Anthony Burgess
British novelist, essayist, and composer
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Slang is ... a pile of fossilised jokes and puns and ironies, tinselly gems dulled eventually by overmuch handling, but gleaming still when help up to the light.
—Anthony Burgess, British novelist, essayist, and composer, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on September 1, 1999 at 8:56 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
There is no acceptable term for those elements of language which belong to closed groups or are mere fiery spurts of instant poetry doomed to die as soon as they are born -- the elements, in fact, which waver on the borders of the corpus of the standard language. The word "slang" is vague and its etymology obscure. It suggests the slinging of odd stones or dollops of mud at the windows of the stately home of linguistic decorum.
—Anthony Burgess, British novelist, essayist, and composer, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on December 8, 1999 at 8:16 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Languages change, and we cannot stop them from changing, nor can we determine the modes in which they shall change. It is not even possible to legislate for a language, to say what is right and what is wrong (questions of intelligibility are a different matter). If it is wrong to say 'you was,' then the educated men of the eighteenth century were wrong. If it is sluttish to drop one's aitches, the Queen Elizabeth I was a slut.
—Anthony Burgess, British novelist, essayist, and composer, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on January 3, 2001 at 11:54 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar which the flesh of vocabulary, or lexis, requires before it can become vertebrate and walk the earth.
—Anthony Burgess, British novelist, critic, and essayist, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on April 27, 1998 at 11:08 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
There is no doubt something gross and brash and materialistic about consonants: they are noises made by banging things together, rubbing, hissing, buzzing. Vowels, on the other hand, are pure music — woodwind to the consonantal percussion — and, because they are produced by the creation of space between the tongue and the hard or soft palate, and these spaces are not measured scientifically but arrived at by a sort of acoustic guesswork, they tend to be indefinite and mutable. The history of the sound-changes of a language is mainly a history of its vowels.
—Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on August 18, 1999 at 10:11 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Fumbling for a word is everybody's birthright.
—Anthony Burgess, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on March 25, 1999 at 3:47 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A word in a dictionary is very much like a car in a mammoth motorshow — full of potential but temporarily inactive.
—Anthony Burgess, British novelist, essayist, and composer, A Mouthful of Air, 1992
Posted on April 2, 1999 at 6:05 PM
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