Quotes About Grammar

Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machine—grammar—controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose—that's like people not understanding your interactions.

My wife saw a mug somewhere that says, 'I'm silently correcting your grammar.' I think that is perfect thing for me.

The reply was: "Whom shall I say, sir?"—in smart society the only persons who bother with grammar are the butler and the social secretary.

En la noche hay lo absoluto; en las tinieblas lo múltiple. La gramática, esta lógica no admite singular para las tinieblas, la noche es una, las tinieblas son varias.

an apostrophe humbled to a comma.

preliterate authors, such as Homer, who cannot be grammatically constrained,

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.

You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does — but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use.

A double negative is a no-no.

Grammar makes the difference between feeling you're nuts and feeling your nuts.

I always put the apostrophe in "ain't" to make certain I'm using proper improper English.

When money talks, no one checks the grammar.

Man 1: Where are you from? Man 2: From a place where we do not end sentences with prepositions. Man 1: Okay, where are you from, jackass?

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

We're talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. starting over with accuracy.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.

Encourage children to write their own stories, and then don't rain on their parade. Don't say, 'That's not true.' Applaud flights of fantasy. Help with spelling and grammar, but stand up and cheer the use of imagination.

You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

I'm not very good at standard English.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

Grammar stops at love, and at art.

What really alarms me about President Bush's "War on Terrorism" is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is "Terrorism" going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.

What really alarms me about President Bush's 'War on Terrorism' is the grammar. How do you wage war on an abstract noun? How is 'Terrorism' going to surrender? It's well known, in philological circles, that it's very hard for abstract nouns to surrender.