Quotes About Grammar

The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil the proper use of the tools of learning.

What it does serve to remind us is that learning formal English grammar from a nineteenth-century textbook, without a qualified teacher, was a truly daunting task, as anyone who picks up a copy of Kirkham's will readily see.

Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn't even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?

Later I wrote a composition that my grammar teacher Ohara Y?ichi praised as the best since the founding of Keika Middle School. But when I read it over now, it's precious and pretentious enough to make me blush.

The 'economy of number' proposed by Peano is an economy of signs whose paradigm is algebraic, whose transparency is consensual, and whose operational effectiveness is therefore not in doubt. He thus participates forcefully in that movement of thought, victorious today, that wrests mathematics from its antique philosophical pedestal and represents it to us as a grammar of signs where all that matters is the making explicit of the code.

Quote is a verb. Quotation is the noun.

I don't know what an interrobang is." "It's a glyph that combines a question mark and an exclamation point.

I would say 'woman' used to be a noun, and now it is a noun and also an adjective. And words change their functions in that way. It's one of the most common phenomena about words. They start as one thing, and they end up as something else.

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.'

Breathe deep." "Deeply," I forced out through my tingling mouth. "What?" "Deeply. Adverbs follow verbs." "Seriously? You're giving me a grammar lesson in the middle of your barfing?

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White

The semicolon is a much neglected beast

When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split.

We invented words; we'll tell you how they're supposed to sound.

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her . . . that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

De Certeau's metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, one whose colloquial phrases, jokes, and curses will vanish, even if its formal grammar survives.

As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time

Pero cuando estaba con una mujer, y le gustaba el modo que tenía de hablar, se la llevaba a la cama por el entusiasmo que le provocaba verla usar el pretérito perfecto del indicativo, como si a presencia del pasado en el presente justificara cualquier pasión.

Not every English sentence beginning with the word why is a legitimate question.

We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon

I don't judge people by their accent, or how they word things, or how grammatically correct their speech is. Some of the smartest men in the world couldn't spell. I judge a person by their character.

I recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentlemen, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.