Andrew Clements Quotes

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

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

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.

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.

Words change over time. 'Condescending,' for instance, was once a good thing to be. It meant that a person was willing to interact politely with people of lower social ranks. In Jane Austen's world, a lady praised for her condescension was receiving a sincere compliment.

Every word was once a poem.

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.

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.

Most of us would be upset if we were accused of being "silly." But the word "silly" comes from the old English word "selig," and its literal definition is "to be blessed, happy, healthy and prosperous."

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

To understand a word, we need to learn where it was born, what paths it took to reach where it is today, and how it has changed along the way. The word 'nice' is a positive word today, but hundreds of years ago, it meant 'stupid.'

… ideas are structures built over time, each part added by a new generation.

Ever since third grade, I had a notebook and was putting together words just for fun. I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects.

English is full of Scandinavian words. Margate, Ramsgate, Billingsgate, any town with a 'gate' on it takes their suffix from the Danish word 'gade' which simply means 'street.'

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.

Frankly, I wonder who Frank was, and why he has an adverb all to himself.

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

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.

The word impossible is not French.

I think they named the orange before the carrot.

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

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.

me: why is it upset? shouldn't it be downset? gideon: i will file a lawsuit against the dictionaries first thing tomorrow morning. we're going to tear merriam a new asshole and throw webster inside of it.

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.