#gramma

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 the formation of a language, seeking the hidden reason of all its apparent caprices, we do not reach that end, for grammar is not literature… When we come to literature, we find that, though it conforms to the rules of grammar, it is yet a thing of joy; it is freedom itself. The beauty of a poem is bound by strict laws, yet it transcends them. The laws are its wings. They do not keep it weighed down. They carry it to freedom. Its form is in law, but its spirit is in beauty. Law is the first step toward freedom, and beauty is the complete liberation which stands on the pedestal of law. Beauty harmonizes in itself the limit and the beyond – the law and the liberty. ↗

— Rabindranath Tagore

#caprice #first-step #freedom #grammar #hidden-reason

When taking Spock to see the spores, Leila comments, "It's not much further." having been beaten about the head severely on the difference between "further" and "farther," I believe I can say with some trembling confidence that she should say, "it's not much farther." "Further" means "to a greater extent or degree" whereas "farther" means "to a greater distance." (I know this is really picky, but hey, that's my business.) ↗

— Phil Farrand

#geek #grammar-humor #nit #nitpick #pick

Statistics is the grammar of science. ↗

— Karl Pearson

#science #statistics

Then when I was in grammar school I played the clarinet, and then, after clarinet I played the flute in college orchestra - besides singing in the college chorus and things like that. ↗

— Bobby McFerrin

#besides #chorus #clarinet #college #flute

A philosopher once said, 'Half of good philosophy is good grammar.' ↗

— A. P. Martinich

#grammar #half #once #philosopher #philosophy

I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it. ↗

— Carl Sandburg

#grammar #i #life #made #mistake

Frankly, I wonder who Frank was, and why he has an adverb all to himself. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#humor

The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses ‘the means at hand,’ that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous – and so forth. There is therefor a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself…If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. ↗

— Jacques Derrida

#grammatology #writing #change

I don't know the rules of grammar. If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language. ↗

— David Ogilvy

#grammar #humour #advertising

Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! ↗

— Roald Dahl

#mathematics