Long Words Quotes - Page 2

• There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.

  Craig Finn

  Song, Ties, Long

  Source: therumpus.net

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• If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know? If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words? Why is 'phonics' not spelled the way it sounds? How come abbreviated is such a long word?

  George Carlin

  Long, Way, Firsts

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• That is a long word: forever!

  Georg Buchner

  Long, Forever

  "Leonce and Lena". Play by Georg Buchner, Act I, 1838.

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• Those who run to long words are mainly the unskillful and tasteless; they confuse pomposity with dignity, flaccidity with ease, and bulk with force.

  Henry Watson Fowler

  Running, Long, Ease

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• As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.

  Lynne Truss

  Long, Messages, Texting

  "The joy of text" by Will Self, Lynne Truss, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2008.

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• I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.

  Nick Hornby

  Long, People, Black

  "A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, May 7, 2005.

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• Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won't be using long words.

  Jonathan Dimbleby

  Names, Long, Andrew

  "Dimbleby lets rip at BBC 'anoraks'" by Jason Deans, www.theguardian.com. January 10, 2003.

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• A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

  George Orwell

  Lying, Latin, Real

  George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (2001). “Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell”, Penguin Modern Classics

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• The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

  William Zinsser

  Writing, Long, Secret

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• Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Science, Errors, Long

  1905 Heretics, ch.13.

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