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.

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.

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...