84 Quotes by Susie Dent

I've been a worrier for as long as I can remember.

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

When I was growing up, I worried that people would dismiss me as a boring swot because I always had my nose in a vocabulary book - usually in French or German.

The enduring image I will keep of Jane Goodall is of her emotional goodbye to a chimp she had rescued and nurtured, on the day of the animal's release.

I'm a work in progress. I've started doing spin classes, which always clears my head.

According to my parents, I've always liked to tune into the conversations of others. But rather than hope for a snippet of salacious gossip, it has always been the words themselves that I wanted to understand.

Slang moves on so fast that most new words disappear soon after they are coined. But there is always something that sticks behind.

I really was the nerd in the car that read vocabulary books. If we were going on day trips, I would quite like to have just stayed in the car with my German and French vocab books. It's embarrassing to admit to it now.

The extraordinary thing about new words is that probably only about one per cent of them are new. Most are old words revived and adapted.