312a794
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The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
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grammar
humor
misunderstandings
problems
troubles
world
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Michel de Montaigne |
ff65dc7
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And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before--and thus was the Empire forged.
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grammar
grammar-humor
humor
humour
science-fiction
space-travel
star-trek-references
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Douglas Adams |
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Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar.
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grammar
immortality
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Margaret Atwood |
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The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person. I mean it.
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grammar
stupid
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Lynne Truss |
aa216ac
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I have no idea what that is, but yawn, anyway, just on principle. Eat up. Pancakes is brain food. Apparently not grammar food. Wow.You college girls are mean.
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claire-danvers
eve-rosser
grammar
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Rachel Caine |
3d56c1d
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Trevor realized that the odd thing about English is that no matter how much you screw sequences word up up, you understood, still, like Yoda, will be. Other languages don't work that way. French? Misplace a single or and an idea vaporizes into a sonic puff. English is flexible: you can jam it into a Cuisinart for an hour, remove it, and meaning will still emerge.
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grammar
language
syntax
words
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Douglas Coupland |
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What the semicolon's anxious supporters fret about is the tendency of contemporary writers to use a dash instead of a semicolon and thus precipitate the end of the world. Are they being alarmist?
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english-language
grammar
humor
lynne-truss
punctuation
sentence-structure
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Lynne Truss |
e71031e
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"Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word "punctilious" ("attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root as punctuation."
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grammar
manners
punctuation
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Lynne Truss |
d40ef1c
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Vowels were something else. He didn't like them and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you know pretty much where you stood, but you could never trust a vowel.
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grammar
maniac
syllable
vowels
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Jerry Spinelli |
e1cec5e
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We can trace the communitarian fantasy that lies at the root of all humanism back to the model of a literary society, in which participation through reading the canon reveals a common love of inspiring messages. At the heart of humanism so understood we discover a cult or club fantasy: the dream of the portentous solidarity of those who have been chosen to be allowed to read. In the ancient world--indeed, until the dawn of the modern nation-states--the power of reading actually did mean something like membership of a secret elite; linguistic knowledge once counted in many places as the provenance of sorcery. In Middle English the word 'glamour' developed out of the word 'grammar'. The person who could read would be thought easily capable of other impossibilities.
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grammar
humanism
language
reading
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Peter Sloterdijk |
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"Stupid English." "English isn't stupid," I say. "Well, my English teacher is." He makes a face. "Mr. Franklin assigned an essay about our favorite subject, and I wanted to write about lunch, but he won't let me." "Why not?" "He says lunch isn't a subject."
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grammar
humor
school
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Jodi Picoult |
89bafc1
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Don't cross out. (That is editing as you write. Even if you write something you didn't mean to write, leave it.) Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, grammar. (Don't even care about staying within the margins and lines on the page.) Lose control. Don't think. Don't get logical. Go for the jugular. (If something comes up in your writing that is scary or naked, dive right into it. It probably has lots of energy.)
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grammar
line
margin
punctuation
spelling
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Natalie Goldberg |
8415864
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Grammar, he saw, was agreement, community, consensus.
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consensus
grammar
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D.T. Max |
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Ils en conclurent que la syntaxe est une fantaisie et la grammaire une illusion.
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grammar
illusions
language
phantasies
syntax
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Gustave Flaubert |
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That's so typical. You won't steal a baby, but you're too lazy to conjugate.
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grammar
humor
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Jim Butcher |
54b2934
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Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It's all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.
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grammar
language
literature
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Thomas C. Foster |
b3e45ef
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Diagramming made language seem friendly, like a dog who doesn't bark, but, instead, trots over to greet you, wagging its tail.
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grammar
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Kitty Burns Florey |
3124ae9
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Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated. To which accusation, I say (mainly), 'Pah!' How can it be a matter of class difference when ignorance is universal?
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class-difference
grammar
humor
ignorance
intellectualism
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Lynne Truss |
5c122e7
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"No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves."
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grammar
grammar-nazi
lynne-truss
seventh-sense
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Lynne Truss |
a5b1b38
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Correct spelling, correct punctuation, correct grammar. Hundreds of rules for itsy-bitsy people. No one could remember all that stuff and concentrate on what he was trying to write about. It was all table manners, not derived from any sense of kindness or decency or humanity, but originally from an egotistic desire to look like gentlemen and ladies. Gentlemen and ladies had good table manners and spoke and wrote grammatically. It was what identified one with the upper classes. In Montana, however, it didn't have this effect at all. It identified one, instead, as a stuck-up Eastern ass.
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grammar
montana
rules-of-english-language
writing
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Robert M. Pirsig |
39b71c7
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"Cheers,' she said as I left, 'and don't forget you're seeing Matt and I on Monday.' I thought for a moment she'd said 'matineye', an East End pronunciation of 'matinee'. Was I meant to review it?
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grammar
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Sebastian Faulks |