“Assassin comes from hashish. Or the other way round.”
— Martin Amis, novelist, in The Pregnant Widow
“The Greek Stoics taught that words were inherent in nature, and that if the original meaning could be found, one could understand what the gods intended when they fixed a given name or label to a given thing. What the Stoics were convinced of is that language is from the depths of some racial unconscious and that words have much to do with the ways in which we perceive and react.”
— John Ciardi, author, A Second Browser’s Dictionary
“Fanciful’s origin circa 1627 made me still love the word … Like, I could totally see Mrs. Mary Poppencock returning home to her cobblestone hut with the thatched roof in Thamesburyshire, Jolly Olde England, and saying to her husband, ‘Good Sir Bruce, would it not be wonderful to have a roof that doesn’t leak when it rains on our green shires, and stuff?’ And Sir Bruce Poppencock would have been like, ‘I say, missus, you’re very fanciful with your ideas today.’ To which Mrs. P. responded, ‘Why, Master P., you’ve made up a word!’”
― Rachel Cohn, author, in Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares
“Philologists who chase
A panting syllable through time and space,
Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,
To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah’s Ark.”
— William Cowper, English poet and hymnodist
“Biology was new when Lamarck first used it, but the pieces he used to construct it were not new: bio- is from the Greek bios, meaning ‘life’”; and -ology was familiar in the endings of many other words (theology, for example). It is also Greek, connected with logos, which means word. The whole word biology may be translated as words about life, or the study of living things.”
— John and Joan Levitt, authors of The Spell of Words
“The suffix naut comes from the Greek and Latin words for ships and sailing. Astronaut suggests a sailor in space. Chimponaut suggests a chimpanzee in sailor pants.”
― Mary Roach, author, in Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void
“Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth’s marvels, beneath the dust of habit.”
— Salman Rushdie, Booker Prize-winning British Indian novelist and essayist
