Rules Of English Language Quotes

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. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties. ~ John Gardner

Though Mrs. Gamely was by all measures prescientific and illiterate, she did know words. Where she got them was anyone's guess, but she certainly had them. Virginia speculated that the people on the north side of the lake, steeped in variations of English both tender and precise, had made with their language a tool with which to garden a perfect landscape. Those who are isolated in small settlements may not know of the complexities common to great cities, but their hearts are rich, and so words are generated and retained. Mrs. Gamely's vocabulary was enormous. She knew words no one had ever heard of, and she used words every day that had been mainly dead or sleeping for hundreds of years. Virginia checked them in the Oxford dictionary, and found that (almost without exception) Mrs. Gamely's usage was flawlessly accurate. For instance, she spoke of certain kinds of dogs as Leviners. She called the areas near Quebec march-lands. She referred to diclesiums, linipoops, rapparees, dagswains, bronstrops, caroteels, opuntias, and soughs. She might describe something as patibulary, fremescent, pharisaic, Roxburghe, or glockamoid, and words like mormal, jeropigia, endosmic, mage, palmerin, thos, vituline, Turonian, galingale, comprodor, nox, gaskin, secotine, ogdoad, and pintulary fled from her lips in Pierian saltarellos. Their dictionary looked like a sow's ear, because Virginia spent inordinate proportions of her days racing through it, though when Mrs. Gamely was angry a staff of ~ Mark Helprin

Yogi's been an inspiration to me, not only because of his baseball skills, but of course for the enduring mark he left on the English language. Some in the press corps think he might even be my speechwriter. ~ George H. W. Bush

This conference on religious education seems to your humble servant the last word in absurdity. We are told by a delightful 'expert' that we ought not really teach our children about God lest we rob them of the opportunity of making their own discovery of God, and lest we corrupt their young minds by our own superstitions. If we continue along these lines the day will come when some expert will advise us not to teach our children the English language, since we rob them thereby of the possibility of choosing the German, French or Japanese languages as possible alternatives. Don't these good people realize that they are reducing the principle of freedom to an absurdity? ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I was always aware of what the language I was using meant in terms of my bond with my parents - how it defined the lines of affection between us. When I spoke English, I felt I wasn't completely their child any more but the child of another language. ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

The Americans set up impromptu checkpoints along the roads and erected stop signs in English - a language and script that not all Iraqis understood. Cars that failed to stop before the checkpoint were fired upon. I witnessed two entire families killed at the same checkpoint within twenty minutes of each other. ~ Lynsey Addario

Probably no theologian in English language has ever rivaled Owen stressing the absolute centrality of Christ's penal substitution and therefore his as Priest ... For that reason alone The Priesthood of Christ is worth all the time it takes to read it with humility, care, and reflection. ~ Sinclair B. Ferguson

In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American ... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag ... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language ... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

And there was never a better time to delve for pleasure in language than the sixteenth century, when novelty blew through English like a spring breeze. Some twelve thousand words, a phenomenal number, entered the language between 1500 and 1650, about half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways not tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs; adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not have grammatically existed before - such as 'breathing one's last' and 'backing a horse', both coined by Shakespeare - were suddenly popping up everywhere. ~ Bill Bryson

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. ~ George Orwell

If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning.
But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. ~ Sherman Alexie

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. ~ John Steinbeck

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor. ~ Max Von Sydow

So what happened to the comma in this process? Well, between the 16th century and the present day, it became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a 'separator' (punctuation marks are traditionally either 'separators' or 'terminators') that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory 'woof' to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom. Commas, if you don't whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job. Luckily the trend in the 20th century (starting with H. W. Fowler's The King's English in 1906) has been towards ever-simpler punctuation, with fewer and fewer commas; but take any passage from a non-contemporary writer and you can't help seeing the constituent words as so many defeated sheep that have been successfully corralled with the gate slammed shut by good old Comma the Sheepdog. ~ Lynne Truss

But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct fails. I think the following rules will cover most cases:

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long words where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything out-right barbarous. These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at the beginning of this article. ~ George Orwell

I believe in the capacity of India to offer nonviolent battle to the English rulers. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

don't know about you, but my English isn't perfect. I hesitate when I'm nervous, I forget precisely the right word every now and again, and there are plenty of topics I am uncomfortable talking about. Applying higher standards to your target language than you would to your native language is overkill. ~ Benny Lewis

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.) ~ Bill Bryson

Behind these practical studies lay powerful, intertwined, and potentially contradictory beliefs: that language provides a key to the rational, scientific understanding of the world and that language is more than human speech, that it claims a divine origin and is the means by which God created the cosmos and Adam named the beasts.

