Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?
In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.
The use of food metaphors is really well established English... Somebody is a peach, a hot tamale.
If words are doing their job, then their novelty will not be the most noticeable thing about them.
I hope you find, as I did, that happiness comes from noticing and enjoying the little things in life.
Let us reject the spirit of making proselytes to particular creeds by any other means than persuasion.
Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.
Accept periods of suffering with gratitude, knowing that suffering can teach you very important lessons.
You can limit the number of invitations to an in-person fashion show, but you can't police the Internet.
Friable isn't often used of food, yet its meaning lends itself perfectly to pastry and crumbly biscuits.
Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of her honor.
The laws are the sole guardians of right, and when the magistrate dares not act, every person is insecure.
English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.
The character of our language defines us, and dictionaries say as much about us as about the way we speak.
Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.
Computer users soon learn that the miraculous powers of personal computers are based on avoidance of error.
Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe.
I don't intentionally eavesdrop. I'm not looking for salacious gossip, I'm just looking for vocabulary items.
Why use salty when you can have brackish? It carries a sense of part-water, part-salt, too, just like the sea.
We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.
A love letter is to be savored; a love email... is to be forwarded to all your friends, and probably laughed at.
Relief of distress or compassion shown to victims of misfortune. A blessing that is an act of Divine compassion.
Almost all the civil liberty now enjoyed in the world owes its origin to the principles of the christian religion.
People say jargon is a bad thing, but it's really a shortcut vocabulary professionals use to understand one another.
The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.
I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.
Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.
If a term becomes too popular, its irritant value is ramped up. The impulse is then to replace it with something else.
if you want someone to stop listening to you go ahead and yell. If you want them to listen to every word, whisper. -Mimi
But the reasonableness of this command to obey parents, is clear, and easily understood by children, even when quite young.
Like italics and hyphens, quotation marks are to be used as sparingly as possible. They should light the way, not darken it.
Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.
After all, it is an ancient and valuable right of the English people to turn their nouns into verbs when they are so minded.
The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scripture ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws.
Right underneath your thoughts and negative emotions exists an ocean of love. You have but to quiet the mind to experience it.
There are hundreds of thousands of words that aren't in any print dictionary today... because there's no space for all of them.
I like to introduce a few lost gems when I can to fellow word-lovers, and would genuinely love some of them to make a comeback.
Anyone who finds himself putting down several commas close to one another should reflect that he is making himself disagreeable.
If anything is guaranteed to annoy a lexicographer, it is the journalistic habit of starting a story with a dictionary definition.
Glogg is a Scandinavian mulled wine, sweetened with honey, almonds, raisins and spices. Its name suits its purpose so beautifully.
Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.
Booze' was once a popular term in the slang or 'cant' of the criminal underworld, which may explain its rebellious overtones today.
Claggy is often seen as a negative word, yet for me it describes perfectly that full-mouthed feel of a treacle tart of banoffee pie.
Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.
The causes which destroyed the ancient republics were numerous; but in Rome, one principal cause was the vast inequality of fortunes.
Those who are addicted to the phrase "to use a vulgarism" expect to achieve the feat of being at once vulgar and superior to vulgarity.
The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.
As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?
We think people go to a dictionary to find out what a word means. Most people go to the dictionary because they don't want to look stupid.
Every sport, every profession, every group united by a single passion draws on a lexicon that is uniquely theirs, and theirs for a reason.