Anu Garg Quotes

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."

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.

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.

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

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.

When did the word 'compromise' get compromised? When did the negative connotations of 'He was caught in a compromising position' or 'She compromised her ethics' replace the positive connotations of 'They reached a compromise'?

I believe every change any word has undergone probably originated in ignorance.

You know, words have strange destiny, too. They grow. They get old. They die. They come back.

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.

Today we speak, but first we spoke; faucets leak, but never loke. Today we write, but first we wrote; we bite our tongues, but never bote.

Words mean what they're generally believed to mean. When Charles II saw Christopher Wren's St. Paul's Cathedral for the first time, he called it "awful, pompous, and artificial." Meaning roughly: Awesome, majestic, and ingenious.

Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

Language changes very fast.

There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.

'Entrepreneur' is a French word.

At a certain point, what people mean when they use a word becomes its meaning.

I think there is some credibility to the notion that marriage is an institution. It meant something very different hundreds of years ago when it became the norm for people to go off and pair.

Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.

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.

We will pass on a document will not have exactly the same meaning it had when we received it from our fathers.

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.'

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

GENEROUS, adj. Originally this word meant noble by birth and was rightly applied to a great multitude of persons. It now means noble by nature and is taking a bit of a rest.