As we will see, both ideas strongly influenced the Inklings, whose leading members wrote many words about the meaning of words. For Owen Barfield, language is the fossil record of the history and evolution of human consciousness; for C. S. Lewis, it is a mundane tool that "exists to communicate whatever it can communicate" but also, as in That Hideous Strength, an essential part of our metaphysical makeup for good or ill; for Charles Williams, language is power, a field of force for the magician, a vehicle of prayer for the believing Christian; for Tolkien, language is a fallen human instrument and a precious divine gift ("O felix peccatum Babel!" he exclaimed in his essay "English and Welsh"), a supreme art, and, as "Word", a name for God. ~ Philip Zaleski

So, I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half-drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colours and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?

Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come to talk to you about the bright African colours. I am a born-again citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the colour of my life is grey. ~ Chris Cleave

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. ~ Annie Dillard

The people of the two nations [French and English] must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each other's wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race. It is God's own method of producing an entente cordiale, and no other plan is worth a farthing. ~ Richard Cobden

Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general - they are too committed to the myth of pure evil). Conservatives want schools to teach lessons that will create a positive and uniquely American identity, including a heavy dose of American history and civics, using English as the only national language. Liberals are justifiably wary of jingoism, nationalism, and the focus on books by "dead white males," but I think everyone who cares about education should remember that the American motto of e pluribus, unum (from many, one) has two parts. The celebration of pluribus should be balanced by policies that strengthen the unum. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Energy doesn't speak English, Spanish or Chinese, but it does speak clearly. It speaks through the metaphors of our lived experiences, through the rain, floods, drought, earthquakes, excessive heat, unseasonable cold or the erupting volcanoes of nature. It communicates through the itches, pains, boils and pimples, through congestion, vertigo and backaches of the body. Energy speaks through our feelings that have nothing at all do with us, but are reflective of what is happening in the field. And, lastly, it speaks through synchronicities, coincidences and dreams that communicate messages which our conscious minds could not have known. This language of Energy, like any new tongue, is challenging. ~ Elaine Seiler

She understood that for her to excel at Oxford she had to improve her English. Her brain was in need of words to express itself fully, the way a sapling was in need of raindrops to grow to its potential. She purchased stacks of coloured Post-it notes. On them she wrote the words she chanced upon, fell in love with and intended to use at the earliest opportunity -- just as every foreigner did, one way or another:
- Autotomy: The casting off of a body part by an animal in danger
- Cleft Stick (from Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings): To be in a difficult situation
- Rantipole (from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow): Wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person.
In her first Political Philosophy essay, she wrote 'In Turkey, where daily politics is rantipole, each time the system is in a cleft stick, democracy is the first thing to be severed and sacrificed in an act of autotomy. ~ Elif Shafak

We can't leave the past in the past because, the past is who we are. It's like saying I wish I could forget English. So, there is no leaving the past in the past. It doesn't mean the past has to define and dominate everything in the future. The fact that I had a temper in my teens doesn't mean I have to be an angry person for the rest of my life. It just means that I had allot to be angry about but, didn't have the language and the understanding to know what it was and how big it was. I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment which is what is called having a bad temper but, it just means that I underestimated the environment and my anger was telling me how wide and deep child abuse is in society but, I didn't understand that consciously so I thought my anger was disproportionate to the environment but, it wasn't. There is almost no amount of anger that's proportionate to the degree of child abuse in the world.

The fantasy that you can not be somebody that lived through what you lived through is damaging to yourself and to your capacity to relate to others. People who care about you, people who are going to grow to love you need to know who you are and that you were shaped by what you've experienced for better and for worse. There is a great deal of challenge in talking about these issues. Lots of people in this world have been hurt as children. Most people have been hurt in this world as children and when you talk honestly and openly it's very dif ~ Stefan Molyneux

It was curious what trying to speak English had done lately to his mind; it reminded him of studying poetry in college, words gaining and losing their meaning, overlapping with images, the curious echo of ideas behind the words people used. ~ Jess Walter

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences. ~ Edith Wharton

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless ... speciesless. ~ John Fowles

