Logophile Quotes

“I am a lover of words.
If your words don't play with me,
nothing else in you will.”
― Wordions

“If you are writing for an educated audience and, to take an example, you use the phrase mutatis mutandis, you are not showing off—you are communicating. You are using words to do what words are supposed to do. It reminds me of the time that someone complained to William F. Buckley about all the unusual words that he would employ. His reply was that the words were not unusual to him. Words are there for a reason, and foreign phrases can often do the trick that more homey phrases cannot. But if you are blogging about your adventures as a shopping mom, and you write about your purchase of a 48-pack of corn dogs at Costco, and you describe them as de provenance étrangère, it had better be a joke. Unusual words or phrases (foreign and domestic) are a barrier to understanding, unless the point is to communicate to the reader that you know something they don't. Then they understand what you are doing quite well.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“There's a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn't mean love at first sight. It's closer to love at second sight. It's the feeling when you meet someone that you're going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don't love them straight away, but it's inevitable that you will.”
― Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

“The brain is more like a muscle and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot, then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase. Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“I revere a kind of sanctity in language and that reverence stands in place of an aesthetic. I wouldn't even make the case that I'm a writer; it's just what I put in the field if someone asks. It's easier than saying what I actually am, which is best expressed as what I actually do, which functionally a kind of worship. I think there are configurations of words that have power. I think they can be arranged in such a way as to modify the operation of the mind. I'm not even saying I succeed at this. I'm saying that seeking these configurations is the only thing I know how to do.”
― Jerry Holkins