At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.

Vulgarity finds its antidote; old crudities become softened with time. Distinctions, both those that are useful and those that are burdensome, flourish and die, reflourish and die again.

A word carries far-very far-deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.

Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.

A word is dead When it is said, Some say. I say it just Begins to live That day.

It's strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, So the lover must struggle for words.

Letters to the editors of English and American newspapers often contain expressions of horror about the new terms that creep into the language, and these expressions are usually accompanied by dire predictions about ruination of the mother tongue.

You can stroke people with words.

The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect.

If a people have no word for something, either it does not matter to them or it matters too much to talk about.