“… Most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died.”

— Douglas Adams , book The Salmon of Doubt

The Salmon of Doubt (2002)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "… Most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, …" by Douglas Adams?

Douglas Adams 317

English writer and humorist 1952–2001

Related quotes

“This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time.”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

Source: The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Every man had to die. He’d always found it odd that so many died when they were old, as logic said that was the point in their lives when they’d had the most practice not dying.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: Shadows of Self

“It appeared that most of the men and boys had died of starvation; they had not been executed. But the manner of death seemed unimportant. Murder had been done at Buchenwald. God alone knows how many men and boys have died there during the last twelve years.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

Broadcast from Buchenwald (1945)

“If only there were a lexicographer of Liang Shih-ch'iu's ability who also had the perspicuity to arrange his dictionary by sound rather than radical! … No wonder most of us are so sour and gray by the time we reach fifty! The amount of time consumed and the spirit expended in this sort of meaningless, not to mention destructive, type of activity is beyond calculation.”

Victor H. Mair (1943) American sinologist and linguist

The Need for an Alphabetically Arranged General Usage Dictionary of Mandarin Chinese (February 1986).

“Mind you, the Elizabethans had so many words for the female genitals that it is quite hard to speak a sentence of modern English without inadvertently mentioning at least three of them.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

“The most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man's land between the various established fields.”

Norbert Wiener book Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine

Source: Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948), p. 2

“I’ve always chosen the most competitive and most difficult careers — that’s kind of all I know. Being a dancer is the same thing. You’re auditioning. You’re working really hard to achieve that goal as an artist. With modeling, you’re auditioning. You’re putting yourself out there. So acting was just another venue, but the most difficult one to actually achieve and to actually work because it’s much more cutthroat. But I was used to it because I had already been auditioning through dance and modeling so I knew that aspect of it.”

Crystal Allen (1972) American actress

Interview: Crystal Allen on Lacrosse, Superman and Storms http://www.celebrityextraonline.com/2012/05/interview-crystal-allen-on-lacrosse.html (May 18, 2012)