language

"When a cryptanalyst starts out trying to analyze a new algorithm, his first thought is probably: "Yikes. What a mess. I'll never make sense of this". So there are all sorts of tricks to help you start to probe into the convoluted innards of the cipher. One of these is to attack a weakened version. Later, he may be able to extend the attack to the full strength version; or, if this cannot be done, the reason why it can't at least gives some insight into the strengths and weaknesses of the cipher."

"For the computer security community, the moral is obvious: if you are designing a system whose functions include providing evidence, it had better be able to withstand hostile review."

"Feistel and Coppersmith rule. Sixteen rounds and one hell of an avalanche."

"The magic words are squeamish ossifrage"

"The multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy among two or more people in the midst of social life must inevitably lead to cryptology wherever men thrive and wherever they write."

"Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break."

"They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce."

"With the aid of my all-important spelling correction program, I can be confident of my presentation. Do I fear that I will lose my ability to spell as a result of overreliance on this technological crutch? What ability? Actually, my spelling is improving through the use of this spelling corrector that continually points out my errors and suggests corrections."

"My spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places."

"Spelling checkers (sometimes called "spell checkers" by people who need syntax checkers) ..."

"If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend."

"Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural."

"Spelling is the art of writing words with their proper letters. In the English language this art is peculiarly difficult."

"As to spelling the very frequent word though with six letters instead of two, it is impossible to discuss it, as it is outside the range of common sanity. In comparison such a monstrosity as phlegm for flem is merely disgusting."

"In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni."

"Sator arepo tenet opera rotas."

"Si Nummi immunis."

"Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel (Lewd did I live, evil I did dwel)"

"A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal – Panama"

"A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!"

"Madam, I'm Adam."

"Able was I ere I saw Elba."

"No one made killer apparel like Dame Noon."

"Philology always leads to crime."

"The influence of German and European philology may be seen in the genealogical lines of early American Sanskrit which crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic: Edward Salisbury studied with Bopp in Berlin, Lassen in Bonn and de Sacy and Burnouf in Paris; Salisbury's student Whitney trained with Bopp and Weber in Berlin, and Roth in Tübingen; Whitney's student Lanman in Tübingen, Berlin and Leipzig."

"A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style."

"Philology, especially in Germany, no longer partakes of the larger perspectives on scholarly inquiry as a whole."

"I hope I have shown that the fictitious unities of race and nation whipped up by philologists, anthropologists, historians, and social scientists of the nineteenth century as alternatives to the antique political state led them to forget a very important past and to invent in its place novel forms of governance that were pursued with vengeance and arrogance and all the cunning skill of the fore-thinkers."

"As poacher turned gamekeeper, C.S. Lewis found himself having to drill students in the elements of Old English philology."

"Philology reigned as king of the sciences, the pride of the first great modern universities—those that grew up in Germany in the eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. Philology inspired the most advanced humanistic studies in the United States and the United Kingdom in the decades before 1850 and sent its generative currents through the intellectual life of Europe and America. It meant far more than the study of old texts. Philology referred to all studies of language, of specific languages, and (to be sure) of texts. Its explorations ranged from the religion of ancient Israel through the lays of medieval troubadours to the tongues of American Indians—and to rampant theorizing about the origin of language itself."

"BALD heads forgetful of their sins, Old, learned, respectable bald heads Edit and annotate the lines That young men, tossing on their beds, Rhymed out in love's despair To flatter beauty's ignorant ear. All shuffle there; all cough in ink; All wear the carpet with their shoes; All think what other people think; All know the man their neighbour knows. Lord, what would they say Did their Catullus walk that way?"

"Now the philosophy of life, in its highest range at least, is a divine science of experience. This experience, however, is throughout internal and spiritual. It is therefore easily conceivable that it can enter readily and easily into all other experimental sciences, and into those especially which more immediately relate to man, as, for instance, most of the branches of natural history, and still more into philology, with which at present we are most immediately concerned. And this it does, in order to borrow such illustrations and comparisons as may tend to elucidate or further to develop its own subject-matter, or else to furnish applications to individual cases in other departments of life. However, in thus proceeding, philosophy must take heed lest it overpass its own proper limits or forget its true end and aim. It must not go too deeply into particulars, or lose itself among the specialities of the other sciences. On the contrary, it ought carefully to confine itself to those points which more immediately concern man, and especially the inner man, and, adhering to the meaning and spirit of the whole, seek to elucidate and throw out this pre-eminently."

"To live classically and to realize antiquity practically within oneself is the summit and goal of philology."

"Philologists appear to me to be a secret society who wish to train our youth by means of the culture of antiquity · I could well understand this society and their views being criticised from all sides. A great deal would depend upon knowing what these philologists understood by the term "culture of antiquity"—If I saw, for example, that they were training their pupils against German philosophy and German music, I should either set about combating them or combating the culture of antiquity, perhaps the former, by showing that these philologists had not understood the culture of antiquity."

"For the new theory of Language has unquestionably produced a new theory of Race. . . . There seems to me no doubt that modern philology has suggested a grouping of peoples quite unlike anything that had been thought of before. If you examine the bases proposed for common nationality before the new knowledge growing out of the study of Sanscrit had been popularised in Europe, you will find them extremely unlike those which are now advocated and even passionately advocated in parts of the Continent. . . . That peoples not necessarily understanding one another's tongue should be grouped together politically on the ground of linguistic affinities assumed to prove community of descent, is quite a new idea."

"Among us, the so-called "higher criticism," which reigns supreme in the domain of philology has also taken possession of our historical literature. This higher criticism has been the pretext for introducing all the anti-historical monstrosities that a vain imagination could suggest. Here we have the other method of making the past a living reality; putting subjective fancies in the place of historical data; fancies whose merit is measured by their boldness, that is, the scantiness of the particulars on which they are based, and the peremptoriness with which they contravene the best established facts of history."

"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."