523 Quotes About English

Good English, well spoken and written, will open more doors than a college degree. Bad English will slam doors you didn't even know existed.

But then we did not think ever of ourselves as poor. We did not accept it. We thought we were superior people and other people that we looked down on and rightly mistrusted were rich. It had never seemed strange to me to wear sweatshirts for underwear to keep warm. It only seemed odd to rich. We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

IN ENGLISH, words of Latin origin tend to carry overtones of intellectual, moral and aesthetic “classiness"—overtones which are not carried, as a rule, by their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. “Maternal,” for instance, means the same as “motherly,” “intoxicated” as “drunk”—but with what subtly important shades of difference! And when Shakespeare needed a name for a comic character, it was Sir Toby Belch that he chose, not Cavalier Tobias Eructation.

Who were the men who did this?" Guido demanded suddenly.Tonio was putting on his cloack. He looked up as if already in deep thought."Fools," he answered, "at the command of a coward."page 139

The vocabulary of flattery and insult is continually enlarged at the expense of the vocabulary of definition. As old horses go to the knacker's yard, or old ships to the breakers, so words in their last decay go to swell the enormous list of synonyms for good and bad. And as long as most people are more anxious to express their likes and dislikes than to describe facts, this must remain a universal truth about language.

The manner in which the exclusionary nature of the English language is used in knowledge prodution separates us as humans.

He was dismayed to find that his English—despite years of mandatory instruction in school, months of private lessons with a Bible studies PhD from Exeter visiting Israel to research Christ, repeated encounters with every episode of every season of Sex and the City (subtitled), sporadic encounters with Fast & Furious 1–6 (undubbed), and an aborted reading of the collected works of Sherlock Holmes (abridged)—sucked.

That’s right: when it comes to correct English, there’s no one in charge; the lunatics are running the asylum.

Kiingereza kilipanda meli na ndege kutoka Uingereza kuja Afrika Mashariki. Tujivunie Kiswahili chetu.