Guilty by Definition Quotes

“but at some point, the opportunities will start to narrow, and you’ll need to find joy in what you’ve achieved already and in the present. There’s a point at which the future can start looking more like a threat than a promise.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“She’d had her share of boyfriends and anonymous lovers but had never felt comfortable enough with any of them to share herself fully. Better to stay in the shadows than risk being melted by the sun.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“As she watched him, Martha thought of the etymology of the eye’s “pupil,” named after the Latin pupilla, little doll, because when we look into the eyes of another, we see a tiny, doll-like reflection of ourselves.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“We all create our own personal Oxfords, don’t we? Geographical idiolects. Some people don’t include the university at all. For others, everything turns ‘here be dragons’ the moment they step beyond the college walls.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“He wore what Safi had come to regard as the uniform of the rural upper classes: a cracked, moss-colored Barbour jacket over a checked shirt and fawn-colored cords.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“obmutescence, noun (seventeenth century): a willful speechlessness”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“She started a new audiobook instead and sat in her wicker armchair by the window, working on a tapestry kit her mother had bought her for her birthday. It felt good to be working with her hands: the small physical pleasures of pulling colored thread through fabric, watching a pattern develop. Life wasn’t bad, she thought, rich reds and blues humming through her fingers, an actor reading to her as she worked. She reveled in a slow moment of concentration and touch, feeling the breeze from the open window, warm and silky with spring.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“That language defines us and is the framework of our thought, an endless, shifting, complex dance through time and human nature. It is about patterns of life and the need to communicate them;”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“uhtceare, noun (Old English): the anxiety before dawn”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Oxford felt alive this morning, its mix of youth and history on full display. They reached the wide thoroughfare of St. Giles, whose undeniable grandeur was tempered by a scruffiness about the edges, like so much of Oxford. At its south end loomed the Martyrs’ Memorial, a Gothic monument erected in memory of three Protestant bishops, condemned for heresy and burnt to death on nearby Broad Street. There was nobility in these sudden glimpses of the past, she thought. This city could never be understood in a single sweeping assessment. Instead, it yielded a slow series of realizations, unlocked over time.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“So a commonplace book? What was that exactly?” he asked. “Good question. It was a journal, a sort of personal archive in the early modern period—well, say from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries.” He blew over the top of his coffee. “So Shakespearean times.” “Yep, and a couple of hundred years either side. Writing a commonplace book was a way of creating your own external hard drive of quotations in a way. But not just quotations: thoughts, philosophy, news items, anything that caught the writer’s eye. Or ear.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“She looked about her now as they made slow progress along the sidewalks flanking the botanical gardens. Many in the crowd were dressed in green, a nod to fertility and to Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers. These revelers were lucky compared with their forerunners a few centuries before, for whom May Day morning had been more bacchanalian than beatific and who risked being pelted by eggs rather than music.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“The Clarendon English Dictionary certainly belonged in this last category, the ongoing result of a mammoth logistical operation involving evidence submitted by thousands of volunteer readers. Astronomers, novelists, vicars, suffragists and housewives, philosophers and paleontologists, and even a few convicted criminals had collectively built the backbone of what had come to be regarded as the highest lexicographical authority in the world. The clues amassed by this curious and eager army of readers were submitted on strips of paper—slips—comprising four-by-six-inch biographical records of language. They amounted to thousands, submitted in such numbers after a public appeal by the dictionary’s editors that the lexicographers had trouble finding enough space to house them. Slips libraries—or scriptoria—had been created for them; in reality, they often amounted to nothing more than an editor’s front room.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Of these, Martha’s enduring favorite was “stealing someone’s thunder,” whose time and place of birth were as solid as the leather covers of her first dictionary. On February 5, 1709, a critic named John Dennis saw his own play open at London’s Drury Lane theater. The rather turgid drama had one surprise: Dennis had perfected for the stage a machine that reproduced the sound of thunder. But despite its dramatic sound effects, the play closed after only a short run. Not one for grudges, Dennis decided to attend the premiere of the production succeeding his, Macbeth. As the witches’ scene began, the sound of thunder filled the auditorium, its reverberations booming out, Dennis quickly realized, from his own sound-effect machine. Accounts from members of the audience that night relayed how Dennis stood up, his face as lowering as the darkened stage, and shouted, “Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Words were defined by what they hid, sometimes in plain sight, like “breakfast” or “freelancer”: a knight free to use his lance for anyone who paid him.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Martha watched as a harrowed-looking mother listened to her silk-skinned teenage daughter shouting and swearing at her. The woman looked trapped, helpless, unable to comprehend how a child she had once wrapped up in her arms could turn into a foul-mouthed stranger. She caught Martha’s eye and looked pleadingly back at her with heavy-lidded eyes. Martha could offer nothing but a sympathetic nod as she walked past. Had she ever sworn at her mother? Probably. But time had softened the bumps and papered over the cracks so that the only texture of her memories now was smooth.