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"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."
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"All our words from loose using have lost their edge."
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Personal Development
"Language is the friendliest of the things from which we cannot escape."
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Personal Development
"'Mean to' don't pick no cotton."
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Personal Development
"If Bengali is my mother, then English is my father and friend."
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Personal Development
"The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them there ought to be as many for love."
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Personal Development
"Putting it into words will destroy any meaning."
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Personal Development
"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?"
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Personal Development
"He is forced to coin words himself, and, taking his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand new word in the end drops out."
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Personal Development
"Words are the fallen ruins of silent majesty."
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Personal Development
"Kitai blinked slowly. "Why would you use the same word for these things? That is ridiculous.""We have a lot of words like that," Tavi said. "They can mean more than one thing.""That is stupid," Kitai said. "It is difficult enough to communicate without making it more complicated with words that mean more than one thing."
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"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
"In terms of adaptability, humans are pretty amazingly useless."
Adaptation
"Open your refrigerator door, and you summon forth more light than the total amount enjoyed by most households in the 18th century. The world at night, for much of history, was a very dark place indeed."
Light
"Shakespeare 'never owned a book,' a writer for the New York Times gravely informed readers in one doubting article in 2002. The statement cannot actually be refuted, for we know nothing about his incidental possessions. But the writer might just as well have suggested that Shakespeare never owned a pair of shoes or pants. For all the evidence tells us, he spent his life naked from the waist down, as well as bookless, but it is probably that what is lacking is the evidence, not the apparel or the books."
Literature
"Nothing - really, absolutely nothing - says more about Victorian Britain and its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and iconic building was entrusted to a gardener."
Architecture
"She was torn between her customer service training and her youthful certitude."
Conflict
"When you consider it from a human perspective, and clearly it would be difficult for us to do otherwise, life is an odd thing. It couldn't wait to get going, but then, having gotten going, it seemed in very little hurry to move on."
Life
"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
"In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face."
Science
"If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it."
Humor
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