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 no...
In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed.
Pliny was persuaded to explore a peculiar cloud formation that appeared to be coming from the summit of the local mountain, Vesuvius. He was duly rowed ashore, visited a local village to calm the pani...
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 j...
I am a nobody. ... Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.
2 percent of America’s electricity now goes to keeping the Internet cool, to keeping the link unbroken, for America and for the world.
Or of oats ( a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people),
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.
They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today's middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries... a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that wa...
No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be a...
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...
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, a...
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...
Is perhaps difficult to imagine so creative a mind working without a single work of lexicographical reference beside him, other than Mr. Cooper’s crib (which Mrs. Cooper once threw into the fire, prom...
They were a formidable group—the college dean, Henry Liddell (whose daughter Alice had so captivated the Christ Church mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson that he wrote an adventure book for her, s...
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.
Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational...
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 thos...
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 capaci...
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, sp...