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.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, “Mythology and Archetypal Experience,” confounded me. I didn’t understand why we couldn’t just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

Real love is booty grabbin

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

I was well warned about English food, so it did not surprise me, but I do wonder sometimes, how they ever manage to prise it up long enough to get a plate under it.

In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who lose a child.

Kingsley Amis was one of a trio of brilliant comic novelists who made English literature sparkle in the twentieth century.

Words are instruments, they are tools that, in their different ways, are as effective as any sharp edge or violate chemical. They are, like coins, items of great value, but they represent a currency that,...

Delight is délice, délit is a misdemeanour”Well, it’s bloody close…”Well, they often are….

He would not mind hearing Petrus’s story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa.

I feel very English in a suit. There’s something about being in a suit abroad, particularly in America, that feels empowering.

My scary strange English shall only be counted as my English problem.

The English country house is certainly an icon of British culture.

English is not my first language.

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a...

When in doubt about who’s to blame. Blame the English.

Ho ho ho, tell me why you are not at home’ is something Santa Claus could ask you if you stayed in a hotel over Christmas. It is most certainly not the reason why it...

I used to have a pony but I outgrew it and I do dream that one day I will live in the country and have lots of horses and be like a proper English lady...

She wanted more, more slang, more figures of speech, the bee’s knees, the cats pajamas, horse of a different color, dog-tired, she wanted to talk like she was born here, like she never came from...

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other...

I finally returned to Iran in 1979, when I got my degree in English and American literature, and stayed for 18 years in the Islamic republic.

I know your head aches. I know you’re tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher’s window. But think what you’re trying to accomplish – just think what you’re dealing...

I discovered Orson Welles in college; my freshman English professor screened ‘Citizen Kane’ for us, and I wound up writing a 20-page term paper on it.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

I know my own heart to be entirely English.

I’d studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly

If water was beer I’d be a teetotaler

In a language as idiomatically stressed as English, opportunities for misreadings are bound to arise. By a mere backward movement of stress, a verb can become a noun, an act a thing. To refuse, to...

I refer to myself as he, the third person, because the first two people are out on a date. They probably expect me to pick up their tab.

I’m not very good at standard English.

Like so many colours, like so many flavours, like so many fragrance, English grammar should be a personal choice.

Libraries are always bigger on the inside because every book has an entire word inside of it.

It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like...

I’m a man of leisure. That’s because I have an English degree and can’t get a job.

I’m bilingual, speaking English and body language. I prefer the latter, because I can speak it silently and without listening and while my back is turned.

I couldn’t speak English. I’m in kindergarten, and the only reason I got through to first grade is because I cheated.

Writing in English is like throwing mud at a wall.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

The North American intellectual tradition began, I maintain, in the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive, pragmatic North American English – the Protestant plain style in both the U.S. and Canada, with its no-nonsense Scottish...

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers’ time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a...

My birthday is coming up. I was born on March 5th, 1982. Humans have come a long way since then—nearly 30 years, if my math is good. And my math better be good, because if...

I’m all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

Speak English!” said the Eaglet. “I don’t know the meaning of half those long words, and, what’s more, I don’t believe you do either!” And the Eaglet bend down its head to hide a smile:...

English:Ô, take this eager dance you fool, don’t brandish your stick at me. I have several reasons to travel on, on to the endless sea: I have lost my love. I’ve drunk my purse. My...

To Americans, English manners are far more frightening than none at all.

I tend to curse in French more often than I do in English.

I have an English family and I’ve lived in England for years.

No,” I replied testily. “I’m pretty sure ‘digital’ is Latin for ‘fingeral,’ so finger cancer equals digital cancer. This is all basic anatomy, Dr. Roland.” The Dr. Roland told me that he thought I was...