There is something uncanny about these new-fangled vehicles. They are all unutterably ugly and never a one of them has been provided with a good, or even an endurable, name. The French, who are usually orthodox in their etymology if in nothing else, have evolved "automobile," which, being half Greek and half Latin, is so near to indecent that we print it with hesitation, while the speakers of English have been fatally attracted by the irrelevant word "horseless." Other nations are equally unfortunate, and it really looks as if the dispossessed, or to-be-dispossessed, animals are to get revenge on ungrateful humanity by stumping us to find a respectable name for our noisy and odorous machines.
—The New York Times (editorial), January 3, 1899

Posted on June 29, 2007

Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."
—(usually attributed, wrongly, to Mark Twain)

Posted on April 9, 1998

All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hills after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.

Posted on January 21, 2003

Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.

Posted on January 25, 2002