Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a /death pledge/.

The problem with the alphabet is that it bears no relation to anything at all, and when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, yachts are 18 volumes from the beach, and wine is 17 volumes from the nearest corkscrew.

So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.

A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.

Anyone who has ever taken out a mortgage will be unsurprised to learn that it is, literally, a /death pledge/.

Freud said that everything was secretly sexual. But etymologists know that sex is secretly food.

Reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality.