Top 82 Quotes & Sayings by Susie Dent - Page 2

If you eat foie gras, I would really urge you to look at the practice that goes in to producing it. It is totally barbaric and involves force-feeding on the most horrific scale imaginable.

I remember as a child of five or six lying in the bath marvelling at the different languages displayed on the shampoo bottles around me. From that moment on it was always words not numbers that held a fascination for me.

Almost half the adult population finds discussing the subject of money difficult. Slang words help us to navigate these conversations by making us feel more comfortable and confident.

I'm a work in progress. I've started doing spin classes, which always clears my head.

I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.

Every sport, every profession, every group united by a single passion draws on a lexicon that is uniquely theirs, and theirs for a reason.

My work, my love of words, became my refuge, both when I was working on bilingual dictionaries for Oxford University Press and then via my involvement with 'Countdown' - and now 'Catsdown,' as I call it.

New words can spread like wildfire thanks to social media - you only have to look at 'mansplaining' and 'milkshake duck' to see language evolution at work - so why not old ones too?

I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.

New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.

I've been a worrier for as long as I can remember.

If a term becomes too popular, its irritant value is ramped up. The impulse is then to replace it with something else.

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

Quite often people ask me 'Is there a word for... ' and go on to highlight a gap in our language that we need to fill.

As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?

Footballers, managers, pundits and fans make up possibly the biggest tribe of them all, especially in this country. Whatever is said by pundits is echoed across sofas and in pubs all over the nation.

I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.

Slang has different functions: many of the words we use are playful and a lot are tribal - we speak the same way as the groups we are part of. A great deal are also euphemistic, so it's no surprise that a third of us are perplexed by their meanings and origins.

When I was growing up, I worried that people would dismiss me as a boring swot because I always had my nose in a vocabulary book - usually in French or German.

I can do some of the number puzzles.

The truth is that only 1% of all new words are totally new, and of those an even smaller percentage are conjured up out of thin air. The vast majority of coinages are the product of some kind of repurposing, and the result has always been a mix of tradition and innovation.