Kevin Parker Quotes

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.'

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.

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".

In the room where I work, I have a chalkboard, and as I'm going along, I write the made-up words on it. A few feet from that chalkboard is a copy of the full 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, to which I refer frequently as a source of ideas and word roots.

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!

Anyone who undertakes the literary grind had better like playing around with words.

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

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

My sister called her pillow a pilgo. My brother called his pacifier his nimma. But I don't think I was much of a word generator myself.

I am very proud of being the one to have coined the word.

Words are slippery and thoughts are vicious.

Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

To be honest, I struggle with words. I often forget them, you know, the official ones. Instead, I make words up. I use home-made words that sound similar to the real thing. Usually, they're some sort of confused hybrid of two existing words.

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.

I made a lot of money and had a great time playing with the words that make up the news. I exploited the laziness behind the news and people's reading habits.

Can one invent verbs? I want to tell you one: I sky you, so my wings extend so large to love you without measure.

It's really funny, because if you make up words, then people project their own meanings onto it, which I find interesting.

Well, "slithy" means "lithe and slimy." "Lithe" is the same as "active." You see it's like a portmanteau - there are two meanings packed up into one word.

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.

All your names I and my friend approve of or nearly all as to sense & expression, but I am frightened by their length & sound when compounded. As you will see I have taken deoxide and skaiode because they agree best with my natural standard East and West. I like Anode & Cathode better as to sound, but all to whom I have shewn them have supposed at first that by Anode I meant No way.

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

MONOSYLLABIC, adj. Composed of words of one syllable . . . Commonly Saxon - that is to say, words of a barbarous people destitute of ideas and incapable of any but the most elementary sentiments and emotions.