When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It Quotes

“designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word “ampersand” didn’t come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced “and.” When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words “and, per se [i.e., by itself ], ‘and.’” This eventually became corrupted to “ampersand.” The symbol is a favorite of law and”
― Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse

“Hoping is a vague, unsophisticated, and largely uninteresting state of mind. One associates it with children and their feelings about birthday presents and snow days. Compared to the surgical precision of sentence adverbs like presumably, ostensibly, and understandably, hopefully is a bowl of mush.”
― Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better And/Or Worse