20th-century Lexicographer Quotes

Lin Yutang
Erin McKean

The dog which remembers only to bark and not to bite, and is led through the streets as a lady's pet, is only a degenerate wolf.

Lin Yutang
Lin Yutang
Acting is a form of deception, and actors can mesmerize themselves almost as easily as an audience.

See yourself as a small child, fragile and vulnerable, and breathe in. Smile with love to this small child within yourself, and breathe out.

Women? Let's get real: we called them chicks. What they did was 'chick work', which tended to be secretarial in its myriad forms... Whatever their own agenda, girls were there for sex, joint-rolling and throwing together the all too mandatory slop.

Not only the tools of manual labour, but also the tools of human thought — words — are subject to the laws of historical development. The history of the meanings of words is outside the area of interest of formal logic, and could not be fruitfully studied by the methods of that discipline.

And I don't like people who eat powdered doughnuts. I don't car how careful you are, they're just plain messy. I can't believe they taste good enough to justify getting that sugar all over everything, especially me.

Erin McKean
Erin McKean
It leaves me wanting to rejoice – isn't language wonderful, that we can do all these different things with it!

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

A dash derives from "to dash," to shatter, strike violently, to throw suddenly or violently, hence to throw carelessly in or on, hence to write carelessly or suddenly, to add or insert suddenly or carelessly to or in the page. "To dash" comes from Middle English daschen, itself probably from Scandinavian-compare Danish daske, to beat, to strike. Ultimately the word is-rather obviously-echoic.

The English language is like a fleet of juggernaut trucks that goes on regardless. No form of linguistic engineering and no amount of linguistic legislation will prevent the cycles of change that lie ahead.