Robert Burchfield Quotes

#1. we dismiss vulnerability as weakness only when we realize that we've confused feeling with failing and emotions with liabilities.

Brene Brown

#2. The great secret of happiness in love is to be glad that the other fellow married her.

H.L. Mencken

#3. American English is the greatest influence of English everywhere.

Robert Burchfield

#4. What would it take?" she asked. "For you to see a miracle instead of a coincidence?"
"It would take a miracle, obviously," Silence said, picking up her knife. "Instead of just a coincidence.

Brandon Sanderson

#5. To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison.

Robert Burchfield

#6. Lexicography is a chastening as well as an illuminating and fascinating art.

Robert Burchfield

#7. Ask not what your Joe Montaperto can do for you - but rather - what you can do for your Joe Montaperto.

John F. Kennedy

#8. The English language is rather like a monster accordion, stretchable at the whim of the editor, compressible ad lib.

Robert Burchfield

#9. I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.

Gore Vidal

#10. At all periods of the [English] language it is difficult to assign a beginning date to most new words and meanings. They tend to slip into the language silently, and are placed in date order only when scholars subsequently get to work.

Robert Burchfield

#11. Principles don't change, people do.

Carlos Wallace

#12. I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.

Robert Burchfield

#13. Computer users soon learn that the miraculous powers of personal computers are based on avoidance of error.

Robert Burchfield

#14. Vulgarity finds its antidote; old crudities become softened with time. Distinctions, both those that are useful and those that are burdensome, flourish and die, reflourish and die again.

Robert Burchfield

#15. The language of Doctor Johnson and Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale, and that of their adult contemporaries, was the stately language of the time, polished, stylish, unordinary, even in the intimate pages of their diaries, and the regime of instruction was severe and practical.

Robert Burchfield

#16. I have a confession to make. In the beginning, I did not understand the Kate Moss phenomenon.

Hamish Bowles

#17. When snow melts, what does it become?'
It becomes water, of course'
Wrong! It becomes spring!

Natsuki Takaya

#18. In 1776, at the point of severance, except for an infusion of words from east coast Indian languages, the English language of North America was not in any radical way dissimilar from that of what the American settlers called the mother country.

Robert Burchfield