Quotes About Grammar

his touch a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

I start sentences with ands and buts. I end sentences with prepositions.

It is my destiny to know people who abuse punctuation.

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

We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason.

Say what you have to say and the first time you come to a sentence with a grammatical ending - sit down.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Proper words in proper places, make the true definition of a style.

I don't know anything but the simplest rules of English grammar, and I seldom consciously apply them. Nevertheless, I instinctively write correctly and, I like to think, in an interesting fashion. I know when something sounds right and when it doesn't, and I can tell the difference without hesitation, even when writing at breakneck speed. How do I do this? I haven't the faintest idea.

Neither said anything while they embraced. Sometimes words didn't go far enough, the vessels of letters and the ladles of grammar incapable of holding the heart's sentiments.

Sometimes words didn't go far enough, the vessels of letters and the ladles of grammar incapable of holding the heart's sentiments.

There's this whole new grammar Twitter skill set that I do not possess. I'm not a very good person to follow. I never tweet, and when I do, it's about some sort of sporting event that I'm watching.

I think the adverb is a much-maligned part of speech. It's always accused of being oppressive, even tyrannical, when in fact it's so supple and sly.

Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.

In my worst moments, I think the biggest effect of 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' was to kill the happiness of people who had previously skipped through life, unaware of all the atrocities lurking in the world around them.

Today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available.

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. When

All the English speakers, or almost all, have difficulties with the gender of words.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

I still like complete sentences that are grammatically correct without spelling errors. I don't always achieve this, and it is irksome to read a message I have sent and discover errors. I know I often leave out words in e-mail, not by choice, but because of the way my brain works.

I have horrible handwriting, horrible spelling and horrible grammar.

I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.