'Stringing English together is like rewiring an old house.'

***

[Re. the word "logocentric"]

'What other kind of too-narrow focus provides... a diagnostic name for itself? If you're ethnocentric, does your culture include a folk dance acknowledging the limitations of your outlook? Is there a beeper that goes off when you get too technocentric?'

***

[Midway through this book that is primarily comprised of digressions, Blount gets to the end of an entry entitled "Memorabilia" and says] 'There might be a way to drag the Latin /mirabile dictu/, "marvelous to say," in here, especially since it might lead us into "too marvelous for words" and other philological lyrics by Johnny Mercer--but we've got to move along, if this book is going to have any narrative drive.'

***

'Minimalism:

'A little of it goes a long way.'

***

[I especially recommend pp. 204-208, about names.]

***

[Blount's priceless encapsulation of a bit of classical absurdity] 

'Aristotle maintained that a falling body accelerated because it became more jubilant as it found itself nearer home.'

***

[Apparently the word ptarmigan is spelled thus because scholars with Greek on the brain mistook the origin of the Scots Gaelic word from which the bird's name actually derived. Says Blount, the ptarmigan] 'lives in cold climes and mostly shuffles or flutters around. It isn't putting on neoclassical airs.'

***

[Blount claims that the letter Q, in the Braggadocio typeface], 'looks like a South Park character.'

***

'De Quincey says that Wordsworth would grow impatient when anyone else spoke of mountains.'