Quotes About Grammar

I miss Latin. So much fun--all those exciting verbs that don't come until the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.

Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun - all those exciting verbs that don't come unit the end of the sentence. It's like a movie trailer for language.

the caller might say abruptly, 'Whoozis?' In that case I would say grandly, '*Whom* are you calling, sir?' And he would hang up immediately without even an expletive. Of all the four-letter words I know, the speediest turn-off in such circumstances is *whom*.

Aprender una lengua extraña: asimilas nociones de gramática, vocabulario básico y un acento espantoso que apenas sirve para que te entiendan. Te esfuerzas durante años y de repente, sin saber por qué, todo fluye, captas cómo funciona...

There ain't no grammatical errors in a non-literate society.

Drawing is to art as grammar is to language: you can speak without any knowledge of grammar, but do not expect to be understood, and certainly do not expect to become a poet.

Miss Taylor smiled. "I shall assume that the verb in that sentence you've just uttered is implied, and that the phrase that you had in mind was That doesn't include…which would, of course, justify the use of the accusative me, rather than the nominative I. I assume that.

Adding 'to you' after the word 'introduce' will help you maintain the order of an introduction. Never say 'I'd like you to meet...' when introducing someone, as it reverses the correct order of an introduction. 'You to' is nonstandard grammar, and the only time to say 'you to' is when referring to a certain Irish rock band.

Certain grammatical rules are arbitrary, but the need to have these arbitrary rules is not arbitrary.

This is where we get the absurd rule that one must never, ever, end a sentence with a preposition. As Winston Churchill put it, "That's the sort of nonsense up with which we shall not put.

All this said, fussy grammarians need friends too, and so you may seek out and encourage them. Drop them a little note, telling them that they are your very favorite fussy grammarian, out with whom you like to hang. And if anybody winced there at my use of a plural pronoun for an indefinite singular, then may I suggest counseling?

We are badly diseased with regard to vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, and what we desperately need is for someone to write an elegant little volume of sane English usage that will make us all whole again.

Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation

A sentence has a subject and a verb and expresses a complete thought. However,

Excuse me, where is the library at? - At Harward we don't end the sentence with preposition - Excuse me, where is the library at, jerk!?

I went to a progressive primary school in Kendal, followed by a boys' grammar school and then Cambridge.

I at once made of those two principles the general foundations of all style: first, to say what one feels exactly as one feels it — clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if it is obscure; and confusedly, if it is confused; secondly, to understand that grammar is a tool not a law.

Let grammar rule the man who doesn't know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves.

It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways - and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways.

No important national language, at least in the Occidental world, has complete regularity of grammatical structure, nor is there a single logical category which is adequately and consistently handled in terms of linguistic symbolism.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language. Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other. Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one—with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. It's all in the pronouns.

A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language.

But to become native to this place, if we are to survive here, and our neighbors too, our work is to learn to speak the grammar of animacy, so that we might truly be at home.

English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.