top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Because of social strictures against even the mildest swearing, America developed a particularly rich crop of euphemistic expletives - darn, durn, goldurn, goshdad, goshdang, goshawful, blast, consarn, confound, by Jove, by jingo, great guns, by the great horn spoon (a nonce term first cited in the Biglow Papers), jo-fired, jumping Jehoshaphat, and others almost without number - but even this cautious epithets could land people in trouble as late as the 1940s."
Standard
Customized
More
"Why people use "Was" I have heard some people to say "I was a smart kid at school - Eminem", but why "Was", was is a word for describing the past... which will mean that has started and ended... so what??? How to get it now? You aren't wise, are you?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Belladonna, n.: In Italian a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the essential identity of the two tongues."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Words can change their meaning, just by repeating them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Everything in writing begins with language. Language begins with listening."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Language is wine upon the lips."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Cussing like a commoner wasn't something I was tested on. I picked that habit up outside of high school."
Author Name
Personal Development
"For last year's words belong to last year's language And next year's words await another voice."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"If we should be worrying about anything to do with the future of English, it should not be that the various strands will drift apart but that they will grow indistinguishable. And what a sad, sad loss that would be."
Society
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
Humor
"The pleasant fact is that the British are not much good at violent crime except in fiction, which is of course as it should be."
Crime
"As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it."
Science
"A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things."
Technology
"I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting."
Science
"The whole of the global economy is based on supplying the cravings of two per cent of the world's population."
Economy
"In the mystifying world that was Victorian parenthood, obedience took precedence over all considerations of affection and happiness, and that odd, painful conviction remained the case in most well-heeled homes up until at least the time of the First World War."
Parenting
"It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before."
Mindset
"What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit..."
Discovery
bottom of page