Grammar Quotes - Page 16

• In grammar school they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fairy tale. In the university they taught me that a frog turning into a prince was a fact!

  Ron Carlson

  School, Frogs, Taught

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• Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.

  Robert Frost

  Vocabulary, Discipline, Delight

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• Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

  Peter Farb

  Mistake, School, Speech

  Peter Farb (2015). “Word Play: What Happens When People Talk”, p.258, Vintage

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• Although mathematical notation undoubtedly possesses parsing rules, they are rather loose, sometimes contradictory, and seldom clearly stated. [...] The proliferation of programming languages shows no more uniformity than mathematics. Nevertheless, programming languages do bring a different perspective. [...] Because of their application to a broad range of topics, their strict grammar, and their strict interpretation, programming languages can provide new insights into mathematical notation.

  Kenneth E. Iverson

  Perspective, Different, Topics

  "Math for the Layman" by Kenneth E. Iverson, Ch. 10, §D, www.cs.trinity.edu. 1999.

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• Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

  Clive James

  Grateful, Style, Enemy

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• Women tend to break the network of friends they make, but it is a habit that men have learned. It is an approach to life that involves planning almost without thinking about it. And men sustain this. I came from a northern grammar school. I had a good education, but I didn't have a good network.

  Pauline Neville-Jones, Baroness Neville-Jones

  School, Men, Thinking

  "Breaking through the brass ceiling" by Jane Martinson, www.theguardian.com. November 30, 2011.

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• We have a Conservative leader that believes in green taxes, that won't bring back grammar schools, that believes in continuing with total open-door migration from eastern Europe and refuses to give us a referendum on the EU.

  Nigel Farage

  Believe, School, Doors

  "Conservative right calls for return to core values and end to 'barmy' policies" by Nicholas Watt, www.theguardian.com. May 4, 2012.

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• An underestimated element in poetry, that reading aloud makes clear, is the pause. I mean especially the force of a pause or a couple of pauses close together, contrasted with a longer unit of grammar.

  Robert Pinsky

  Couple, Reading, Mean

  "The Pause: An Underestimated Element in Poetry". poemsoutloud.net. April 14, 2009.

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• Geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer.

  Guillaume Apollinaire

  Art, Order, Plastic

  Guillaume Apollinaire, Dorothea Eimert (2014). “Cubism”, p.12, Parkstone International

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• We have in our head something called story grammar. We see the world as a series of episodes rather than logical propositions... In our serious society, storytelling is seen as being soft. But people process the world through story.

  Daniel H. Pink

  People, Stories, World

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• Word lessons, in particular the wouldst couldst shouldst have loved kind, were kept up, with much warlike thrashing, until I had committed the whole of French, Latin, and English grammars to memory.

  John Muir

  Memories, Latin, English Grammar

  John Muir, Terry Gifford (1996). “John Muir: His Life and Letters and Other Writings”, p.29, The Mountaineers Books

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• Just as the grammarian makes one study grammar,
  A Buddha teaches according to the tolerance of his students;
  Some he urges to refrain from sins, others to do good,
  Some to rely on dualism, other on non-dualism;
  And to some he teaches the profound,
  The terrifying, the practice of enlightenment,
  Whose essence is emptiness that is compassion

  Akkineni Nagarjuna

  Compassion, Essence, Practice

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• What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

  Dave Barry

  War, Humorous, Painful Death

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• Learn Languages the Right Way. Language acquisition games and abstract communicative method are bullshit. The second-best way to learn a foreign language is alone in a room doing skull-numbing rote memorization of vocabulary, grammar, key phrases, and colloquialisms. The best way is in bed.

  Chuck Thompson

  Vocabulary, Keys, Games

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• The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.

  Charlton Laird

  Teacher, World, Hoaxes

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• I went to parochial grammar school, and I give thanks to the Catholic training because of course, they brought me to the heart of Jesus.

  Tony Orlando

  Jesus, Heart, School

  "Tony Orlando's Brush With Death". Interview with Scott Ross, www.cbn.com. October 16, 2013.

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• My first interest in graffitti came when I was in grammar school, around '87 or '88 I was about twelve years old. I did not know much about writing, I just knew that I liked to write my name everywhere I could in my neighborhood.

  KAWS

  Writing, School, Years

  Art Crimes Interview, www.graffiti.org. 1996.

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• I am certain, from experience, of the immense advantage of strict account-keeping in early life. It is just like learning the grammar then, which when once learned need not be referred to afterwards.

  William E. Gladstone

  Needs, Advantage, Certain

  Letter to Mrs. Gladstone on January 14, 1860. "Gladstone as Financier and Economist" by Francis Wrigley Hirst, p. 242, 1931.

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• It strikes me that mathematical writing is similar to using a language. To be understood you have to follow some grammatical rules. However, in our case, nobody has taken the trouble of writing down the grammar; we get it as a baby does from parents, by imitation of others. Some mathematicians have a good ear; some not (and some prefer the slangy expressions such as 'iff'). That's life.

  Jean-Pierre Serre

  Baby, Taken, Writing

  "Some Hints on Mathematical Style". Letter to David Goss, August 2016.

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• My basic idea is that programming is the most powerful medium of developing the sophisticated and rigorous thinking needed for mathematics, for grammar, for physics, for statistics, for all the "hard" subjects.... In short, I believe more than ever that programming should be a key part of the intellectual development of people growing up.

  Seymour Papert

  Growing Up, Powerful, Believe

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• She's not impressed by your fancy car.
  She got a body so she's snotty and she don't care who you are.
  So don't get mad and dis her reputation
  Callin' her a floozy, any conversation.
  Mad grammar, backstabber, girls they wanna be her.
  But like Stevie Wonder, none of y'all can see her!

  Positive K

  Girl, Rap, Fancy Cars

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• Margaret Thatcher was in my year, and our first-year college photograph shows us standing side by side in the back row. We were both grammar school girls on state scholarships.

  Nina Bawden

  Girl, School, College

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