Word Formation Quotes

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.

I have a good memory for words, and when I come upon a word I don't know, I remember it, or try to - it's almost like a tic. I also just have a good feeling for how words are made and formed in English and the etymologies that give you prefixes and suffixes.

Reading activates and exercises the mind. Reading forces the mind to discriminate. From the beginning, readers have to recognize letters printed on the page, make them into words, the words into sentences, and the sentences into concepts. Reading pushes us to use our imagination and makes us more creatively inclined.

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.

Aunt Mercy put down her tiles, one at a time. I-T-C-H-I-N. Aunt Grace leaned closer to the board, squinting. "Mercy Lynne, you're cheatin' again! What kinda word is that? Use it in a sentence." "I'm itchin' ta have some a that white cake." "That's not how you spell it." At least one of them could spell. Aunt Grace pulled one of the tiles off the board. "There's no T in itchin'." Or not.

I want to get a job naming kitchen appliances. That seems easy; refrigerator, toaster, blender. You just say what the thing does and add "er".

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.

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open. Love is a word another kind of open — As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside. Take my word for jewel in your open light.

We're playing Scrabble. It's a nightmare." "Scrabble?" He sounds surprised. "Scrabble's great." "Not when you're playing with a family of geniuses, it's not. They all put words like 'iridiums'. And I put 'pig'.

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.

Sometimes when you're making songs you just make sounds, and the sounds slowly mutate and evolve into actual words that have meaning.

Syllables govern the world.

A lot of other people have used the talk box but have used it as a sound as opposed to actually making the guitar enunciate words.

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.

When you stop to examine the way in which our words are formed and uttered, our sentences are hard-put to it to survive the disaster of their slobbery origins.

One must regard the hyphen as a blemish to be avoided wherever possible.

If you stop to think about it, you’ll have to admit that all the stories in the world consist essentially of twenty-six letters. The letters are always the same, only the arrangement varies. From letters words are formed, from words sentences, from sentences chapters, and from chapters stories.

In English every word can be verbed.

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.

We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.

What do you call that when you add '-ism' on the end of a word? What is that process? 'Wordism'? Something like that, yeah.

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.

Scrabble was invented by Nazis to piss off kids with dyslexia.