#gramma

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar. ↗

— James Nicoll

#grammar #humor #humor

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs’ attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives’ attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs’ importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT’s cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people’s English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#grammar #snoot #attitude

The whispers of shared ecstasy are choral. ↗

— George Steiner

#ecstasy #whisper #grammar

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. All I know about grammar is its power. ↗

— Joan Didion

#ear #grammar #i #know #piano

Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason. ↗

— Richard Chenevix Trench

#grammar #logic #reason #speech

Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it. ↗

— A. N. Wilson

#dragon #george #giant #grammar #harry

Ever since grammar school, I knew I wanted to be famous - I always wanted to be a singer. ↗

— Jennifer Hudson

#ever #famous #grammar #grammar school #i

It's perfectly obvious that there is some genetic factor that distinguishes humans from other animals and that it is language-specific. The theory of that genetic component, whatever it turns out to be, is what is called universal grammar. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#component #distinguishes #factor #genetic #grammar

Grammar schools are public schools without the sodomy. ↗

— Tony Parsons

#public #public schools #schools #sodomy #without

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar. ↗

— Ferdinand de Saussure

#directed #grammar #henceforth #language #longer