229 Quotes About Grammar

You're correcting my grammar now?Yes, I'm helping you to be better. And I expect the same from you.What if I don't want to be better?Then you'll be just a petulant, infinitive-splitting eavesdropper.

That last bit of babble had gone home. How was they supposed to know, that was ungrammatical but right.

That is the correct grammar, you know: her husband and me.

Verum de nulla orationis parte praecipere difficilius est, quam de collocatione et usu coniunctionum.

People do not invent languages by writing grammars, they write grammars – at least, the first grammars to be written for any given language – by observing the tacit, largely unconscious, rules that people seem to be applying when they speak. Yet once a book exists, and especially once it is employed in schoolrooms, people feel that the rules are not just descriptions of how people do talk, but prescriptions for how they should talk.

I tell my students that they don't need to be accurate to communicate. They do need to be accurate to be respected.

That's so typical. You won't steal a baby, but you're too lazy to conjugate.

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.

In France, we leave a single space before and after most punctuation marks. In England, there are generally no spaces before punctuation, and one inserts a double space between sentences.