a practical and informal approach to communication, emphasizing its active role in everyday life.
Carl Sandburg's quote suggests that slang is not just a casual form of language but an essential tool that engages directly with the experiences and realities of people. It emphasizes the dynamic and working-class roots of slang, reflecting a language that is robust, functional, and deeply connected to daily existence.
Themes
SlangLanguageCommunicationInformalExpression
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about urban culture, one might quote this to highlight the significance of slang in modern communication.
More from Carl Sandburg
All quotes βNothing happens... but first a dream.
Carl SandburgRead
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
Carl SandburgRead
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Carl SandburgRead
There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus in me that wants to wallow in the mud.
Carl SandburgRead
A liar goes in fine clothes, a liar goes in rags, a liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.
Carl SandburgRead
Similar quotes
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.
Noam ChomskyRead
I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.
George SteinerRead
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
H. L. MenckenRead
Dangling punch lines to forgotten stories remain in the language like the smile of the Cheshire cat.
William SafireRead
My language! heavens!I am the best of them that speak this speech. Were I but where 'tis spoken.
William ShakespeareRead
She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee's knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from anywhere else
Jonathan Safran FoerRead