Oxygen was called flammable air for a while, but it didn’t catch on.
Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.
So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.
Poetry is much more important than the truth, and, if you don’t believe that, try using the two methods to get laid.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was the sausage-maker who disposed of the body.
A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.
So popular is alliteration that in the 1960s it actually made a grab for political power. In the 1960s a vast radical youth movement began campaigning to do things for the sole reason that they began with the same letter. Ban the bomb. Burn your bra. Power to the people. For a moment there it seemed as though alliteration would change the world. But then the spirit of idealism faded and those who had manned the barricades went off and got jobs in marketing.
The Oxford English Dictionary is the greatest work of reference ever written, and it’s largely the result of a Scotsman who left school at fourteen, and a criminally insane American.
Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day.
The lawyer’s lucky phrase is ‘including but not limited to’, which gets you out of the utterly unnecessary trouble that the unnecessary trouble merism got you into in the first place.
So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He’s like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.
Most people can improvise in unrhymed dactyls for hours. It’s just that you lose all your friends if you do.
The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can’t end a sentence with up, should be told to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it’s one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to.
Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.
If you’re too overcome to even finish your sentence then you must be sincere, you must really mean what you’re not saying, you must... I’m sorry. I cannot type. My fingers are crying.
When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them... These lists are almost universally awkward.
If you look back far enough, everything is stolen and every country invaded.
The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing, and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.