Quotes About English

It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavors look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect.

Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.

To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.

All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.

History, Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases that 'once caused terrifying epidemics and then disappeared as mysteriously as they had come38'. He cites the robust but mercifully transient English sweating sickness, which raged from 1485 to 1552, killing tens of thousands as it went, before burning itself out. Too much efficiency is not a good thing for any infectious organism.

began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English—a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive.

Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.

Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

he was the most gifted English scientist of his age, but also the strangest. He suffered, in the words of one of his few biographers, from shyness to a 'degree bordering on disease'19. Any human contact was for him a source of the deepest discomfort.

the only English-language publication on offer was the weekend edition of USA Today, a publication that always puts me in mind of a newspaper we used to get in grade school called My Weekly Reader. I am amazed enough that they can find buyers for USA Today in the U.S.A., but the possibility that anyone would ever present himself at the station kiosk in Buchs, Switzerland, and ask for it seemed to me to set a serious challenge to the laws of probability.

Pepys recorded in his diary a rather more prosaic milestone in his life. On September 25, 1660, he tried a new hot beverage for the first time, recording in his diary: "And afterwards I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink), of which I never had drank before." Whether he liked it or not Pepys didn't say, which is a shame, as it is the first mention we have in English of anyone's drinking a cup of tea.

No country has given the world more incomparable literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog? The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.

It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently.

meat was any food (the sense is preserved in "meat and drink" and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it).

We're sending ye tae Wapping, ye soft English nancies, and if ye wairk very, very hard and if ye doonae git on ma tits, then mebbe I'll not cut off yer knackers and put them in ma Christmas pudding. D'ye have any problems with tha'?

There is something in what he said. English is a merry confusion of quirks and irregularities that often seem willfully at odds with logic and common sense.

The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates.

If we take the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as our guide, then Shakespeare produced roughly one-tenth of all the most quotable utterances written or spoken in English since its inception—a clearly remarkable proportion.

All else in every direction was quiet, agreeable, timeless English countryside.

English also has a commendable tendency toward conciseness, in contrast to many languages

Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

the Pilgrims didn't have to learn Algonquian for the happy and convenient reason that Samoset and Squanto spoke English—Samoset only a little, but Squanto with total assurance (and some Spanish into the bargain).