#english

Ninety-nine per cent of traditional English literature concerns people who never have to worry about money at all. We always seem to be watching or reading about emotional crises among folk who live in a world of great fortune both in matters of luck and money; stories and fantasies about rock stars and film stars, sporting millionaires and models; jet-setting members of the aristocracy and international financiers. ↗

— James Kelman

#crises #emotional #english-literature #fortune #money

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. ↗

— Jared Diamond

#music

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing. ↗

— John H. McWhorter

#grammar

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

— Jonathan Culver

#grammar #language #grammar

So I went to English school, secondary English school, so forget going to Mecca for my religious education. ↗

— Abdullah Ahmad Badawi

#english #english school #forget #going #i

Listeners will wonder what an Englishman is doing on the German radio tonight. You can imagine that before taking this step I hoped that someone better qualified than me would come forward. ↗

— John Amery

#better #come #doing #englishman #forward

The Economist is undoubtedly the smartest weekly newsmagazine in the English language. I always look forward to its quirky year-end double issue. ↗

— Eric Alterman

#double #economist #english #english language #forward

I appeal to all Britishers to answer this call to arms for the defence of all the principles that we Englishmen have been the first to proclaim in the world. ↗

— John Amery

#appeal #arms #been #call #defence

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds. ↗

— John James Audubon

#aware #better #birds #english #habits

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it. ↗

— Christian Bale

#actually #again #batman #before #by the time