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“It was her own take on the concept of “sonder”: the realization that other people have rich and complicated lives that we will never know.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“There is alchemy in turning raw ingredients into a meal, she thought, adding a pinch of sea salt. What luxury we live in, where this everyday commodity that once held up the Roman Empire can be delivered to us in neat little jars for pennies. Salary, salad, silt, sausage, salsa, sauce…the lexicon of salt whirred through her brain as she turned the stew down to a simmer. The story was richer still, she knew. Salt was once believed to ward off the evil eye, cure anyone considered fairy-struck, and defend against witchcraft, demons, and sprites, for witches and the animals they bewitched were unable to eat anything salted.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“She’d buy A Glossary of the Essex Dialect, first compiled in the nineteenth century. The entries for “bellywengins,” meaning small beer, and “dallop,” a patch of ground missed by the plow, had swung it.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Kything, she thought: the recognition of old friends in a crowd.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Yet it was precisely the unsung words that were the most beautiful in Martha’s eyes. “Apricity,” the warmth of the sun on a winter’s day, she had found mentioned in just a single source from the 1620s, and then nothing. “Respair,” sketchily defined in the dictionary as a recovery from despair, apparently lived for just one day, like a linguistic mayfly, before it vanished into the recesses of a word-hoard so vast that its tiny footprint lay buried beneath the tread of words more ordinary yet inexplicably more popular.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“And, of course, there was that scent. Vellichor: the musty, musky, and utterly beguiling smell of old books.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Famed for its Lego-like constructions, it generously bent over backward (sometimes literally) to fill a linguistic gap. Martha’s favorite, without doubt, was Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that ends up making things worse.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“The meaning of ritual, someone once said, is to remember something that must not be forgotten.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“It’s one of my favorites,” Safi said. “Radix malorum est cupiditas. Greed is the root of all evil. It’s the one where three young men go in search of Death to kill him because he’s taking so many of their friends. They’re told they’ll find him under a tree, but when they get there, there’s a big pile of treasure instead, and they end up killing each other over it.” So unwittingly, they find what they were originally seeking. It played out in Martha’s mind. The mysterious tree and the pile of gold, the youngest of the three bringing poison to the others, then being killed by them. The wages of sin is death.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“One of the editors, Imogen, spoke about watching the entire series of The Wire to locate the earliest mention of “burner phone,” only to find her colleague had pipped her by finding it in a rap song from a year earlier. Saki, an editor with a passion for unearthing obscure evidence of use, announced that one of the dictionary’s readers had found in a chat room exchange from 1992 an earlier example of “meh” before The Simpsons got hold of it. Someone had used it in response to something “far too Ken-doll to me.” How our icons fall, Martha thought.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“William Shakespeare had certainly long been regarded as the bedrock of all historical dictionaries, the author credited with over thirty thousand first records of words and expressions, from the well-known “it’s all Greek to me” to less obvious coinages like “under-peep” and “crafty-sick.” It was undeniable that the playwright had been an exuberant experimenter with language, verbing furiously, dovetailing one word with another, and flipping the appearance and meaning of existing words to create something headily new. But it was also now acknowledged that some of his apparent inventions were almost certainly in use already, carried through the air in spoken English, where they were exchanged without ceremony or record. Shakespeare’s time had been one of lexical effusiveness, when language was springy and daring, producing words as modern sounding as “banana” and as steeped in time as “overmorrow.” The dictionary’s reliance on his work was largely due to his unparalleled literary status at the time when compilation began in earnest, leading to a bias among editors, many of whom were Shakespeare scholars. Each first record attributed to the playwright had become another brick in the Shakespeare edifice. Even his hapax legomena—words that lasted barely a day—were routinely given full legitimacy.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Or have you finally got to the bottom of ‘dog’?” he continued. “That would be a coup.” Another lexicographical cliché. “Dog” was one of the biggest etymological mysteries in the language, arriving unannounced in Middle English with no trace of past or ancestry.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“Set” was the longest entry in the dictionary, one that would need to be recast almost as soon as its editors completed it. It was already twice as long as Orwell’s Animal Farm, although the entry for “run” was following closely on its heels. Every dictionary maker knew that language would always outpace them, that—as Samuel Johnson had put it—they would be forever chasing the sun.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition

“You seem to be taking a lot of interest in this case, though. Students disappear from the university all the time, don’t they?” It was his face that showed a flash of irritation this time, and he spoke slowly. “No. They leave the university, Ms. Thornhill. They leave Oxford and go back to their families. They don’t just disappear without trace.”
― Susie Dent, Guilty by Definition