Every definition is dangerous.
Dictionary Quotes
Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
Dictionaries are like watches; the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.
Me not no Oxford don me a simple immigrant from Clapham Common I didn’t graduate I immigrate I ent have no gun I ent have no knife but mugging de Queen’s English is the story of my life. I don’t need no axe to split/up yu syntax I don’t need no hammer to/mash up yu […]
Gratitude is a useless word. You will find it in the dictionary but not in life.
Lexicographer, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods. For your lexicographer, having written his dictionary, comes to be considered “as one having authority,” whereas his function is only […]
Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This (my) dictionary, however, is a most useful work.
It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
Adams: But Sir, how can you do this in three years? Johnson: Sir, I have no doubt I can do it in three years. Adams: But the French Academy, which consists of forty members, took forty years to compile their dictionary. Johnson: Sir, thus it is. This is the proportion. Let me see; forty times […]
In three moments a laborer will remove an obstructing rock, but three moons will pass without two wise men agreeing on the meaning of a single vowel.
