Gary Jennings Quotes

I’ve always been a word guy, I like weird words and I like American slang and all that and words that are no longer being used… I like to drag them out of the box and wave them around… this is an interesting one, it’s amazing how in addition to punctuation just a little pause in the wrong place can just completely transform the meaning of something.

As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.

OBSOLETE, adj. No longer used by the timid. Said chiefly of words. A word which some lexicographer has marked obsolete is ever thereafter an object of dread and loathing to the fool writer . . .

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

There are very few good ways to get publicity for a dictionary.

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages.

In my dictionary, and everyone's dictionary in the 1970s, the word 'queer' did mean strange and unusual. There was no slur to it.

You can say now, 'I dissed him' - to diss, I dissed him - or, 'Stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity - they form part of the linguistic color of a period.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

First, in the history of words there is much that indicates the history of men, and in comparing the speech of to-day with that ofyears ago, we have a useful illustration of the effect of external influences on the very words of a race.

I believe every change any word has undergone probably originated in ignorance.

The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

KISS, n. A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for "bliss." It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.

Zoë threw up her hands in exasperation. "I hate this language. It changes too often!

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

LEXICOGRAPHER, n. A pestilent fellow who, under the pretense of recording some particular stage in the development of a language, does what he can to arrest its growth, stiffen its flexibility and mechanize its methods.

English is a second language in most of the educated sectors of Europe and much of the world. But maybe in the future Chinese will be. But I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.

I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.