Penelope Keith Quotes

I really like language - and slang in particular, and just the shorthand we use when we communicate with people.

We just say things differently in Australia - like torch. I'd ask, 'Can I have the torch?' It seems to fall flat when I say, 'Can I have the flashlight?'

Being the offspring of English teachers is a mixed blessing. When the film star says to you, on the air, 'It was a perfect script for she and I,' inside your head you hear, in the sarcastic voice of your late father, 'Perfect for she, eh? And perfect for I, also?'

I'm very bad at ending sentences. A lot times I just want to say, 'That's the end of my sentence. I have nothing more to say.'

I write in American slang.

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.

It's Fifty, not Fiddy.

The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.

I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

I'd rather split an infinitive than split an idea.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

People love to drop in 'you betcha' as often as they can.

I would always talk with my friends in English and Spanglish, but it was more like slang. It was more like, 'Yo, what's up, dog?' But in Spanish, I know what's proper, and what's ghetto. I know the difference.

My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

We are surrounded by hundreds of 'tribes,' each speaking their own distinct slanguage of colourful words, jokes and phrases that together form an idiosyncratic phrasebook, years in the making.

Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

English is clipped in speech. Texas is exactly the opposite.

I'm not very good at standard English.

I have been fighting over commas all my life.

'Do you spell it with a 'V' or a 'W'?' inquired the judge. 'That depends upon the taste and fancy of the speller, my Lord'.

What I mind in modern society very much is the awful lack of grammar.

English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education - sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street.

There's a way that white people and black people spoke in the '70s that is nothing like how they speak now. They spoke from a soul, actually. There's a singsongy way of walking and talking that's just different now.