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One of the glories of English simplicity is the possibility of using the same word as noun and verb.

Almost any word can be drafted to serve as a verb, even words we think of as eternal and unchanging, stuck in their more traditional roles.

A word is an arbitrary label - that's the foundation of linguistics. But many people think otherwise. They believe in word magic: that uttering a spell, incantation, curse, or prayer can change the world. Don't snicker: Would you ever say, 'Nothing has gone wrong yet' without looking for wood to knock?

The top 10 verbs in the English language are all irregular, even though irregular verbs make up only 3 per cent of the language.

I spent 20 years doing research on regular and irregular verbs, not because I'm an obsessive language lover but because it seemed to me that they tapped into a fundamental distinction in language processing, indeed in cognitive processing, between memory lookup and rule-driven computation.

I believe in a visual language that should be as strong as the written word.

Certainly ordinary language has no claim to be the last word, if there is such a thing.

I think that what computers have done is just disastrous to the language.

Good writing does not come from verbiage but from words.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.