Friday, October 14, 2011

Quotations about Grammar

My spelling is Wobbly. It's good spelling but it Wobbles, and the letters get in the wrong places. ~A.A. Milne


Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression. ~Bronson Alcott


Correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. ~George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872


Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason. ~Richard C. Trench


[A] man must be a d—d fool, who can't spell a word more than one way. ~Author unknown, 1855, anecdote from Jamestown Journal (Thanks, Garson O'Toole!)


Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma'ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world. ~Henry Louis Mencken, The American Language


Women are the simple, and poets the superior, artisans of language... the intervention of grammarians is almost always bad. ~Rémy de Gourmont


Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use. ~Mark Twain


When I split an infinitive, god damn it, I split it so it stays split. ~Raymond Chandler


Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect! ~Owens Lee Pomeroy


There are grammatical errors even in his silence. ~Stanislaw J. Lec


Do not be surprised when those who ignore the rules of grammar also ignore the law. After all, the law is just so much grammar. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put. ~Attributed to Winston Churchill, rejecting the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition, c.1948, may instead have been said by an anonymous official, see notes at www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html


Only in grammar can you be more than perfect. ~William Safire

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