#usage

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 Epistles in the New Testament have all of them a particular reference to the condition and usages of the Christian world at the time they were written. ↗

— Joseph Butler

#christian world #condition #epistles #new #new testament

I used to help my granddaddy make sausage. He would mix it up in a cleaned-out washtub with his hands, no gloves. Man, if we did anything like that today, they would jack the jail up and throw us under it. ↗

— Jimmy Dean

#did #gloves #granddaddy #hands #help

I found that when I went from Albany to Savannah, that I needed to put that white rice away, and I needed to turn that into Savannah red rice because they were big into that sausage, tomato-y, bell pepper-y rice mixture. ↗

— Paula Deen

#away #because #bell #big #found

It was actually quite easy to work with Uggie, because he's a really well trained dog. Very talented. I just had to follow him a little bit, improvise a little bit. Sometimes he'd follow me. Especially because of the sausages I had in my pocket. ↗

— Jean Dujardin

#because #bit #dog #easy #especially

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them. ↗

— Alvin Toffler

#esteemed #goes #into #know #least

It's difficult for me to feel that a solid page without the breakups of paragraphs can be interesting. I break mine up perhaps sooner than I should in terms of the usage of the English language. ↗

— A. E. van Vogt

#difficult #english #english language #feel #i

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street. ↗

— E. B. White

#education #english #getting #judgment #like

Look at growth, look at how much time people spend on the Net and look at the variety of things that they are doing. It's all really good, so I am actually encouraged by the fundamentals that underlie usage growth on the Net. ↗

— Meg Whitman

#actually #am #doing #encouraged #fundamentals

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part. ↗

— Sue Grafton

#books #crank #different #every #formula