Why no s for two deer,but an s for two monkeys?Brother Quang saysno one knows.So much for rules!Whoever invented English should be bitten by a snake.

Those were the days, you know. It’s an English thing; as soon as it’s gets to 6 pm, you have to go and have a drink. We used to stick to that religiously.

English was such a dense, tight language. So many hard letters, like miniature walls. Not open with vowels the way Spanish was. Our throats open, our mouths open, our hearts open. In English, the sounds...

At somewhere around 10 syllables, the English poetic line is at its most relaxed and manageable.

The English language is a work in progress. Have fun with it.

Burst pipes were an English tradition, like so many others.Like, for instance, English men. Charm the knickers off you with their mellow vowels and frivolous verbiage, and then, once they’d got them off, panic and...

…I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It...

He had a voice you couldn’t miss: strong and penetrating with strange vowels that sounded different from the accents of other English speakers even to me. I later discovered that he was Canadian.

Dearest creature in creation,Study English pronunciation.I will teach you in my verseSounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.I will keep you, Suzy, busy,Make your head with heat grow dizzy.Tear in eye, your dress will tear.So...

His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real...

English isn’t my first language—gibberish is.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

One knows so well the popular idea of health: the English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the unbeatable.

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in...

For Sayonara, literally translated, ‘Since it must be so,’ of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the Auf Wiedershens and Au revoirs, it does not try to cheat itself by...

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

Mocho was a Spanish word that meant maimed or referred to something that had been lopped off like a stump. To call Homer el mocho was, essentially, to call him “Stumpy” or “the maimed one.”...

Everything is possible for an eccentric, especially when he is English.

Bad people? What kind of bad people? Members of the Church of Satan? Insurance salesmen? People who don’t speak English?

In Sweden, they broadcast the American shows in English with Swedish subtitles, whereas in many European countries they dub them. Watching those shows in English was big for me.

I’m sorry to hear you’re jobless.” I need to network with people who encounter letters on a daily basis in math equations, not romantic poetry.

At four lines, with the quatrain, we reach the basic stanza form familiar from a whole range of English poetic practice. This is the length of the ballad stanza, the verse of a hymn, and...

Peter held up the book he had been reading: ‘Moby-Dick; or, The Whale’.”To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure this is English,” Peter said. “It’s taken me most of today to get through...

Writing poetry is a state of free float

I grew up listening to English music.

I was more excited than scared, at the opportunity to work in an English movie.

That’s different. The French know that the English are superior to them and they’re appropriate about it. The Eastern Europeans on the other hand have no sense of place. All that communism has them thinking...

I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.

A traditional Englishman drinks tea to the point where his blood has long-since been replaced with an infusion of Ceylon, Assam, and Darjeeling.

Sir, — Whether women are the equals of men has been endlessly debated; whether they have souls has been a moot point; but can it be too much to ask [for a definitive acknowledgement that...

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your...

I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the...

She would speak her story in Spanish and la señora Maureen would tell hers in English; it was obvious to her that the two languages did not carry equal weight.

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?

…[G]reat progress was evident in the last Congress of the American ‘Labour Union’ in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the...

Bicky rocked, like a jelly in a high wind.

You would be amazed by how I can torture the English language. I am an abusive lover.

It’s not entirely absurd to think that somewhere in the past of mankind someone, for the first time, did in his mind the equivalent of putting an adjective to a noun, and saw, not only...

As a student, I wrote English reports on science fiction.

Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages.”I hate you,” she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless....

I’m English, and I started off as a songwriter, so I can’t really escape that – it’s there.

I can read. A little. I kind of protested it in School(TM). On the grounds that the silent ‘E’ is stupid.

You hear doom and gloom about the Internet ruining young people’s command of English – that’s nonsense.

The English language is like London: proudly barbaric yet deeply civilised, too, common yet royal, vulgar yet processional, sacred yet profane. Each sentence we produce, whether we know it or not, is a mongrel mouthful...

You can learn English online

I’M SCOTTISH!

I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

Are you one of those people who uses words more for the sound than for the sense of them?