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.

When you depart from standard usage, it should be deliberate and not an accidental lapse. Like a poet who breaks the rules of poetry for creative effect, this only works when you know and respect...

The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved through an ancient association between learning and enchantment.

One of the major problems encountered in time travel is not that of becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem in becoming your own father or mother that a broad-minded and well-adjusted...

The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly (“It is believed…,” instead of, “I believe…”), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude...

Grammarians make no new thoughts, but thoughts make new grammar.

It is very useful, when one is young, to learn the difference between “literally” and “figuratively.” If something happens literally, it actually happens; if something happens figuratively, it feels like it is happening. If you...

In learning a language, when from mere words we reach the laws of words, we have gained a great deal. But if we stop at that point and concern ourselves only with the marvels of...

A synonym is a word you use when you can’t spell the other one.

Which is him?” The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

But doesn’t add something to what has come before; but takes something away. At its most daring, it can feel like a Bat Turn, a 180-degree spin int the Batmobile. Make that a But Turn.

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before–and thus was the Empire forged.

The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.

Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical...

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

thnkz 4 hlpng e wth e spllng d gwammer mestr josef

It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it’s fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he...

An imperfect creative expression is much more sensible and creative than a grammatically perfect expression without an iota of sense and value in it.

Try – Takes the infinitive: “try to mend it,” not “try and mend it.” Students of the language will argue that ‘try and’ has won through and become idiom. Indeed it has, and it is...

Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don’t work that way. French? Dieu!...

We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring...

English doesn’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Tyranny begins with the laws of grammar.

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Mortality rose.

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

Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, police grammar on the Internet.

Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity...

[M]y favorite teacher was explaining that you don’t say but however. These are pleonasms: the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. There are times in life that are very but however.

People who practice freedom of expression are terrorizing our grammatical way of life.

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

Grammar perfect books are for Ivy Leaguers in Ivory Towers. My book is a sandcastle built on the beach of usefullness.

Like prepositional phrases, certain structural arrangements in English are much more important than the small bones of grammar in its most technical sense. It really wouldn’t matter much if we started dropping the s from...

The true structure of the Welsh grammar will be revealed only when we look at sentences slightly more complicated than its basic VSO pattern. Welsh is no different from the rest of the world: it...

His sentences didn’t seem to have any verbs, which was par for a politician. All nouns, no action.

Was it too much to expect the rest of the world to care about grammar or pay attention to details?

Deleuze and Guattari have been totally misunderstood because the following has been wrenched from context: “Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is...

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

Grammar is politics by other means.

I escape disaster by writing a poem with a joke in it:The past, present, and future walk into a bar—it was tense.

Some minds, at some point, discover that they can not make sense of their own predications without attention to grammar, although they do not ordinarily think of what they are doing as an exercise in...

#Twitter: proudly promoting ghastly grammar and silly misspelling since 2006.

Perfect grammar–persistent, continuous, sustained–is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any...

By the way I also would say “I got a book.” But your teacher and I are not “English teachers” in the same sense. She has to put across an idea of what the English...

Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they’re more of an example to young people than adults books are.

Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of “Remember to never split an infinitive” and “The passive voice should never be used.” The notion of making a mistake while...