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The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English
Henry Hitchings
Top 10 Best Quotes
“is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he’d checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn’t been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.”
“We owe pandemonium to Milton’s Paradise Lost (where it is ‘the high Capital of Satan and his Peers’), diplomacy to Edmund Burke, and pessimism to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”
“Tradition has it that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, preferred to speak French to diplomats, Italian to ladies, German to stable boys and Spanish to God. English he seems to have used sparingly – to talk to geese.”
“These many and very different Sources of our Language may be the cause, why it so deficient in Regularity … Yet we have this advantage to compensate the defect, that what we want in Elegance, we gain in Copiousness.’2 These”
“The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant ‘the man from Chorasmia’ (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan).”
“The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.”
“The Western impression of Africa and Asia was that they were hazardous and uncivilized, full of gargantuan lizards, men with the heads of dogs, eels many hundreds of feet long, and creatures like the monoceros, which was alleged to have a stag’s head, the body of a horse, and feet like an elephant’s. The”
“On loof, literally ‘on rudder’, was a Dutch phrase spoken by the captain of a vessel when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. It became aloof, a word that extended this idea of avoidance and evasion.”
“Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion.”
“Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns”
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Book Keywords:
english-language-history