Quotes from Susie Dent

If we want to change the nuance of a particular word we have to change that ourselves.

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

If you eat foie gras, I would really urge you to look at the practice that goes in to producing it. It is totally barbaric and involves force-feeding on the most horrific scale imaginable.

In many cases, the line between a thriller and a crime novel has become too blurred to be useful.

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?

New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.

I'm an Arsenal fan and an even bigger Arsene fan.

My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.

In all my years in 'Countdown's' Dictionary Corner, the subject most guaranteed to rankle with our viewers is the presence of Americanisms in the dictionary.