Quotes About Grammar

I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language.

Art is more than a sum of cultural signs: It is a language both direct and associative, and has a grammar and syntax like any other human communication. The act of paying close attention to what someone made, in all of its particulars, is what stimulates an authentic, as opposed to a conditioned, response.

Simply put, democracy is viewed exclusively as a set of principles of government that, like the grammar of a language, can be delineated, taught, and applied so that when uttered, it will sound the same regardless of habits of reading or listening. This trend towards a grammatical and linguistic common sense also finds expression in theoretical de- bates about normativity and deontology in contemporary liberalism.

Let schoolmasters puzzle their brain, With grammar, and nonsense, and learning, Good liquor, I stoutly maintain, Gives genius a better discerning.

Instead of pressuring the Japanese into lowering trade barriers or taking a greater share of the responsibility for their own defense, we should be urging them to bring their verbs from the ends of their sentences into second place, right after their subjects, where they belong.

Semicolon, you dolt!

His spelling was several degrees beyond arbitrary, and his punctuation brought reason to sigh with unhappiness.

For Alma, to read something once was to have ownership of it forever. She could take apart an argument the way a good soldier can dismantle his rifle—half asleep in the dark, and the thing still comes to pieces beautifully. Calculus put her into fits of ecstasies. Grammar was an old friend—perhaps from having grown up speaking so many languages simultaneously.

The Essentials of English, book of choice of the older boys at St. Faith's for spanking the younger boys with, leaving a particular broad-natured pain ever afterwards associated with grammar.

Does "anal-retentive" have a hyphen?

De acuerdo que la gramática es esencial, pero sólo si tiene como objeto la escritura: privada de su objetivo, se convierte en un código estéril.

We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.

Engineers aren't professional grammarticians, but they love correcting people. Even more, they love making you feel stupid.

The Apostrophe To grant possession to a singular noun, simply add an apostrophe and s: The student's love of punctuation is boundless. If a plural noun that already ends in s needs to become possessive, slap a single apostrophe on the end of that word:

A semicomma, we should note, doesn't exist; we just made the word up. But it sounds like a punctuation mark that should exist, doesn't it?

[S]ometimes... quotation marks are an absolute crime against humanity.

The rules of punctuation seem arbitrary. How can they not, when an apostrophe looks like nothing in this world so much as a comma that can't keep its feet on the ground? Or when, by simply placing next to that wafting comma its twin, one creates (of all things) a quotation mark?

Grammar Checker – A software program that is not needed by those who know grammar and virtually useless for those who don't.

Never end a sentence with a preposition, Sobel. You don't wanna say, 'gave the plumbers new grounds to bargain on.' You wanna say, 'gave the plumbers new grounds on which to bargain.

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness!

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant nothing would. No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

In 1933, in Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski proposed that we should abolish the is of identity from the English language. (The is of identity takes the form X is a Y. E.g., Joe is a Communist, Mary is a dumb file-clerk, The universe is a giant machine, etc.) In 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. proposed the abolition of all forms of the words is or to be and the Bourland proposal (English without isness) he called E-Prime, or English-Prime.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences.