Richard Chevenix Trench
Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
For what, after all, is a word, but the enclosure for human use of a certain district, larger or smaller, from the vast outfield of thought or feeling or fact, and in this way a bringing of it under human cultivation, a rescuing of it for human uses?
—Richard Chevenix Trench, Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet, On the Study of Words, 1851
Posted on October 13, 2003 at 7:09 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
A Dictionary is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view; and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered, or been disposed to wander, may be nearly as instructive as the right ones in which it has travelled.
—Richard Chevenix Trench, Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, 1860
Posted on December 17, 1999 at 3:17 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
It is in every case desirable that the first authority for a word's use in the language which occurs should be adduced; that the moment of its entrance into it (that is, into the written language, for this only comes under our cognizance), the register of its birth, should thus be noted.
—Richard Chevenix Trench, Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet, On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries, 1860
Posted on October 27, 2000 at 9:17 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.
—Richard Chevenix Trench, Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet, On the Study of Words, 1851
Posted on January 8, 1999 at 7:47 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.
—Richard Chevenix Trench, Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet, On the Study of Words, 1851
Posted on April 2, 2002 at 7:27 AM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.
—Richard Chevenix Trench, Irish clergyman, philologist, and poet, On the Study of Words, 1851
Posted on May 2, 2002 at 12:05 PM
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