Long Words Quotes

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  • One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you're maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed.

    Stephen King (2002). “On Writing”, p.110, Simon and Schuster
  • Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

    George Orwell (1953). “Shooting an Elephant: And Other Essays”
  • Programme names have been changed, and we have Andrew Neil saying he won't be using long words.

    Names   Long   Andrew  
    "Dimbleby lets rip at BBC 'anoraks'" by Jason Deans, www.theguardian.com. January 10, 2003.
  • I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.

    Long   People   Black  
    "A Long Way Down". Book by Nick Hornby, May 7, 2005.
  • There are science teachers who actually claim that they teach "a healthy skepticism." They do not. They teach a profound gullibility, and their dupes, trained not to think for themselves, will swallow any egregious rot, provided it is dressed up with long words and an affectation of objectivity to make it sound scientific.

    Anthony Standen (1950). “Science is a sacred cow”
  • Those who run to long words are mainly the unskillful and tasteless; they confuse pomposity with dignity, flaccidity with ease, and bulk with force.

    Running   Long   Ease  
  • Do not put statements in the negative form. And don't start sentences with a conjunction. If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do. Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all. De-accession euphemisms. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague.

    Editing   Long   Sound  
  • Why does everyone have to pretend to be stupid and not know long words?

    Stupid   Ignorance   Long  
    "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.
  • It's not unsporting to thrash a cowardly cad,' said Simmons. 'Everyone knows you don't fight like a gentleman.' 'That might be called an oxymoron,' Ramses said. 'Oh--sorry. Bad form to use long words. Look it up when you get home.' The poor devil didn't know how to fight, like a gentleman or otherwise.

    Sorry   Home   Fighting  
  • For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me.

    Writing   Editing   Long  
    Winnie-the-Pooh ch. 4 (1926)
  • What are letters?” “Kinda like mediaglyphics except they’re all black, and they’re tiny, they don’t move, they’re old and boring and really hard to read. But you can use ’em to make short words for long words.

    Moving   Long   Black  
    Neal Stephenson (2003). “The Diamond Age”, p.46, Spectra
  • I like 'pencil-necked weasel'. It has 'pencil' in it. Pencils are good things. You can draw or write things with pencils. I think it's what you call someone when you're worried that using a long word like 'intellectual' may have too many syllables. It's not something that people who have serious, important things to say call other people.

    Writing   Thinking   Long  
    "Neil Gaiman hits back at US politician's theft accusation" by Alison Flood, www.theguardian.com. May 5, 2011.
  • Speak English!' said the Eaglet. 'I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and I don't believe you do either!

    Lewis Carroll (2015). “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: That CUPCAKE was off her head!”, p.23, Oldcastle Books
  • It behooves us to avoid archaisms. Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

    Writing   Long   Use  
  • How come abbreviated is such a long word?

    Funny   Humor   Long  
  • When we asked Pooh what the opposite of an Introduction was, he said "The what of a what?" which didn't help us as much as we had hoped, but luckily Owl kept his head and told us that the Opposite of an Introduction, my dear Pooh, was a Contradiction; and, as he is very good at long words, I am sure that that's what it is.

    Opposites   Long   Owl  
    Milne, George, Milne, A. A. (Alan Alexander), Shepard, Ernest H. (1977). “The World of Pooh : the Complete Winnie-The-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner”, McClelland and Stewart, 1989
  • I was just asking Chad [Myers], how can you get a volcano in Iceland? Isn't it too- when you think of a volcano, you think of Hawaii and long words like that. You don't think of Iceland.You think it's too cold to have a volcano there.

  • IF is a very long word in Formula One; in fact, IF is F1 spelled backwards.

    Long   Racing   Facts  
  • Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

    Science   Errors   Long  
    1905 Heretics, ch.13.
  • Never is a long word.

    Ivy Compton-Burnett (2011). “A Heritage and its History”, p.138, A&C Black
  • A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

    Lying   Latin   Real  
    George Orwell, Peter Hobley Davison (2001). “Orwell and politics: Animal farm in the context of essays, reviews and letters selected from the complete works of George Orwell”, Penguin Modern Classics
  • There's this moment sometimes, when you do a crossword puzzle and you have the one really long word. And once you get that, the whole thing kind of comes into focus. Sometimes it's just working things over in your mind and then finding that one line that kind of ties the song together, and now it works. It's a puzzle of sorts.

    Song   Ties   Long  
    Source: therumpus.net
  • That is a long word: forever!

    "Leonce and Lena". Play by Georg Buchner, Act I, 1838.
  • There are some simple maxims which I think might be commended to writers of expository prose. First: never use a long word if a short word will do. So, if you want to make a statement with a great many qualifications, put some of the qualifications in separate sentences. Third: do not let the beginning of your sentence lead the reader to an expectation which is contradicted by the end.

    Simple   Thinking   Long  
    Bertrand Russell (2009). “The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell”, p.37, Routledge
  • The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. And they usually occur in proportion to the education and rank.

    Writing   Long   Secret  
  • Long words, fat talk they may tell us something about ourselves. Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self-confidence has waned?

    Russell Baker (1983). “So This Is Depravity”, Pocket Books
  • As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.

    Long   Messages   Texting  
    "The joy of text" by Will Self, Lynne Truss, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2008.
  • I would never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose.

    Long   Purpose   Use  
    Oliver Wendell Holmes (2007). “Medical Essays”, p.302, Reprint Services Corporation
  • Never use a long word where a short one will do.

    Long   Use   Simile  
    George Orwell (1961). “Collected essays”
  • If a word is misspelled in the dictionary, how would we ever know? If Webster wrote the first dictionary, where did he find the words? Why is 'phonics' not spelled the way it sounds? How come abbreviated is such a long word?

    Long   Way   Firsts  
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