Читать книгу A Word In Your Shell-Like - Nigel Rees - Страница 4

‘Thou art a retailer of phrases, and dost deal in remnants of remnants’

William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700)

‘False English, bad pronunciation, old sayings and common proverbs; which are so many proofs of having kept bad and low company’

4th Earl of Chesterfield, Advice to his Son on Men and Manners (1775)

‘Sir, it [an earthquake] will be much exaggerated in popular talk; for, in the first place, the common people do not accurately adapt their thoughts to the objects; nor, secondly, do they accurately adapt their words to their thoughts: they do not mean to lie; but, taking no pains to be exact, they give you very false accounts. A great part of their language is proverbial, If anything rocks at all, they say it rocks like a cradle; and in this way they go on’

Samuel Johnson, quoted in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) – for 14 September 1777

‘Blank cheques of intellectual bankruptcy’

A definition of catchphrases attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–94)

‘What do I mean by a phrase? A clutch of words that gives you a clutch at the heart’

Robert Frost, interviewed in the Saturday Evening Post (16 November 1960)