Quotes About Grammar

Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'

My dad, as much as I love him, has one of those signs - 'The Isbell's' - on his front door, and he's got the damn apostrophe in there. I haven't strangled him yet.

If you learn the auxiliary verbs in your target language, plus the all-important to be, to have, to do, and to go, you can very quickly express any idea.18 Just see the following chart.

It is a remarkable phenomenon that children can learn to speak without ever being consciously aware of the sophisticated grammar they are using.

I don't know if I officially proofread my father's book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

There's a convention in English stuff that if something is more than 100 years old, people have to say 'do not' instead of 'don't. They have to say 'will not' instead of 'won't.' People are speaking in a way that is not accessible or normal. And people didn't ever speak like that.

Sanskrita, "polished, complete." Sanskrit is the elder sister of all Indo-European tongues. Its alphabetical script is called Devanagari; literally, "divine abode." "Who knows my grammar knows God!" Panini, great philologist of ancient India, paid that tribute to the mathematical and psychological perfection of Sanskrit. He who would track language to its lair must indeed end as omniscient. 2

But he had once told Watson that the "less or fewer" issue, along with the use of "I" in such sentences as "He gave the money to Sheila and I", inflicted on the public by people who considered themselves well-educated, could be drastically reduced in frequency—if not actually abolished—by a few well-aimed pistol shots and an explanatory note that would be pinned to the victims' chests.

had been Mirandized. And a perfectly good adjective had been made into a verb.

It's amazing, the increase in grammatical errors in proportion to the level of hatred in the content of hate mail.

Materialism is like a grammar that recognizes only nouns; but reality, like language, contains action as well as objects, verbs as well as substantives, life and motion as well as matter.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.

What?" said Kyle. "How can a number have a past tense?

Moreover, in order to show forth her wisdom and the excellence of her mind to the centuries to come, she [Nicostrata/Carmentis] worked and studied so hard that she invented her own letters, which were completely different from those of other nations, that is, she established the Latin alphabet and syntax, spelling, the difference between the vowels and consonants, as well as a complete introduction to the science of grammar.

I'm glad you like adverbs — I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

I think smartphones need to send an electrical shock to a user when they get their your/you're mixed up.

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.

Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.

They had just digested a recent meal of prepositions and were happily farting out apostrophes and ampersands; the air was heav'y with th'em&.

To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence useless for anyone Yoda except you have.

Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example, explained Lady Cavendish. You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had , had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not.

You wouldn't believe the kind of hate mail I get about my work on irregular verbs.

Trump can't string a single grammatical sentence together, and at the podium, he is lumpen and awkward.

I know what the structure of the language is.