#grammar

There's a fine line between funny and annoying – and it's exactly the width of a quotation mark. ↗

— Martha Brockenbrough

#grammar #grammar-humor #quotation-marks #funny

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

— Jennifer Crusie

#humor #politics #humor

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

— Michel de Montaigne

#grammar #humor #misunderstandings #problems #troubles

And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet. ↗

— Russell Brand

#grammar-humor #humor

I love you. You are the object of my affection and the object of my sentence. ↗

— Mignon Fogarty

#humor #humor

We got through all of Genesis and part of Exodus before I left. One of the main things I was taught from this was not to begin a sentence with And. I pointed out that most sentences in the Bible began with And, but I was told that English had changed since the time of King James. In that case, I argued, why make us read the Bible? But it was in vain. Robert Graves was very keen on the symbolism and mysticism in the Bible at that time. ↗

— Stephen Hawking

#language #change

A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#grammar

... [In 'Pride and Prejudice'] Mr Collins's repulsiveness in his letter [about Lydia's elopement] does not exist only at the level of the sentence: it permeates all aspects of his rhetoric. Austen's point is that the well-formed sentence belongs to a self-enclosed mind, incapable of sympathetic connections with others and eager to inflict as much pain as is compatible with a thin veneer of politeness. Whereas Blair judged the Addisonian sentence as a completely autonomous unit, Austen judges the sentence as the product of a pre-existing moral agent. What counts is the sentence's ability to reveal that agent, not to enshrine a free-standing morsel of truth. Mr Darcy's letter to Elizabeth, in contrast, features a quite different practice of the sentence, including an odd form of punctation ... The dashes in Mr Darcy's letter transform the typographical sentence by physically making each sentence continuous with the next one. ... The dashes insist that each sentence is not self-sufficient but belongs to a larger macrostructure. Most of Mr Darcy's justification consists not of organised arguments like those of Mr Collins but of narrative. ... The letter's totality exists not in the typographical sentence but in the described event. ↗

— Andrew Elfenbein

#jane-austen #linguistics #style #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 of language is fundamentally political. ↗

— Gilles Deleuze

#freedom #grammar #individuality #language #politics

I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style. ↗

— Louis Aragon

#books #commas #demand #footsteps #grammar