#grammar

I was a little excited but mostly blorft. "Blorft" is an adjective I just made up that means 'Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.' I have been blorft every day for the past seven years. ↗

— Tina Fey

#grammar-humor #humor #stress #humor

It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between "literally" and "figuratively." If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you are literally jumping for joy, for instance, it means you are leaping in the air because you are very happy. If you are figuratively jumping for joy, it means you are so happy that you could jump for joy, but are saving your energy for other matters. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#humor #language #humor

Nothing could go wrong because nothing had...I meant "nothing would." No - Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations - conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#humor #science-fiction #time-travel #humor

Stupid English." "English isn't stupid," I say. "Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me." "Why not?" "He says lunch isn't a subject." I glance at him. "It isn't." "Well," Jacob says, "it's not a predicate, either. Shouldn't he know that? ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#grammar #humor #school #humor

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time. ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#language #change

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

Ladies, if you want to know the way to my heart... good spelling and good grammar, good punctuation, capitalize only where you are supposed to capitalize, it's done. ↗

— John Mayer

#done #good #grammar #heart #know

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

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

Grammar is a piano I play by ear. ↗

— Joan Didion

#play