Tom Waits Quotes

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

I contend, most seriously, that there is a real need for a good, thick, complete-as-possible dictionary of 'What People Used to Call Things.'

I'd rather split an infinitive than split an idea.

Alphabet Juice is the book Roy Blount was born to write, which considering his prodigious talent, is saying a lot. Did you know that the word LAUGH is linguistically related to chickens and pie? This is the book that any of us who urgently, passionately love words-to read them, roll them over the tongue and learn their life stories while laughing and eating chicken and pie-were lucky enough to be born to read.

By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.

Words are not too old, only people are too old if they use the same words too frequently.

It is a curious fact that the word 'essayist' showed up in English before it existed in French.

I'm not against profanity. It's an important part of the language when used properly.

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

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

I think the close work I do as a translator pays off in my writing - I'm always searching for multiple ways to say things.

Ideally my goal is, before I die, to have some information about every word that's ever been used in print.

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

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've found the world's most versatile word - 'cheeky.' The amount of ways you guys can use the word 'cheeky' is quite impressive.

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.

When I was little, seven or eight years old, in third and fourth grade, I would always try to use long words and stuff.

In Paul Friedrich's book Proto-Indo-European Trees he identifies the "semantic primitives" of the Indo-European tribe of languages through a group of words that have not changed much through twelve thousand years - and those are tree names: especially birch, willow, adler, elm, ash, apple and beech (bher, wyt, alysos, ulmo, os, abul, bhago). Seed syllables, bija, of the life of the west.

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.

Nothing is so indecent that it cannot be said to another person if the proper words are used to convey it.

Every word was once a poem.

Words aren't made — they grow,' said Anne.

Words fascinate me. They always have. For me, browsing in a dictionary is like being turned loose in a bank.

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. These models may be fairly sophisticated and recent, as is perhaps the case with 'motive' or 'impulse', but one of the commonest and most primitive types of model is one which is apt to baffle us through its very naturalness and simplicity.