Americanisms Dictionary Quotes

Many Arabic/Islamic words have now entered the English dictionary, such as haj, hijab, Eid, etc., and I no longer need to put them in italics or explain them. ~ Leila Aboulela

Every time I have to look up a word in the dictionary, I'm delighted. ~ Vivienne Westwood

Look up the word role in the dictionary and you'll see it means playing a part. That's why I call myself a real model. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

I once typed 'vagina dentata' into dictionary.com and it asked me, 'Did you mean giant anteater? ~ Juliet Cook

Hey. Not sure what's going on-gonna go find out. Be careful and don't do anything stupid. Don't come after me-your better on your own. See you. F
I sat on the edge of the bed, holding the note.
Okay, so Fang had looked up vague in the dictionary and this was what it had said to write. ~ James Patterson

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

[ ... ]Are both of you ... ?"
"Manscaped?" Dante smiled. "I'm fucking Italian; I been mowing my lawn since I was thirteen. ~ Damon Suede

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill. ~ Michael Pollan

Oh.My. Every illegal swear word in the dictionary, God. What is it with older men? don't they ever look in the mirror? ~ Diane Messidoro

I'm beginning to think a dictionary would have been a far more advantageous birthday gift for you."
"More advantageous than being eaten alive by a giant, carnivorous bunny? Yes, most things fall in that category, I think. ~ William Ritter

Success brings poise, especially avoirdupois. Success comes before work only in the dictionary. ~ William Cranch Bond

Not leaving: an act of trust and love, often deciphered by children. ~ Markus Zusak

Impossible," said he, "is a word only to be found in the dictionary of fools. ~ Napoleon Hill

To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say. ~ Michael Bassey Johnson

A lot of people use the dictionary to find out how to spell words. ~ Maxine Kumin

People are laughing at me today for having holes in my pockets, and ink blood on my fingers-
a thirty-something old writer, who strangles words from dictionaries, and feeds on the decay of poetry. ~ Anthony Liccione

Just what is a speculative bubble? The Oxford English Dictionary defines a bubble as "anything fragile, unsubstantial, empty, or worthless; a deceptive show. From 17th c. onwards often applied to delusive commercial or financial schemes." The problem is that words like show and scheme suggest a deliberate creation, rather than a widespread social phenomenon that is not directed by any central impresario. ~ Robert J. Shiller

It cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of
the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to
synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat
simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes,
all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent
disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly
say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years
allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead
though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through
the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call
themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's life, whatever the
"Dictionary of National Biography" may say, is always a matter of
dispute. ~ Virginia Woolf

If the reader needs a dictionary to read your book then the dictionary may turn out to be a more interesting read. ~ Ken Scott

At the stomp of boots on grass, I ease my eyes open. Aithinne leans down with a grin. "You didn't die. See? I told you it was easy." She offers me a hand and I take it, rising unsteadily to my feet.

"I've been bitten by some demonic woodland creature. My legs have been shredded by razor-sharp trees. We almost died. Easy? I'm getting you a damn dictionary."

I inspect my bleeding arm. The cut bisects five of the marks Lonnrach made, and I feel inexplicably proud of that. Good. Replace the old, bad memories with new badges. Start over.

"A dictionary," she repeats. "Is that a type of dessert?"

For the love of - "It's a type of book that explains the meaning of words."

"Oh. That sounds terribly dull. I was really hoping for dessert."

I'm hoping to end this rescue with my sanity intact. ~ Elizabeth May

The recent Dictionary of Occupational Titles lists over twenty thousand specialized professions in America; being a millionaire is not one of them. ~ Jerzy Kosinski

Mizuko loved reading the dictionary. She liked it when there were multiple meanings for words and when opposite meanings could be contained. ~ Olivia Sudjic

Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn't come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is capricious and wilful, demanding absolute obedience. You can waste the better part of a lifetime arguing about the randomness of the clues, the setting of the squares, why a certain square is black and not white as you need it to be, question the whole point of doing the crossword – what, after all, is to be gained by solving it. Only after all the chattering is over and you give your complete attention to it, does the perfection of the pattern reveal itself. As is, where is, everything fits. And at the end, when it's all done, there is no reward to be had – the joy of doing it right is all the reward there ever is. (A Deepavali Gift) ~ Manjul Bajaj

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

The difference between bush and ladder also allows us to put a lid on a fruitless and boring debate. That debate is over what qualifies as True Language. One side lists some qualities that human language has but that no animal has yet demonstrated: reference, use of symbols displaced of in time and space from their referents, creativity, categorical speech perception, consistent ordering, hierarchical structure, infinity, recursion, and so on. The other side finds some counter-example in the animal kingdom (perhaps budgies can discriminate speech sounds, or dolphins or parrots can attend to word order when carrying out commands, or some songbird can improvise indefinitely without repeating itself), and gloats that the citadel of human uniqueness has been breached. The Human Uniqueness team relinquishes that criterion but emphasizes others or adds new ones to the list, provoking angry objections that they are moving the goalposts. To see how silly this all is, imagine a debate over whether flatworms have True Vision or houseflies have True Hands. Is an iris critical? Eyelashes? Fingernails? Who cares? This is a debate for dictionary-writers, not scientists. Plato and Diogenes were not doing biology when Plato defined man as a "featherless biped" and Diogenes refuted him with a plucked chicken. ~ Steven Pinker

The high-minded definition of politics is: 'the art or science of government; the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy.' It is only when you keep reading in Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary that you get closer to the truth: 'political activities characterized by artful and often dishonest practices'. ~ Cal Thomas

On Sunday morning, April 12th, my wife woke from what was really a deep, profound sleep and as she was waking a voice distinctly spoke to her; and the voice spoke to her; and the voice spoke with great authority and it said to her: "You must stop spending your thoughts, your time and your money; everything in life must be an investment." So she quickly wrote it down and went straight to the dictionary to look up the two important words in the sentence, 'spending' and 'investing': the dictionary defines 'spending' as "to waste, to squander, to layout without return." To 'invest' is to "layout for a purpose, for which a profit is expected". ~ Neville Goddard

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order. ~ Jean Cocteau

If you look in the dictionary under 'white trash' there's a picture of my family."
from BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, p 37 ~ Michael Flynn

I used the dictionary very minimally and I just wrote how I speak. And I speak very hateful manner usually. I constantly did that because I think the fans would get more out of it if they understood exactly what I'm saying - exactly where I'm coming from. ~ Kerry King

Unique feelings are so unique that they can not be popularized. Feelings without words in the dictionary disappear. Every year thousands of feelings disappear for lack of a concrete form. ~ Isidore Isou

My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next. ~ Grace Paley

My dictionary has no such expression as a violent fight. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

The doctors told me that the neuronal activity in my brain was excessive - too much - a dictionary definition for my entire life. ~ Shinji Moon

Death. I wish the word could be removed from the vocabulary and from the dictionary. It simply does not exist, except in the human mind that was taught that it does exist. People think they are a body and they come to believe that when the body dies, everything they are will die too. It's not true. The soul lives on. The soul of consciousness exists not only in the body but outside of the body too. We are all souls that cannot be contained or limited by time or space or the physical body. For souls there is no death. ~ Kate McGahan