Susie Dent > Quotes

“quiddling’ (attending to the trivial tasks in life as a way of avoiding the important ones).”
― Susie Dent, Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year

“Language is a democratic enterprise.”
― Susie Dent, WHAT MADE THE CROCODILE CRY:101 QUESTIONS ABOUT ENGLISH LANGUAGE: 101 Questions about the English Language

“And there is always the argument-closing ‘Villain, I have done thy mother’, a retort from Titus Andronicus of such eviscerating wit that we still honour it today with jokes beginning with ‘your mum’.”
― Susie Dent, Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year

“BITCH THE POT Tea and gossip go together. At least, that’s the stereotypical view of a tea gathering: a group of women gathered around the teapot exchanging tittle-tattle. As popularity of the beverage imported from China (‘tea’ comes from the Mandarin Chinese cha) increased, it became particularly associated with women, and above all with their tendency to gossip. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue lists various slang terms for tea, including ‘prattle-broth’, ‘cat-lap’ (‘cat’ being a contemporary slang for a gossipy old woman), and ‘scandal broth’. To pour tea, meanwhile, was not just to ‘play mother’, as one enduring English expression has it, but also to ‘bitch the pot’ – to drink tea was to simply ‘bitch’. At this time a bitch was a lewd or sensual woman as well as a potentially malicious one, and in another nineteenth-century dictionary the phraseology is even more unguarded, linking tea with loose morals as much as loquaciousness: ‘How the blowens [whores] lush the slop. How the wenches drink tea!’ The language of tea had become another vehicle for sexism, and a misogynistic world view in which the air women exchanged was as hot as the beverage they sipped. ‘Bitch party’ and ‘tabby party’ (again the image of cattiness) were the terms of choice for such gossipy gatherings. Men, it seems, were made of stronger stuff, and drank it too. Furthermore, any self-respecting man would ensure his wife and daughters stayed away from tea. The pamphleteer and political writer William Cobbett declared in 1822: The gossip of the tea-table is no bad preparatory school for the brothel. The girl that has been brought up, merely to boil the tea kettle, and to assist in the gossip inseparable from the practice, is a mere consumer of food, a pest to her employer, and a curse to her husband, if any man be so unfortunate as to affix his affections upon her. In the twenty-first century, to ‘spill the T’ has become a firm part of drag culture slang for gossiping. T here may stand for either ‘truth’ or the drink, but either way ‘weak tea’ has come to mean a story that doesn’t quite hold up – and it’s often one told by women. Perhaps it’s time for bitches to make a fresh pot.”
― Susie Dent, Word Perfect: Etymological Entertainment For Every Day of the Year

