#lang

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

— B.R. Myers

#grammar #language #grammar

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

A misspelled word is probably an alias for some desperate call for aid, which is bound to fail. ↗

— Ben Marcus

#language #spelling #grammar

Language is something you inherit, it's never just you doing the talking, which helps when you're pretending. ↗

— Cees Nooteboom

#fantasy #language #night-thoughts #self-deception #self-knowledge

There are objects made up of two sense elements, one visual, the other auditory—the colour of a sunrise and the distant call of a bird. Other objects are made up of many elements—the sun, the water against the swimmer's chest, the vague quivering pink which one sees when the eyes are closed, the feeling of being swept away by a river or by sleep. These second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the writer. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#language #reality #truth #visualization

Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#knowledge #languages #literature #literature-quotes #memory

Suddenly I was the man who got the part that every actor in the English language was trying to get. I was really scared. I had talked the talk, and now I had to walk the walk. For three days, I couldn't answer the phone. ↗

— F. Murray Abraham

#answer #days #english #english language #every

But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#beautiful #chaotic #flow #heart #his

And I'm working at trying to find a kind of language where I won't be so easily modulated by expectation. ↗

— Kathy Acker

#expectation #find #i #kind #language