A Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic

Ambrose Bierce

Quote Topics

Device Dictionary Growth Hard Language Literary Making Malevolent

Quote Author

Ambrose Bierce
American - Journalist
June 24, 1842 - 1914

Hash, x. There is no definition for this word - nobody knows what hash is. Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable. Dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.

Ambrose Bierce

UG [universal grammar] may be regarded as a characterization of the genetically determined language faculty. One may think of thisfaculty as a 'language acquisition device,' an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with present experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained: knowledge of one or another language.

Noam Chomsky

I used to keep a dictionary and work with it and then I realized there are more words that exist in the English language than there are in this dictionary.

Nas

The dictionary has been in the making for several decades, and the result is well worth the wait. MacLean and those who worked with her have consulted with Iñupiaq speakers from across Alaska's North Slope to compile a comprehensive collection of word stems, along with postbases, grammatical endings, and an array of other valuable material. . . . This dictionary will prove fascinating for anyone interested in the Iñupiat and their language.

Lawrence Kaplan

I am a part of the old school where I feel that purity of the language should be retained. But English is a constantly evolving language where new words are being added to the dictionary, so I don't see any harm in experimenting with the language. Only poor editing standards need to be improved.

Ashwin Sanghi

Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language - not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book which is written in that tongue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.

William Stafford

It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language.

Kevin Young

The bold and discerning writer who, recognizing the truth that language must grow by innovation if it grow at all, makes new words and uses the old in an unfamiliar sense has no following and is tartly reminded that 'it isn't in the dictionary' - although down to the time of the first lexicographer no author ever had used a word that was in the dictionary.

Ambrose Bierce

Music is a language, and it's like a dictionary that has a lot of words, but if you limited yourself to a couple of definitions you would be illiterate. If one limits oneself to a peculiar definition like 'new music,' 'avant-garde,' or something like that, I think it's like cutting out half the dictionary.

Archie Shepp

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality.

Ursula K. Le Guin

The one indisputable reality of dictatorship is that dissent, insult, and malevolent language do not go unpunished if it is allowed at all.

Ferdinand Marcos

But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously.

Julio Cortazar

The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others.

Alain de Botton

Chinese culture is already telling children to work hard. That's not growth mindset because they're working hard for the product, not for the growth or the joy of learning.