He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.
I always knew Gordon Lightfoot was a really great songwriter, but his stuff even sounds better and better all the time. It's just so really good to me. It's just like that's what should be in a dictionary, you know, next to a really good contempory folk song, is a Gordon Lightfoot song.
The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.
A DEFINITION NOT FOUND IN THE DICTIONARY Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children
The trouble with the dictionary is that you have to know how a word is spelled before you can look it up to see how it is spelled.
Language is a signifier - it points to something. But those somethings change sometimes. Where the line comes down is that change is not in the dictionary first, it's not: change the signifier and the signified will go away.
Me? Well, I don't know, I must go to a dictionary and learn what a crook is. I've never been a crook.
My lad chewed and swallowed a dictionary. We gave him Epsom salts - but we can't get a word out of him.
But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.
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.
As sheer casual reading matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in our language.
You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.
And no, I'm not a walking C++ dictionary. I do not keep every technical detail in my head at all times. If I did that, I would be a much poorer programmer. I do keep the main points straight in my head most of the time, and I do know where to find the details when I need them.
Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic
Back in the 19th century, our marketing folks decided to play up the refined usage angle because prescriptivism was very popular: our dictionary is where you go to learn anything about anything. That really set the tone in North America for how people responded to dictionaries.
In the dictionary, next to the word stress, there is a picture of a midsize mutant stuck inside a dog crate, wondering if her destiny is to be killed or to save the world. Okay, not really. But there should be.
In the dictionary of satyagraha, there is no enemy.
I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.
Rap music. . . sounds like somebody feeding a rhyming dictionary to a popcorn popper.
To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover what one suspected, that the only word in it is nothing.
