The Meaning of Everything Quotes

“No critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language's capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility. For English is a language that simply cannot be fixed, not can its use ever be absolutely laid down. It changes constantly; it grows with an almost exponential joy. It evolves eternally; its words alter their senses and their meanings subtly, slowly, or speedily according to fashion and need.”
― Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

“Jonathan Swift mounted a lifelong attempt to ‘fix our language forever’—no critic and advocate of immutability has ever once managed properly or even marginally to outwit the English language’s capacity for foxy and relentlessly slippery flexibility.”
― Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary

“Our histories, our novels, our poems, our plays—they are all in this one book.”
― Simon Winchester, The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary