#gramma

... [In 'Pride and Prejudice'] Mr Collins's repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia's elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen's point is that the well-formed sentence belongs to a self-enclosed mind, incapable of sympathetic connections with others and eager to inflict as much pain as is compatible with a thin veneer of politeness. Whereas Blair judged the Addisonian sentence as a completely autonomous unit, Austen judges the sentence as the product of a pre-existing moral agent. What counts is the sentence's ability to reveal that agent, not to enshrine a free-standing morsel of truth. Mr Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, in contrast, features a quite different practice of the sentence, including an odd form of punctation ... The dashes in Mr Darcy's letter transform the typographical sentence by physically making each sentence continuous with the next one. ... The dashes insist that each sentence is not self-sufficient but belongs to a larger macrostructure. Most of Mr Darcy's justification consists not of organised arguments like those of Mr Collins but of narrative. ... The letter's totality exists not in the typographical sentence but in the described event. ↗

— Andrew Elfenbein

#jane-austen #linguistics #style #grammar

Each letter of the alphabet is a steadfast loyal soldier in a great army of words, sentences, paragraphs, and stories. One letter falls, and the entire language falters. ↗

— Vera Nazarian

#grammar #language #languages #letter #literacy

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political. ↗

— Gilles Deleuze

#freedom #grammar #individuality #language #politics

I studied at a grammar school and later at the University of Vienna in the Faculty of Medicine. ↗

— Karl von Frisch

#grammar #grammar school #i #later #medicine

Arguments over grammar and style are often as fierce as those over IBM versus Mac, and as fruitless as Coke versus Pepsi and boxers versus briefs. ↗

— Jack Lynch

#coke #fierce #fruitless #grammar #ibm

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

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

— Sharon Green

#humor #dreams

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

[M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don't say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however. ↗

— Stefano Benni

#grammar #language #life