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9d4c113
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And after that, and also for each word, there should be sentences that show the twists and turns of meanings--the way almost every word slips in its silvery, fishlike way, weaving this way and that, adding subtleties of nuance to itself, and then perhaps shedding them as public mood dictates.
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words
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Simon Winchester |
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7eb11d9
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Any grand new dictionary ought itself to be a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.
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Simon Winchester |
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c4bc29a
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In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings--then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and set them down.
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Simon Winchester |
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8cc705c
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An end to timidity - the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive." - on the making of the Oxford English Dictionary"
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Simon Winchester |
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5a141fb
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The English language was spoken and written--but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air--it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were--who knew?
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Simon Winchester |
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6cd83b5
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All of a sudden his books, which had hitherto been merely a fond decoration and a means of letting his mind free itself from the grim routines of Broadmoor life, had become his most precious possession. For the time being at least he could set aside his imaginings about the harm that people were trying to inflict on him and his person: It was instead his hundreds of books that now needed to be kept safe, and away from the predators with who..
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escapism
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Simon Winchester |
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51c2b9b
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The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.
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Simon Winchester |
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01f00c3
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His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone's eyes.
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Simon Winchester |
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faccd7a
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One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: "I don't know why I am telling you all of this. It's none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge's business either. It was a purely family affair."
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Simon Winchester |
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a359703
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There is a Sacerdotall dignitie in my native Countrey contiguate to me, where I now contemplate: which your worshipfull benignitie could sone impenetrate for mee, if it would like you to extend your sedules, and collaude me in them to the right honourable lord Chaunceller, or rather Archgrammacian of Englande.
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Simon Winchester |
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e6c9bc9
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One woman even disparaged Johnson for failing to include obscenities. "No, Madam, I hope I have not daubed my fingers," he replied, archly. "I find, however, that you have been looking for them."
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Simon Winchester |
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bccdbb6
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No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily ac..
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words
lexicology
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Simon Winchester |
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60c07b7
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God--who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman--naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device;
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Simon Winchester |
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8410e6c
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Railroads brought about lasting social effects, as well. The companies' ruthless attention to keeping time impelled passengers to carry pocket watches,* and led to the eventual establishment of time zones.
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Simon Winchester |
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4e9e7d1
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was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.
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Simon Winchester |
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fe28fba
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No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses. And
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Simon Winchester |
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ad2dcf3
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Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells. Though
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Simon Winchester |
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6536f2c
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2 percent of America's electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.
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Simon Winchester |
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47aedc4
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Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays--they are all in this one book.
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Simon Winchester |
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44e48ad
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the creation of any sense of unity among a population of potentially disharmonious settlers almost always requires the deliberate agency of man.
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Simon Winchester |
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316769d
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According to an equally lovingly preserved English translation of the prospectus, the purpose of Ibuka's firm was "to establish an ideal factory that stresses a spirit of freedom and open-mindedness, and where engineers with sincere motivation can exercise their technological skills to the highest level." We shall, he pledged, "eliminate any unfair profit-seeking exercises" and "seek expansion not only for the sake of size." Further, "we sh..
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Simon Winchester |
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04c934c
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The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today--Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia--even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten.
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Simon Winchester |
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f19827c
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Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to 'fix our language forever'--no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.
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Simon Winchester |
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91ccedb
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Without haste, without fear, we conquer the world.
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Simon Winchester |
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8902074
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Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules--a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known that the word being defined. The definition must say what something is..
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Simon Winchester |
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8e3c6ce
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Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, "look something up." Indeed the very phrase--when it is used in the sense of "searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference"--simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxf..
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Simon Winchester |
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85ca017
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But wait--was that not how the world at large had come to think of the ocean as a whole? Wasn't the ocean just distance for most people these days? Didn't we all now take for granted a body of water that, so relatively recently--no more than five hundred years before, at most--was viewed by mariners who had not yet dared attempt to cross it with a mixture of awe, terror, and amazement? Had not a sea that had once seemed an impassable barrie..
