Quotes About Grammar

With verbs randomly scattered about instead of neatly stacked at the end of each sentence, verbs that had no real endings, and nondeclension nouns, the language was oral chaos.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

I am damned if I will spend my time listenin' to ungrammatical, repetitious, imbecilic nonsense without a challenge!

First was the fewer, not less. Now it was the care in avoiding a preposition at the end of a sentence. An educated man, presumably. Precise. Apparently fussy about small-minded rules, perhaps to compensate for a willingness to ignore large ones.

Grammar is not just a pain in the ass; it's the pole you grab to get your thoughts up on their feet and walking. Besides, all those simple sentences worked for Hemingway, didn't they? Even when he was drunk on his ass, he was a fucking genius.

Emoticons as a new class of oversignifying precision grammar.

When it comes to correct English, there's no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

The word 'glamour' comes from the word 'grammar', and since the Chomskyan revolution the etymology has been fitting. Who could not be dazzled by the creative power of the mental grammar, by its ability to convey an infinite number of thoughts with a finite set of rules?

Syntax overrides carbon dioxide.

The real principle is that between is used for a relationship of an individual to any number of other individuals, as long as they are being considered two at a time, whereas among is used for a relationship of an individual to an amorphous mass or collectivity.

A comparative adjective is appropriate when the two items are being directly contrasted, one against the other; a superlative can work when an item is superior not just to the alternative in view at the time but to a larger implicit comparison group.

the [mental] organization of grammar [is] a case where complexity in the mind is not caused by learning; learning is caused by complexity in the mind.

As far as I'm concerned, whom is a word that was invented to make everyone sound like a butler.

Literate people should know how to think about grammar.

The enmeshing of polysemy with grammar is also visible in one of the ways that Americans and Britons are divided by their common language. When a product gives its name to an employer, the name is singular in the United States (The Globe is expanding its comics section) but plural in the United Kingdom (The Guardian are giving you the chance to win books).

Linguists call this the container-locative construction, because now it's the container that's being focused upon.

Linguists call this the content-locative construction, because the contents being moved are focused upon in the object of the sentence

Experiments that measure readers' comprehension times to the thousandth of a second have shown that singular they causes little or no delay, but generic he slows them down a lot.

The main danger in using these forms is that a more-grammatical-than-thou reader may falsely accuse you of making an error. If they do, tell them that Jane Austen and I think it's fine.

To show that these rules really are parts of a language engine, one needs to show that they mesh with other mechanisms of language, particularly in ways that would leave common sense and the desire to communicate frustrated.

For example, there is an old grammarian's saw about how a sentence can end in five prepositions. Daddy trudges upstairs to Junior's bedroom to read him a bedtime story. Junior spots the book, scowls, and asks, "Daddy, what did you bring that book that I don't want to be read to out of up for?

When a grammatical construction is associated with politicians you can be sure that it provides a way to evade responsibility. Zombie nouns, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That

The errors could have been avoided by mentally moving the who or whom back into the gap and sounding out the sentence (or, if your intuitions about who and whom are squishy, inserting he or him in the gap instead).