#gramma

I come from the sort of family in which, at the age of ten, I was told I must always say hoi polloi, never "the hoi polloi," because hoi meant "the," and two "the's" were redundant -- indeed something only hoi polloi would say. ↗

— Anne Fadiman

#usage #age

Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail. ↗

— Kitty Burns Florey

#grammar #art

Let me just acknowlege that the function of grammar is to make language as efficent and clear and transparent as possible. But if we’re all constantly correcting each other’s grammar and being really snotty about it, then people stop talking because they start to be petrified that they’re going to make some sort of terrible grammatical error and that’s precisely the opposite of what grammar is supposed to do, which is to facilitate clear communication. ↗

— John Green

#correcting #function #grammar #grammar-nazi #vlogbrothers

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#grammar #mortality #nouns #writing #death

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world—indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states—the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities. ↗

— Peter Sloterdijk

#grammar #humanism #language #reading #dreams

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. ↗

— Joan Didion

#play

My, my, aren't we upper class and therefore faultlessly grammatical. ↗

— Sharon Green

#humor #dreams

People who practice freedom of expression are terrorizing our grammatical way of life. ↗

— Bauvard

#freedom #funny #grammar #humor #terrorism

Xander: To read makes our speaking English good. ↗

— Ashley Gable

#grammar-humor #humor #language #humor

What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist? ↗

— Lynne Truss

#english-language #grammar #humor #lynne-truss #punctuation