Words On Words

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"I hate quotations," said Emerson in his Journals. "Tell me what you know." He may not have realized how much could be gleaned from a book of quotations. This collection offers a crash course in the history of thought about language, featuring nearly 5,000 snippets that lead readers back to countless original sources. It serves as a Bartlett's for word lovers and linguists, with nearly half of the text devoted to indexes. Editors David and Hilary Crystal meticulously curated and corrected these quotations, often surprised by the sources that yielded the most. For instance, they found Laurence Sterne's works unexpectedly rich in quotes, while Pepys's Diary was less fruitful. The Crystals sought "succinctness and autonomy of expression," discovering abundance in the works of Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Montaigne, Emerson, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, and Ambrose Bierce, whose Devil's Dictionary is notably quoted. The quotations are organized into 65 categories, covering topics like language origins, usage, multilingualism, verbosity, slang, and political language. Interestingly, despite David Crystal's reputation as a linguist, the Crystals noted that professional linguists are "remarkably unquoteworthy."