Esa-Pekka Salonen Quotes

I am very proud of being the one to have coined the word.

The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.

One of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend - and a blend is when you run two words together to make a third word.

What I am doing is creating a language. A different American language.

The truth is that only 1% of all new words are totally new, and of those an even smaller percentage are conjured up out of thin air. The vast majority of coinages are the product of some kind of repurposing, and the result has always been a mix of tradition and innovation.

I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and "Hispanically".

'Refudiate,' 'misunderestimate,' 'wee-wee'd up.' English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!'

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.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

And what better way to get people talking than by creating a new word.

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

Slang is vigorous and apt. Probably most of our vital words were once slang.

Ay, ay, the best terms will grow obsolete: damns have had their day.

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.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

Language changes very fast.

I believe that writers have a responsibility to evolve the language, whether by introducing new words or new usages. Shakespeare alone is responsible for something like 3400 words and phrases.

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

Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

I think, in a way, I invented the term 'fight club' and that these things have always existed, but they never really had a label. Nobody had a language to apply to them. I created that language in two words and I've been paid a great deal of money for inventing two words and labeling something that has always been around.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.