84 Quotes by Susie Dent

Language is essentially tribal, so jargon can actually be a really good thing because it unites people.

Linguistic supersizing is on the increase, and it may show the influence of advertising-speak and corporate jargon on language, in which everything needs to be hyped to get noticed. It means that some of our greatest words are losing their power.

If a term becomes too popular, its irritant value is ramped up. The impulse is then to replace it with something else.

In the earliest days, make-up and moralising were intertwined. The 'cosmetic slops and washes' of the 17th and 18th centuries aimed to smooth complexions and revive a woman's 'bloom' - but their critics were never far behind.

In the middle of the 20th century, aspirations to sound 'proper' were passionately pursued. Dictionaries as late as the Seventies include many pronunciations that could cut the proverbial glass.

I work with the Oxford Dictionary databases, which sounds really boring, but they're actually fascinating as they show you how current words are being used.

One of the things I noticed is that if you look up the word ambition you will see that when it's applied to women, it's almost always negative. If a woman is ambitious she's cutthroat, she's seen as more unpleasant. Whereas when its attached to a man it's far less negative.

I've been collecting linguistic oddities for years and years, ever since I was small. I've got loads of notebooks where I've jotted down things I couldn't make sense of.

If we want to change the nuance of a particular word we have to change that ourselves.