A Quote by Steven Pinker

People are under the impression that dictionaries legislate language. What a dictionary does is keep track of usages over time.

Steven Pinker

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Dictionary Does Impression Keep Language Legislate Over People Time Track

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Steven Pinker
Canadian - Scientist
Born: September 18, 1954

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

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

I'm very sensitive to the English language. I studied the dictionary obsessively when I was a kid and collect old dictionaries. Words, I think, are very powerful and they convey an intention.

Drew Barrymore

History does not record in its annals any lasting domination exercised by one people over another, of different race, of diverse usages and customs, of opposite and divergent ideals. One of the two had to yield and succumb.

Jose Rizal

We created the hierarchical, pyramidal, managerial system because we needed it to keep track of people and things people did; with the computer to keep track, we can restructure our institutions horizontally.

John Naisbitt

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

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Gilbert Murray

Now, what does a vampire do with a computer? Keep track of investments? Send e-mail to other vampires as you all plot to take over the world?” “I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia making corrections to the entries of historical figures I’ve known.” I blinked at him. “Really?” “No, Kitty. That was a joke.

Carrie Vaughn

There's an expression in life: "You can only make one first impression." And that first impression has to be spectacular. So, I wait, and let people see it when it's ready to go. It's not a set rule, but I think it's the better way of working. People will agree with you because of your track record, but you want people to like it because it's good, not because you found it.

Simon Cowell

I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.

Bob Garfield

You can't actually legislate what goes on in people's minds and their attitudes, but you certainly can legislate for parity where pay and salaries are concerned.

Diana Rigg

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

James Gleick

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.

Bill Gates

I know that when it comes to your friends, especially in the music industry, we work so much and do so much that we don't even really keep track of our days, or keep track of our health, or keep track of our mental health. Sometimes we just go astray.

Amine

Back in the 19th century, our marketing folks decided to play up the refined usage angle because prescriptivism was very popular: our dictionary is where you go to learn anything about anything. That really set the tone in North America for how people responded to dictionaries.

Kory Stamper

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

A Quote by Steven Pinker

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