Sarah Booth

“English has a lot of synonyms for “fool” or “idiot.” Perhaps you take this to mean that English speakers are mean-spirited; I simply reply that necessity is the mother of invention.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.”
― Kory Stamper, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

“We are one country, and I remain a proud Unionist, happy to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and pledge allegiance, sing about the amber waves of grain, wish I was in the land of cotton, pick my teeth with a carpet tack, be in the kitchen with Dinah, hate to see the evening sun go down, take myself out to the ball game, walk that lonesome valley, and lean on the everlasting arms. I love this country. This is one of those simple dumb discoveries a man makes, like the night I came out of the New York hospital where I, a bystander at my wife’s travail, had held my naked newborn six-pound shining-eyed daughter in my two hands, and I walked around town at midnight stunned by the fact that what I had seen was utterly ordinary, everybody comes into the world pretty much like that. In the same spirit, I walk around St. Paul and think, This is a great country and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.”
― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America

“WE DEMOCRATS are deeply flawed people, but we do stick to our guns, and believe in decency and public spiritedness and have refused to hitch our wagon to yahooism and intolerance and have supported government as a necessary force for good to “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty . . .”
― Garrison Keillor, Homegrown Democrat: A Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America