Definitions Quote by Andrew Bird

What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable,…

— Philip Kaufman

Sometimes I know the meaning of a word but am tired of it and feel the need for an unfamiliar, especially precise or poetic…

— William Safire

Most words evolved as a description of the outside world, hence their inadequacy to describe what is going on inside me.

— Hugh Prather

Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous.

— Frank Herbert

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

— William Safire

I don't know why I still find it so hard to accept that words are faulty and by their very nature innacurate

— Doris Lessing

The very natural tendency to use terms derived from traditional grammar like verb, noun, adjective, passive voice, in describing languages outside of Indo-European is…

— Benjamin Lee Whorf

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing. It embodies, indeed, something better than the…

— J. L. Austin

I find it difficult to believe that words have no meaning in themselves, hard as I try. Habits of a lifetime are not lightly…

— Stuart Chase

I was fascinated by the shape of words even before I knew what they meant.

— Susie Dent

“must his simplicity of thought and occasional quaintness be reproduced in the form of archaisms of language; and that not only because the affectation…

— Herodotus

“A word's meaning depends not so much on its linguistic past but rather on the place the word occupies in relation to the general…

— Anonymous