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.

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...

Of course, it is boring to read about boring thing, but it is better to read something that makes you yawn with boredom than something that will make you weep uncontrollably, pound your fists against...

I’m English. We’re about as tactful as a hot poker up the bum, most of the time.

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In...

Language is the key to the heart of people.

Komandoo Nicolas Kahima Kankiriho (‘Kahima the Warrior’) alizaliwa katika Wilaya ya Bushenyi, Ankole, kusini-magharibi mwa Uganda, Julai 24, 1954, mtoto wa tano kuzaliwa, katika familia ya watoto sita ya Nicodemas Kankiriho; mzee wa heshima wa...

I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.

I can kick the can down the road, and I can also kick other modal verbs.

Literature offers the thrill of minds of great clarity wrestling with the endless problems and delights of being human. To engage with them is to engage with oneself, and the lasting rewards are not confined...

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken...

Christian missions to India imply that India is a land of heathens, and, therefore, stands on the same level with the Andaman or the Fiji Islands. That a country which has been recognised in all...

In high school, we barely brushed against Ogden Nash, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or any of the other so-unserious writers who delight everyone they touch. This was, after all, a very expensive and important school....

Carlyle’s genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region...

I am illiterate. Just not in English.

I don’t like being flattered. It doesn’t suit my English sensibilities. Remember, we are the great country of understatement.

Don’t fuck with an English major. They keep lots of useless crap trapped in their heads. Once in a while they let some of it out and it bites you square on the ass.

When I first came to this country, I didn’t know how to speak English.

The lively oral storytelling scene in Scots and Gaelic spills over into the majority English-speaking culture, imbuing it with a strong sense of narrative drive that is essential to the modern novel, screenplay and even...

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.