Morris Bishop
American linguist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The words of a living language are like creatures: they are alive. Each word has a physical character, a look and a personality, an ancestry, an expectation of life and death, a hope of posterity.
—Morris Bishop, American linguist, "Good Usage, Bad Usage, and Usage" in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 1969
Posted on September 28, 2000 at 4:09 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Once I lost a preposition.
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair.
And angrily, I cried, "Perdition!
Up from out of in under there!"
Correctness is my vade mecum,
And dangling phrases I abhor.
But still I wonder, what should he come
Up from out of in under for?
—Morris Bishop, American linguist, The New Yorker, 1947
Posted on September 25, 2000 at 7:32 AM
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