Quotes About Language

Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe.

If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don't bother to go any further.

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world.

While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time .

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

That's why they came up with the emoticon, too—the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to get a life by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll.

Cruelty to punctuation is quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a powerful magnifying glass; you name it.

pretentious and over-active" semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought.

I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation – but for many it may be too late.

One moment you can say the words 'I am'. And the next, you have no first person, no present tense, and no entitlement, as a subject, to act on verbs of any kind.

Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

As we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price.

No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it's best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked uo on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

So how should you use a colon, to begin with? H. W. Fowler said that the colon delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words, which is not a bad image to start off with.

The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly".

And you can't let him shake and bake Nicholas." Thomas rolled his eyes. "It's staked and baked, Jo. We aren't pork chops.

How on earth does she make the English language float and float?

I find attempts to create bilingual gospels laughable, in particular the attempt to translate the service from Church Slavonic into Russian. What for? In order not to make the effort and not to learn the divine, if somewhat artificial but solemn, language specially carved for this purpose? This language also provides a link with a tradition which is realized at depths and which the modern Russian language cannot plumb.

If we want to be heard we must speak in a language the listener can understand and on a level at which the listener is capable of operating.

a língua humana há de ser sempre impotente para exprimir certos afetos da alma (...). Estou condenado a não dizer nada ou a dizer mal. (A mulher de preto)

And God knows the strength of an adjective, especially in young and warm countries.

José Dias amava os superlativos. Era um modo de dar feição monumental às ideias; não as havendo, servia a prolongar as frases.