Status Updates From Mudar de Ideias

'We live inside time; it surrounds us and holds us; it marks our beginnings and our ends; it dates our favourite moments and our blackest days; we refer to it all the . . . time – well, there you go.'

'Rereading would be a dull and complacent business if it always resulted in a simple confirmation of what you had previously thought. And the pleasure of being proved wrong can be a genuine pleasure.'

'This lexical golden-ageism often joins hands with grammatical prescriptivism – never end a sentence with a preposition, never split an infinitive, and so on – to create many mournful and irritated letters to the newspapers about the decline of language and, with it, civilization.'