#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

Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships. ↗

— Nina Bawden

#both #college #grammar #grammar school #margaret

Going to a grammar school, you mixed with all sorts of different types and I used to listen to how they talked. When I did my imitations, I could sound like someone really rough, or I could sound like a cabinet minister. ↗

— Steve Coogan

#could #did #different #different types #going

It's really difficult for me. Language, I am sorry that I haven't. I think I just always expected that you learn a word in place of a word and when I discovered how difficult the grammar was and learning that was very discouraging for me. ↗

— Bo Derek

#am #difficult #discouraging #discovered #expected

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

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women's stories. God, the BBC's practically run by women. ↗

— Julie Walters

#baby boomers #bbc #boomers #editors #education

Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar. ↗

— E. B. White

#faith #grammar #trick #writing