Quotes About Grammar

I before e, Except after c, Or when sounded as a, As in neighbor or weigh.

The most damaging mistakes a writer can make are probably misspelling or misusing words

among, between: Think division. If only two people are dividing something, use between; if more than two people are involved, use among. Here's a mnemonic: between for two and among for a group.

It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me.

I don't really know what an adverb is. A dangling participle? That sounds really rude. I don't know what character is, really. Plot seems vaguely juvenile to me. It's all about language, it's all about how you apply it to the page.

I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar.

grammar is something people without anything more exciting to do in their lives codify into a book. While

Another forgotten property of stressors is in language acquisition—I don't know anyone who ever learned to speak his mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by biquarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules.

What I wanted to do was slap him down a bit with wit and words. Grammar and vocabulary as a weapon. But what kind of world would it be if we all took every opportunity presented to us to assault the weak?

Charles Harrington Elster

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes.

We do have to be on guard these days or we're likely to get swatted by a belligerent pronoun or hit with a preposition we didn't see coming. These are perilous times for the English language, in case you hadn't noticed.

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all - it's that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.

Don't trust anybody who'd rather be grammatically correct than have a good time.

Incidentally, he might have added, are you aware that there's no such thing as a smithereen? The word exists only in the plural.

I hate all these crazy verbs, using a subjunctive to get what's happened in the future and the past mixed up.

Know the difference between its and it's, between lay and lie: you lay the form rejection slip on the table; you lie on the bed filled with the anguish of self-doubt and feelings of utter worthlessness.

It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.

Remember: Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural. All y'all's is plural possessive.

Perhaps that's why they had been so happy to learn a new tongue in the first place : the self consciousness of it, the effort of it, the grammar of it, pulled you up; a new language provided distance and kept the heart intact.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Every letter in the alphabet in that sentence.

To ask oneself in general what exists or what is real means only to ask how would you like to use a verb and an adjective; it's a grammatical question, not a question about nature. Nature, for its part, is what it is, and we discover it very gradually. If our grammar and our intuition do not readily adapt to what we discover, well, too bad. We must seek to adapt them.

All of this, I believe, indicates that in order to grasp the basic grammar of the world, we need to merge three basic ingredients, not just two: not just general relativity and quantum mechanics, but also the theory of heat, that is, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, which we can also describe as "information theory.