quotes

Some business letters are sadly down at heel. Some seem to say things that do not need saying, in a way that shows the writer to have had no interest in saying them. Others look all right on the outside, being carefully typed on good paper with the proper margins, but they are as indigestible as a gaudily iced cake filled with concrete.

Who doth not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rock.

I believe that people write and continue to write because they want to change the world a little. They want to leave their stamp on the world, no matter how humble the scope of their efforts. They want to put something into somebody else's mind that wasn't there before. They want to communicate.

"Innately" is sometimes misused for "inherently." What is "innate" is inborn, so the term should be confined to living things. But "inherent" (= essential, intrinsic) applies best (but not exclusively) to nonliving things such as objects or ideas.

Perhaps the most famous example of inelegant variation is "elongated yellow fruit" as the second reference for "banana." Thus Charles W. Morton named "the elongated-yellow-fruit school of writing," citing examples such as "the numbered spheroids" for billiard balls, "the azure-whiskered wifeslayer " for Bluebeard, "hen-fruit safari" for an Easter-egg hunt, "succulent bivalves" for oysters, and "rubber-tired mastodon of the highway" for a truck.

One of the main purposes of using slang is to solidify one's identification with a group. Slang is most prevalent among the young and among such disfranchised groups as blacks, teen-agers, drug users, criminals, carnival workers, hobos and the uneducated. Often, slang is used as a code language to fortify the group and to exclude outsiders. Some criminal slang, called cant, is so highly developed that pickpockets, for example, can carry on a conversation in front of a victim without the person's realizing that they are discussing which pocket to pick.

Phallucy: the odd notion that aggressive behavior and possessions have any relationship to sexual performance and size.

Now that Fidel Castro has resigned, he'll likely be succeeded by his brother Raul... Or his idiot son Fidel W. Castro.

Young children of the right age pick up a foreign language almost as easily as they catch measles, while their parents plod laboriously behind.

We know he can walk on water; now he's got to produce the loaves and fishes.