Susie Dent Quotes

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.

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

I definitely do see language serving its users, and when it no longer serves them we need to look for new words.

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.

Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word.

Sarah Palin was delivering a speech and she said 'refudiate.' It's not a word – you have refute and repudiate, and she combined them. A lot of times that will happen and people will confuse combinations of words. I remember a couple years ago John McCain mistakenly combined the words Vice President and Palin.

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.

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that 'fetch' is now the word I want to use to mean 'cool.'

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

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.

I welcome new words, or old words used in new ways, provided the result is more precision, added color or greater expressiveness.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?

One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.

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".

Verbing weirds language.

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.

The emergence of a new term to describe a certain phenomenon, of a new adjective to designate a certain quality, is always of interest, both linguistically and from the point of view of the history of human thought.

Every word was once a poem.

Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?