Quotes About Language

Finally, don't be fooled by words like orientate or commentate, misguided back-formations from orientation and commentator; orient and comment do the job just fine. Don't use big words to gloss over the truth or to pump air into ideas.

The most common prepositional error is forgetting that the noun or pronoun in a prepositional phrase is the object of the preposition. The object of the preposition must be expressed in the objective case. Who can forget Jane Russell's line, in a 1970s Playtex ad, for a bra "for we full-figured gals." The preposition for mandates the pronoun us. But, then, Russell never was known for her pronouns.

Pronouns are proxies for nouns. They stand in willingly when nouns don't want to hang around sounding repetitive. The noun (or noun phrase), whose bidding the pronoun does, is called the antecedent—because it goes (ced-) before (ante-) the pronoun in the sentence or paragraph.

You'll most likely find interjections at the beginning of a sentence, followed by a comma or an exclamation point: Ahem! Wake up—this is the last chapter on parts of speech.

In French printer's jargon, cliche (which mimicked the sound of a mold striking molten metal) was a synonym for stereotype, which in turn evolved from the Greek for "solid impression." A stereotype was a printing plate that duplicated typography and that was used by the printer in lieu of the original. So a cliche is a word or phrase used over and over again in lieu of the original.

The English critic George Saintsbury once compared the act of sentence making--the letting out and pulling in of clauses--to the letting out and pulling in of the slide of a trombone or the "draws" of a telescope.

What would a grammar book be if it didn't lounge around in a little Latin? Let

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

To find the right pitch is to be human, to have a sense of the street, while still reaching for the lofty. It means resisting the kind of language that suits cogs in a machine better than sentient beings.

If all of this seems paradoxical, get used to it. Language is paradox.

Phrases can build grace into sentences. Taut declarations lend clarity, but too many of them can start to sound like a Dick-and-Jane story. A strategically placed phrase can turn a staccato burst into a more lyrical sentence. This is what we mean by "turning a phrase"—using our command of language and our mastery of the rhythms of a sentence to affect style as well as substance

The technically incorrect It's me and That's me have been part of our DNA since as long as English has been recorded. There's something nice and low-key about them. Maybe we just crave a simple English equivalent of the French C'est moi .

Let's never forget that we need to speak and write like human beings with hearts, and not like the tin woodsman in The Wizard of Oz or Hal in the movie 2001 .

The art of sentence making comes down to experimentation, skill, and variety. Just because you can do the three-and-a-half-somersault tuck off the high board doesn't mean you must ditch the gorgeous swan dive. Good sentences can be short and muscular, and they can be long and graceful.

The long form of the possessive pronoun replaces the noun. completely.

It's dangerous to deal with words. In addition the author risks being flayed and stuffed after death by any little youthful and self-assured doctor of literature.

Neurosexism promotes damaging, limiting, potentially self-fulfilling stereotypes. Three years ago, I discovered my son's kindergarten teacher reading a book that claimed that his brain was incapable of forging the connection between emotion and language. And so I decided to write this book.

A member of my family, who shall remain nameless, refers to all newborns as 'blobs'.

Nonexistent sex differences in language lateralization, mediated by nonexistent sex differences in corpus callosum structure, are widely believed to explain nonexistent sex differences in language skills.

Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

you can not fully read a book without being alone. But through this very solitude you become intimately involved with people whom you might never have met otherwise, either because they have been dead for centuries or because they spoke languages you cannot understand. And, nonetheless, they have become your closest friends, your wisest advisors, the wizards that hypnotize you, the lovers you have always dreamed of. -Antonio munoz molinas, "the power of the pen

The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one.

And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb. I would think of Haarlem, each substantial church set behind its wrought-iron fence and its barrier of doctrine. And I would know again that in darkness God's truth shines most clear.

The Bible has been through at least half a dozen translations by the time you read it. Plus, when the word of God is infected by the hand of man, that is, written down, it is tainted.