What senseless violence does is to prolong the lease of life of the British or foreign rule. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I found cause to wonder upon what ground the English accuse Americans of corrupting the language by introducing slang words. I think I heard more and more different kinds of slang during my few weeks' stay in London than in my whole "tenderloin" life in New York. But I suppose the English feel that the language is theirs, and that they may do with it as they please without at the same time allowing that privilege to others. ~ James Weldon Johnson

His scowl returned. "Why, if they're supposed to be Greek, are all of them speaking with an English accent?"
She laughed. "Didn't you know that British is, like, the universal 'foreign' language in Hollywood? They use it in any movie where they want to have a foreign feel to it, regardless of where it's set ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

From eating at El Pollo Loco salsa bar to the Golden Globes buffet, I managed to stumble through this journey with the perseverance of an immigrant and the mindset of an American. I learned to thrive on being uncomfortable to pursue what I loved. The English language was uncomfortable, so I studied BET until it became my natural tongue. Doing stand-up was uncomfortable, so I hung out at the Comedy Palace until it became my second home. Auditions were uncomfortable, so I spent six hundred bucks a month on acting classes while I slept in some dude's living room for three hundred bucks until acting became my profession. I never looked at these challenges as barriers; I saw them as opportunities to grow. I'd rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American. ~ Jimmy O. Yang

I came to the country [U.S] without speaking a word of English, without a penny, worked full time, 40 hours a week, went to school full time, opened my own small business, ended up being a multi-millionaire. If I can do it, without even knowing the language, anybody can do it. All it takes is determination, perseverance, and like Winston Churchill said: 'Never, never, never, never give up.' ~ Rafael Cruz

They have been taught to labor," the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1891. "They have been taught Christian civilization, and to speak the noble English language instead of some African gibberish. The account is square with the ex-slaves. ~ Anonymous

From purest wells of English undefiled None deeper drank than he, the New World's Child, Who in the language of their farm field spoke The wit and wisdom of New England folk. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

This famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, of all the endless combinations of words in all of history, that Cellar Door is the most beautiful. ~ Donnie Darko

One of the special beauties of America is that it is the only country in the world where you are not advised to learn the language before entering. Before I ever set out for the United States, I asked a friend if I should study American. His answer was unequivocal. "On no account," he said. "The more English you sound, the more likely you are to be believed." ~ Quentin Crisp

Yeah. Calm down. Two of the most useless words in the English language. ~ Lili St. Crow

Certain opponents of Marxism dismiss it as an outworn economic dogma based upon 19th century prejudices. Marxism never was a dogma. There is no reason why its formulation in the 19th century should make it obsolete and wrong, any more than the discoveries of Gauss, Faraday and Darwin, which have passed into the body of science... The defense generally given is that the Gita and the Upanishads are Indian; that foreign ideas like Marxism are objectionable. This is generally argued in English the foreign language common to educated Indians; and by persons who live under a mode of production (the bourgeois system forcibly introduced by the foreigner into India.) The objection, therefore seems less to the foreign origin than to the ideas themselves which might endanger class privilege. Marxism is said to be based upon violence, upon the class-war in which the very best people do not believe nowadays. They might as well proclaim that meteorology encourages storms by predicting them. No Marxist work contains incitement to war and specious arguments for senseless killing remotely comparable to those in the divine Gita. ~ Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. ~ Raymond Williams

The allowance vanished absolutely; and in its place there came into being an arrangement. By this, his lordship was to have whatever money he wished, but he must ask for it, and state why it was needed. If the request were reasonable, the cash would be forthcoming; if preposterous, it would not. The flaw in the scheme, from his lordship's point of view, was the difference of opinion that can exist in the minds of two men as to what the words reasonable and preposterous may be taken to mean. Twenty pounds, for instance, would, in the lexicon of Sir Thomas Blunt, be perfectly reasonable for the current expenses of a man engaged to Molly McEachern, but preposterous for one to whom she had declined to remain engaged. It is these subtle shades of meaning that make the English language so full of pitfalls for the foreigner. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

European languages and a Google app can now turn your words into a foreign language, either in text form or as an electronic voice. Skype, an internet-telephony service, said recently that it would offer much the same (in English and Spanish only). But claims that such technological marvels will spell the end of old-fashioned translation businesses are premature. Software can give the gist of a foreign tongue, but for business use (if executives are sensible), rough is not enough. And polyglot programs are a pinprick in a vast industry. The business of translation, interpreting and software localisation (revising websites, apps and the like for use in a foreign language) generates revenues of $37 billion a year, reckons Common Sense Advisory (CSA), a consulting firm. ~ Anonymous