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Simon Winchester |
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a530f15
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The citizens of Buffalo, then a smallish lakeside town, embarked on a brief campaign, led by a local judge named Wilkeson, to clear their own eponymous riverway and so tempt the canal engineers to route the Erie Canal to a terminus nearby. Energetic lobbying, together with the clearance of the creek, evidently worked, for the engineers did eventually end their labors there, and the fact that more than a million people now still brave one of..
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Simon Winchester |
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37ade55
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individual can fully exercise his or her abilities and skills. "We shall distribute the company's surplus earnings to all employees in an appropriate manner, and we shall assist them in a practical manner to secure a stable life. In return, all employees shall exert their utmost effort into their job." Finally, his new company would help his country. Its formally stated national intent was to help "reconstruct Japan, and to elevate the nati..
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Simon Winchester |
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5057050
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The northeast trade winds that blow at a steady fifteen knots onto the cliffs and reefs of the islands' lee shores produce endless trains of eminently glidable waves.
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Simon Winchester |
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b9da64e
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Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean had been written by a Scottish fur trader, from Stornoway in the Scottish Outer Hebrides, named Alexander Mackenzie. Or more accurately, Sir Alexander Mackenzie--since King George III had awarded him a knighthood for becoming the first white man ever to cross the entirety of North America. Mackenzie had completed his voyage almost nine years earlier. He suspected that his seven-month ove..
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Simon Winchester |
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bbd8941
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I am a nobody. ... Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.
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Simon Winchester |
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e13d27e
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The scientific world of the time was in the midst of a terrible ferment, with discoveries and realizations coming at an unseemly rate. To many in the ranks of the conservative and the devout, the new theories of geology and biology were delivering a series of hammer blows to mankind's self-regard. Geologists in particular seemed to have gone berserk, to have thrown off all sense of proper obeisance to their Maker... Mankind, it seemed, was ..
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science
god
volcano
volcanism
geography
geology
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Simon Winchester |
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e75aca8
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The first vehicle was an unmanned two-ton, hundred-thousand-dollar steel-caged contraption named ANGUS (for Acoustically Navigated Geophysical Underwater System), which had powerful strobe lights, a collection of thermometers, and, most critically, high-definition cameras. Late
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Simon Winchester |
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86a48ea
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It was an idea consonant with Trench's underlying thought, that any grand new dictionary ought to be itself a democratic product, a book that demonstrated the primacy of individual freedoms, of the notion that one could use words freely, as one liked, without hard and fast rules of lexical conduct.
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Simon Winchester |
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ce45b83
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And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. "I am a nobody," he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. "Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether." But"
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Simon Winchester |
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7726b70
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The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which--together with two Canadian provinces--contribute waters to its flow.
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Simon Winchester |
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cc9460e
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Another party, who took an iron boat named the Explorer into the Black Canyon of the lower Colorado River, came across an Indian of what they considered such staggering ugliness that one of their number, a German visitor attached to the party, voted to kill him, pickle him in alcohol as a zoological specimen, and take him back to New York for forensic inspection. The proposal was rejected, however, and the hapless man lived.
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Simon Winchester |
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8746ced
|
These were the soldiers of the Second Brigade--the Irish Brigade--and they were braver and rougher than almost any other unit in the entire Federal army. "When anything absurd, forlorn, or desperate was to be attempted," as one English war correspondent wrote, "the Irish Brigade was called upon." The"
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Simon Winchester |
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e94398f
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Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, "look something up." Indeed the very phrase--when it is used in the sense of "searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference"--simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxf..
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Simon Winchester |
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9e95221
|
He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomforting to dwell.
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madness
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Simon Winchester |
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36a661c
|
The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga's protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which s..
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Simon Winchester |
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8790967
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I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest-staying inmates. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.
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Simon Winchester |
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65e3fb6
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Achaemenid Persian
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Simon Winchester |