Quotes About Vocabulary

Anglo-Saxon tends not to lend itself to long and elaborate words that have strung together three or four affixes to create a rhetorical term for a very obscure thing. While

Sesquihoral (adj.) Lasting an hour and a half. Because sometimes you just don't feel like saying "an hour and a half." Short-thinker

Foreplead (v.) To ask too much in pleading. You are pleading when you ask for your job back; you are forepleading when you ask for a raise to go with it. Fornale

Yepsen (n.) The amount that can be held in two hands cupped together; also, the two cupped hands themselves. A measurement that has never really caught on like the teaspoon, the yepsen also falls firmly within the category of things for which you never thought there was a word—at least, not until some interfering busybody like me came along and told you what it was. Yesterneve

The Verbalist, 1894

The other day I was playing Scrabble. I saw that I could close the space in D-E- -Y. I had an N and an F. Which do you think I chose? What was the word I made?

Words often outlive the people who create them.

Similarly—and more in line with the sorts of factors that may play a role in acquiring skills with practice—nine-month-old infants who paid more attention to a parent as that parent was reading a book and pointing to the pictures in the book grew up to have a much better vocabulary at five years of age than infants who paid less attention.

The richness of our ethnic insults vocabulary was wide and deep. It reflected, all too easily, the more elaborate predjiduces of our parents (not my parents), which in their rabid form, had already resulted in tribal bloodbaths.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience.

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.

Youthquake' wasn't an entirely predictable choice for Oxford's Word of 2017. It hasn't been on the lips of an entire nation, nor is it new. But it amply fulfilled the criteria Oxford requires for selection.

I love the word 'dearth,' by the way. It's one of my favorite words.

Always, as a child, I would go around the house, and if I found a word that I didn't know the meaning of, I would write it down and ask my parents to define it and try to memorise it.

When I need to know the meaning of a word, I look it up in a dictionary.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

Most of the words you know and love and use every day are not words you learned by looking them up in a dictionary and reading a definition.

Don't hate the word, playa; hate the dictionary.

I've always been in love with language. My favorite book is a dictionary. I have always loved words.

The character of our language defines us, and dictionaries say as much about us as about the way we speak.

I use the dictionary all the time when I'm reading or working on scripts.

Funny how words in one language get used in another language. For example, 'scotch' in Russian is tape and 'pampers' means diapers.