“Resistance to the evolution of words was nothing new, but today’s fictitious entries had a different motivation, planted in order to catch any copyright infringement or plagiarism by others and known since the 1970s as a “mountweazel” thanks to the bogus inclusion in a biographical dictionary of a woman called Lillian Mountweazel, who had “died at thirty-one in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Of these, Martha’s enduring favorite was “stealing someone’s thunder,” whose time and place of birth were as solid as the leather covers of her first dictionary. On February 5, 1709, a critic named John Dennis saw his own play open at London’s Drury Lane theater. The rather turgid drama had one surprise: Dennis had perfected for the stage a machine that reproduced the sound of thunder. But despite its dramatic sound effects, the play closed after only a short run. Not one for grudges, Dennis decided to attend the premiere of the production succeeding his, Macbeth. As the witches’ scene began, the sound of thunder filled the auditorium, its reverberations booming out, Dennis quickly realized, from his own sound-effect machine. Accounts from members of the audience that night relayed how Dennis stood up, his face as lowering as the darkened stage, and shouted, “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Oliver Caldwell, a Yorkshire surname. Her father had long been a student of onomastics, and he loved to unpack the names of people they encountered as children. Caldwell, from Old English, meant “chill spring.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“obmutescence, noun (seventeenth century): a willful speechlessness”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Kything, she thought: the recognition of old friends in a crowd.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“uhtceare, noun (Old English): the anxiety before dawn”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Berlin, where she’d spent the last ten years learning her trade as an editor, had felt starkly different. History pressed up against you more urgently there, its upheavals and reinventions so recent they seemed to linger in the air and give the city a restless energy. In Oxford, the history had settled into the fabric of the stone, a subtle perfume breathed out by the street names and college spires. It comforted. Welcomed contemplation.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“She should have better words, she thought, she of all people. But she loved words as individuals. She knew their roots, their rhythms, their skeletons, shapes, and stories. Fitting them together to create something meaningful took a different skill altogether.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Of all the things to anthropomorphize”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Yet it was precisely the unsung words that were the most beautiful in Martha’s eyes. “Apricity,” the warmth of the sun on a winter’s day, she had found mentioned in just a single source from the 1620s, and then nothing. “Respair,” sketchily defined in the dictionary as a recovery from despair, apparently lived for just one day, like a linguistic mayfly, before it vanished into the recesses of a word-hoard so vast that its tiny footprint lay buried beneath the tread of words more ordinary yet inexplicably more popular.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Oxford felt alive this morning, its mix of youth and history on full display. They reached the wide thoroughfare of St. Giles, whose undeniable grandeur was tempered by a scruffiness about the edges, like so much of Oxford. At its south end loomed the Martyrs’ Memorial, a Gothic monument erected in memory of three Protestant bishops, condemned for heresy and burnt to death on nearby Broad Street. There was nobility in these sudden glimpses of the past, she thought. This city could never be understood in a single sweeping assessment. Instead, it yielded a slow series of realizations, unlocked over time.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“So a commonplace book? What was that exactly?” he asked. “Good question. It was a journal, a sort of personal archive in the early modern period—well, say from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.” He blew over the top of his coffee. “So Shakespearean times.” “Yep, and a couple of hundred years either side. Writing a commonplace book was a way of creating your own external hard drive of quotations in a way. But not just quotations: thoughts, philosophy, news items, anything that caught the writer’s eye. Or ear.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Famed for its Lego-like constructions, it generously bent over backward (sometimes literally) to fill a linguistic gap. Martha’s favorite, without doubt, was Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that ends up making things worse.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“That language defines us and is the framework of our thought, an endless, shifting, complex dance through time and human nature. It is about patterns of life and the need to communicate them;”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“It’s one of my favorites,” Safi said. “Radix malorum est cupiditas. Greed is the root of all evil. It’s the one where three young men go in search of Death to kill him because he’s taking so many of their friends. They’re told they’ll find him under a tree, but when they get there, there’s a big pile of treasure instead, and they end up killing each other over it.” So unwittingly, they find what they were originally seeking. It played out in Martha’s mind. The mysterious tree and the pile of gold, the youngest of the three bringing poison to the others, then being killed by them. The wages of sin is death.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Turf Tavern, known to everyone as simply the Turf, was tucked into an ancient courtyard among the twisting cobbled alleyways that lay behind the elegant eighteenth-century facades of Holywell Street. Alex loved the incongruities of the fourteenth-century pub, the centuries of building and rebuilding apparent in its layered architecture, the different window styles and shapes, doors sunk at odd angles, and uneven surfaces.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“The Clarendon English Dictionary certainly belonged in this last category, the ongoing result of a mammoth logistical operation involving evidence submitted by thousands of volunteer readers. Astronomers, novelists, vicars, suffragists and housewives, philosophers and paleontologists, and even a few convicted criminals had collectively built the backbone of what had come to be regarded as the highest lexicographical authority in the world. The clues amassed by this curious and eager army of readers were submitted on strips of paper—slips—comprising four-by-six-inch biographical records of language. They amounted to thousands, submitted in such numbers after a public appeal by the dictionary’s editors that the lexicographers had trouble finding enough space to house them. Slips libraries—or scriptoria—had been created for them; in reality, they often amounted to nothing more than an editor’s front room.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“There is alchemy in turning raw ingredients into a meal, she thought, adding a pinch of sea salt. What luxury we live in, where this everyday commodity that once held up the Roman Empire can be delivered to us in neat little jars for pennies. Salary, salad, silt, sausage, salsa, sauce…the lexicon of salt whirred through her brain as she turned the stew down to a simmer. The story was richer still, she knew. Salt was once believed to ward off the evil eye, cure anyone considered fairy-struck, and defend against witchcraft, demons, and sprites, for witches and the animals they bewitched were unable to eat anything salted.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“She looked about her now as they made slow progress along the sidewalks flanking the botanical gardens. Many in the crowd were dressed in green, a nod to fertility and to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. These revelers were lucky compared with their forerunners a few centuries before, for whom May Day morning had been more bacchanalian than beatific and who risked being pelted by eggs rather than music.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“One of the editors, Imogen, spoke about watching the entire series of The Wire to locate the earliest mention of “burner phone,” only to find her colleague had pipped her by finding it in a rap song from a year earlier. Saki, an editor with a passion for unearthing obscure evidence of use, announced that one of the dictionary’s readers had found in a chat room exchange from 1992 an earlier example of “meh” before The Simpsons got hold of it. Someone had used it in response to something “far too Ken-doll to me.” How our icons fall, Martha thought.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“It spoke of the centuries of prejudice that had inhibited women's progress, denied them the space to achieve their potential. So that whenever we read of a woman in the past who was ducked as a witch, of one who was thought to be possessed by devils, or who silently mothered a remarkable man, we will be on the track of a lost poet, a forgotten storyteller who also dreamed, wrote, imagined. What if these women had been allowed to let their creativity run free and unimpeded? History had decided instead that they would go half crazed with fear and frustration, their words unsigned and unacknowledged.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Set” was the longest entry in the dictionary, one that would need to be recast almost as soon as its editors completed it. It was already twice as long as Orwell’s Animal Farm, although the entry for “run” was following closely on its heels. Every dictionary maker knew that language would always outpace them, that—as Samuel Johnson had put it—they would be forever chasing the sun.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Tabby Originally the name of a silk material with a ‘watered’ surface, giving an effect of wavy lines. This was later applied to a brownish cat with dark stripes, because its markings resemble this material. The ultimate source of the name is in Arabic al-’attabiya, literally ‘quarter of (Prince) ‘Attab’, this being the district of Baghdad where the fabric was first made.”
― Susie Dent, Interesting Stories about Curious Words: From Stealing Thunder to Red Herrings

“We all create our own personal Oxfords, don’t we? Geographical idiolects. Some people don’t include the university at all. For others, everything turns ‘here be dragons’ the moment they step beyond the college walls.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“It was her own take on the concept of “sonder”: the realization that other people have rich and complicated lives that we will never know.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“And, of course, there was that scent. Vellichor: the musty, musky, and utterly beguiling smell of old books.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition