Quotes from Henry Hitchings

Obsession' is explained as 'the act of besieging' or 'the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possession'—a pair of definitions together more eloquent than the whole of Fatal Attraction.

The almost as familiar chutzpah has been drolly defined as 'the quality shown by the man who murders his mother and father, then asks the judge to forgive a poor orphan

Johnson loathed cucumbers: he held with the old-fashioned view that 'a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing'. Boiled

As we have seen before, this finely tuned judgement also allows Johnson to discriminate deftly between the different senses of a particular word. Thus there are sixteen senses of 'world', ranging from 'the great collective idea of all bodies whatever' to 'the earth; the terraqueous globe'

misadventures. 'A family', Johnson would later write, 'is a little kingdom, torn with factions and exposed to revolutions.'4

Jane Collier's Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (a spoof conduct book published in 1753)

Naïveté was in fact warmly embraced. It proved a useful alternative to describing an action or statement as ingenuous, an adjective which contemporary users were apt to confuse with ingenious.19

But his key label is 'cant'. He defines the word as follows: 1. A corrupt dialect used by beggars and vagabonds 2. A particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men 3. A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms 4. Barbarous jargon 5. Auction When a word is

For another 300 years lawyers would continue to do a great deal of their writing and thinking in French, and they would supplement it with generous helpings of Latin – words like affidavit and subpoena – which conveyed an air of precision and authority unavailable to English. To this day the language of the law proves prolix, repetitious, archaic and theatrical, as indeed do many of its quite mystifying processes and practitioners.

in fact foppery looks to have German origins, while fond, still then commonly used as a somewhat poetic equivalent for 'silly', may be from the Norse, related for instance to the modern Icelandic fáni, which means someone who emptily swaggers. Another

Johnson insists: It must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every one that speaks it, … words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in the water. Perhaps

In his entry under the verb 'to antedate', Johnson quotes the essayist Jeremy Collier: 'By reading, a man does, as it were, antedate his life, and makes himself contemporary with the ages past.' It is Johnson's engagement with the past and his revival of a diffuse pot-pourri of materials that make the Dictionary such an unexpectedly vibrant work. At

gloomy, pensive, discontented temper This melancholy flatters, but unmans you; What is it else but penury of soul, A lazy frost, a numbness of the mind? —JOHN DRYDEN AT

Dictionary he identifies 'what ills the scholar's life assail': 'Toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail'. The last of these was always a genuine possibility: it was common for people owing even modest debts to be incarcerated, and several writers known to Johnson had suffered this fate—the

The answer lies in the Preface, where he explains, 'Obsolete words are admitted, when they are found in authors not obsolete, or when they have any force or beauty that may deserve revival.'ag Significantly, the epigraph to the finished Dictionary is a passage on this very theme from the second of Horace's Epistles; it celebrates the efforts of the prudent critic who weeds out undignified language and rehabilitates forgotten but elegant words.

These many and very different Sources of our Language may be the cause, why it so deficient in Regularity … Yet we have this advantage to compensate the defect, that what we want in Elegance, we gain in Copiousness.'2 These

Tradition has it that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, preferred to speak French to diplomats, Italian to ladies, German to stable boys and Spanish to God. English he seems to have used sparingly – to talk to geese.

is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he'd checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn't been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.

We owe pandemonium to Milton's Paradise Lost (where it is 'the high Capital of Satan and his Peers'), diplomacy to Edmund Burke, and pessimism to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns

The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.

Among more recent innovators was the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel Bend Sinister is trophied with delightful oddities like kwazinka ('a slit between the folding parts of a screen') and shchekotiki (which is 'half-tingle, half-tickle').6

Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion.

The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant 'the man from Chorasmia' (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan).