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.
To make dictionaries is dull work.
If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know? If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words? Why is 'phonics' not spelled the way it sounds? How come abbreviated is such a long word?
All the words you need are to be found in the dictionary. All you have to do is put them in the right order.
The English language was carefully, carefully cobbled together by three blind dudes and a German dictionary
Did you just use juxtaposition in a sentence?" "Yes, Sage" he said patiently. "We use it all the time with art,. . . That, and I know how to use a dictionary
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.
Cantona's expression speaking the whole French dictionary without saying a word.
The word impossible has been and must remain deleted from our dictionary.
I need no dictionary of quotations to remind me that the eyes are the windows of the soul.
You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.
I couldn't have opened a store without putting books with the clothes. I am still writing as I have always done, and have published my ninth book "L'envers à l'endroit" last year. I am currently working on a dictionary of my favourite words.
I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.
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.
What's a depression? The dictionary says a depression is a dent. And what's a dent? Everybody knows a dent is a hole. And what's a hole? You tell me what's a hole! And I'll tell you that a hole is nothin'!
When I start asking my friends, "What do you think this means?" And it leads to way more interesting conversations than what it actually ends up meaning in the dictionary. Like "apocryphal," for instance.
Read the dictionary from A to Izzard today. Get a vocabulary. Brush up on your diction. See whether wisdom is just a lot of language.
My work is play. And I play when I design. I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure that I actually do that, and the definition of “play,” number one, was “engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor,” and number two was “gambling. ” And I realize I do both when I’m designing.