14 quotes
“I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of the earth, and that things are sons of heaven.”
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
The language should be accorded just the same dignity and respect as those other standards that science was then also defining.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
An end to timidity—the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
His life was merely a slow-moving tragedy, an act of steady dying conducted before everyone's eyes.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
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.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
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.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
Think simple, Murray kept insisting: Think simple.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
“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.”
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
“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 accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.”
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
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.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
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 serial ever written.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)
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.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne (1998)