Quotes About Lexicon

morphological

Every sport, every profession, every group united by a single passion draws on a lexicon that is uniquely theirs, and theirs for a reason.

The two words, in the American lexicon, are never good. Pink slip. The first time I ever heard it when I was young was when Kaiser Steel handed out pink slips to many of my neighbors and relatives. Layoffs were about efficiency, sales figures for raw materials or refrigerators.

The vocabularies in the world add up, they do not overlap. Translation is something else.

You see," continued the minister, bowing thankfully to the duke, "Dictionopolis is the place where all the words in the world come from. They're grown right here in our orchards.

I will use big words from time to time, the meanings of which I may only vaguely perceive, in hopes such cupidity will send you scampering to your dictionary: I will call such behavior 'public service'.

Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'

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

In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military's deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a 'pre-dawn vertical insertion'.

I like to think that my main instrument is vocabulary.

Lexicography is a chastening as well as an illuminating and fascinating art.

Old words, he said, were the best of all, and he indulged in them: correctitude, palimpsest, parlementaire, guttersnipe, purblind.

obsolete subject headings; for example, the word aeroplanes was replaced by airplanes.

I have learned to interface - what I think would be the contemporary term - with various different lexicons, and people speak very different languages. I've learned to speak in a lot of tongues, and I can live with the bellicose language of some fervent, fire-breathing Christians, sure.

La lingua è vera, ma la maniera in cui la assorbo e utilizzo sembra finita. Un lessico cercato acquisito, resta per sempre anomalo, come se fosse artefatto, anche se non lo è.

I could list hundreds of words I've come up against in the course of my work that did not exist in the era of which I was writing and for which I never could find a suitably old-time, archaic or obsolete substitute.

There are so many words in our language; we get to know so few of them.

Foot-and-a-half-long words.

choosing words is harder than I thought.

Thanks to Mr. Grose's Lexicon Balatronicum, Olympia knew a buffer nabber was a dog stealer.

I've always loved the English language. I just like words, you know?

A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the other one.

When a language advances and adds a third term to its lexicon for color, the third term is always red.

If you look up a word in the dictionary, you find it defined by a string of other words, the meanings of which can be discovered by looking them up in a dictionary, leading to more words that can be looked up in turn. There is no exit from the dictionary.