The best grammarian still can’t write a verse.

Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling.

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

Whenever I write a paragraph in English, I first check it with the Google Translator, and most often it says no language detected.

Sex is a matter of biology, while gender is a matter of grammar, and there is no earthly reason why sex should be involved in gender distinctions.

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...

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.

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

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...

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

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...

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.

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.

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

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...

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

thnkz 4 hlpng e wth e spllng d gwammer mestr josef

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!...

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...

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.

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...

Mortality rose.

Tyranny begins with the laws of grammar.

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

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...

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.

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.

[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.

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...

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...