Scott Westerfeld Quotes

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

I'm really fascinated by lingos and colloquialisms that are outmoded and have gone by the wayside. I love the way people spoke in the '30s, and the amazing slang of the mid-'60s and '70s.

I write in American slang.

I really like language - and slang in particular, and just the shorthand we use when we communicate with people.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

People love to drop in 'you betcha' as often as they can.

I hear it all the time in the street: 'It's the crisp bloke.'

I have this little thing that people call Keegan-ese, where I don't speak English words at all. I just say stuff like, "You gotta toish the doish and you gotta maloish the hoish."

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.

The downtrodden are the great creators of slang.

Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.

It's Fifty, not Fiddy.

Jargon: any technical language we do not understand.

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.

My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.

I would always talk with my friends in English and Spanglish, but it was more like slang. It was more like, 'Yo, what's up, dog?' But in Spanish, I know what's proper, and what's ghetto. I know the difference.

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

We are surrounded by hundreds of 'tribes,' each speaking their own distinct slanguage of colourful words, jokes and phrases that together form an idiosyncratic phrasebook, years in the making.

I keep a big, fat dictionary with me while writing.

I've found that there are only two kinds that are any good: slang that has established itself in the language, and slang that you make up yourself. Everything else is apt to be passe before it gets into print.

The Color Purple really floored me. That book was just incredible because I loved the language. The biggest deal of that book was that I loved the poetry of broken English. Broken English and vernacular. It just floored me that you can actually capture the way people really talked. And I also really connected to the social class element.