David Levithan Quotes

Once upon a time the plural of 'wizard' was 'war'.

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

Prowling the meanings of a word, prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then the luminous, big, shivering, discandied, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

I think they named the orange before the carrot.

For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.

Philologists, who chase A painting syllable through time and space Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark, To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's Ark.

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

The business, task or object of the scientific study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a very limited extent and for very few languages.

The dictionary is like a time capsule of all of human thinking ever since words began to be written down. And exploring where words have come from can increase your understanding of the words themselves and expand your understanding of how to use the words, and all of this change happens in your thinking when you read the words.

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.

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.

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.

Words are not simple things: they take unto themselves, as they have through time, power and meaning.

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.

Platypus? I thought it was pronounced platymapus. Has it always been pronounced platypus?

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.

My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.

Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.

We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse: we carry a museum inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard.

The word trill really REALLY bugs me! Like who made that up???

I used to teach. I quote American history and I love words. I've read the dictionary I don't know how many times throughout my life. People say, "You read the dictionary?" I say, "Yes, and you can really believe it."

Scared and sacred are spelled with the same letters. Awful proceeds from the same root word as awesome. Terrify and terrific. Every negative experience holds the seed of transformation.

J, n. A consonant in English, but some nations use it as a vowel . . . from a Latin verb, "jacere", "to throw," because when a stone is thrown at a dog the dog's tail assumes that shape.