grammar

Never underestimate the audacity of the small minded and slightly crapulous.A rather bleezed young neighbour decided to have a grammar battle with me. It lasted all of two seconds.I said something slightly amicable, and he responded with, __ou sure that's how you use that word?__ put down my laundry basket and turned to him slowly and deliberately.__o you really want to have this discussion with me, son, or do you want to go home and rethink your life?__e grumbled and vanished.

If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they__e happy.

Evolution did not design us to believe only true facts, nor to buy only useful products, nor to say only meaningful sentences

If the components of the body were organs and veins and cells, then the components of thought and language were words and grammar.

The bridge between the words glamour and grammar is magic. According to the OED, glamour evolved through an ancient association between learning and enchantment.

Grammar is the breathing power for the life of language

Write like you speak with the 'rhythms of human speech,' as William Zinsser said, and in as few words as possible. Use action verbs to carry water.

The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense.

...why, when people write words do they capitalize ___? Why not capitalize __ou_ too? For You are as important as I am. It__ hard for me to understand the human ways.

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street.

Cynthia had been on friendly terms with an eccentric librarian called Porlock who in the last years of his dusty life had been engaged in examining old books for miraculous misprints such as the substitution of "1" for the second "h" in the word "hither." Contrary to Cynthia, he cared nothing for the thrill of obscure predictions; all he sought was the freak itself, the chance that mimics choice, the flaw that looks like a flower; and Cynthia, a much more perverse amateur of misshapen or illicitly connected words, puns, logogriphs, and so on, had helped the poor crank to pursue a quest that in the light of the example she cited struck me as statistically insane. ("The Vane Sisters")

Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It__ all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term "future perfect" has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be.

The past is always tense, the future perfect.

An imperfect creative expression is much more sensible and creative than a grammatically perfect expression without an iota of sense and value in it.

It is only in grammar that the mighty can be bound by rules made by the humble

I ran across an excerpt today (in English translation) of some dialogue/narration from the modern popular writer, Paulo Coelho in his book: Aleph.(Note: bracketed text is mine.)... 'I spoke to three scholars,' [the character says 'at last.'] ...two of them said that, after death, the [sic (misprint, fault of the publisher)] just go to Paradise. The third one, though, told me to consult some verses from the Koran. [end quote]' ...I can see that he's excited. [narrator]' ...Now I have many positive things to say about Coelho: He is respectable, inspiring as a man, a truth-seeker, and an appealing writer; but one should hesitate to call him a 'literary' writer based on this quote. A 'literary' author knows that a character's excitement should be 'shown' in his or her dialogue and not in the narrator's commentary on it. Advice for Coelho: Remove the 'I can see that he's excited' sentence and show his excitement in the phrasing of his quote.(Now, in defense of Coelho, I am firmly of the opinion, having myself written plenty of prose that is flawed, that a novelist should be forgiven for slipping here and there.)Lastly, it appears that a belief in reincarnation is of great interest to Mr. Coelho ... Just think! He is a man who has achieved, (as Leonard Cohen would call it), 'a remote human possibility.' He has won lots of fame and tons of money. And yet, how his preoccupation with reincarnation__one other than an interest in being born again as somebody else__uggests that he is not happy!